Questions tagged [evolution]
Development of languages, language families, etc, through time with influences by other languages or pre-existing ones.
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Research on how/why word pronunciations within a single language lineage end up getting standardized into a consistent phonology?
I have always taken for granted that each of the 100s or 1000s of natural languages on Earth basically have a consistent, defined phonology (set of individual sounds they use), and the individual ...
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What is the origin of the short future tense of imperfective verbs in Ukrainian (e.g. "читатиму" instead of "буду читати")?
The other Slavic languages I know of require a construction of "<future form of "be"> + verb" (which is also permitted in Ukrainian), so I suspect it is a new evolution and ...
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Impact of modern media (radio, television, internet) on language evolution [duplicate]
Language change has traditionally been driven by the geographic and social barriers separating populations. However, the rise of mass media (radio, television) and the internet in the 20th century has ...
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How did English end up with a voiced "z" at the end of words?
How did English end up with a voiced "z" at the end of words, for example in "is", "was", "those"? Does this phenomenon exist in any Indio-European language ...
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How does tense evolve from a tenseless parent language?
Whenever someone asks something about TAM evolution, they seem to inevitably be pointed towards the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (Kuteva et al., 2e, 2019) and The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, ...
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Related words persisting longer in a language than their etymology would otherwise suggest
I was considering the “a” prefix as in afoot, aflame, alight. That prefix is largely in disuse in conversational English. But two notable exceptions, “asleep” and “awake” make me wonder if there’s a ...
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How and when do polygenesis advocates think new primary language families arose?
I've been reading about linguistics and have read that most linguists are harshly critical of proposals of genetic relationships between primary language families, and that the predominant theory of ...
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Why does Danish have more short-long vowel pairs than Swedish?
In Danish, the pair /ø/ and /ø:/ are distinguished from the pair /œ/ and /œ:/. In Swedish, the phonemes /ø:/ and /œ/ are treated as a short-long pair.
In Danish, the pair /ɔ/ and /ɔ:/ are ...
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What are the slowest changing languages?
What are the slowest changing languages (as measured by, e.g., a "glottochronological constant" or other methods)?
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Is there any evidence that the modern word for "bear" is an euphemism which replaced the original taboo word?
I have read and heard many times the old linguistic story about the modern word for "bear":
Slavic: medvěd, niedźwiedź, ведмідь, ... "honey-eater"
Germanic: bär, bear, björn, ... &...
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Is there any reliable way to organize phonemes that aren't in the IPA?
I'm coming up with an idea for a game that simulates the evolution of languages, but to do that and make it the most realistic, I would need to put in the sounds that the IPA says are possible but we ...
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Looking for examples of natural languages with affricates but no corresponding fricatives/plosives
I was thinking about how Spanish has a /t̠ʃ/ but (in most dialects) no /ʃ/, and how many native Spanish speakers have trouble producing the sound ʃ by itself. I don't see why this couldn't apply to ...
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Why is "knife" in Ukrainian different from other Slavic languages?
I saw this image on reddit, and it made me wonder why the way Ukrainians say "knife" is different from all other Slavic languages?
Is this part of a more general trend ("i" ...
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State of language in the hunter-gatherer era of Europe / Levant?
I would like to piece together a picture for a blog article (in essence) of what the state of the world was in the "hunter gatherer stage" just before the origin of agriculture. I would like ...
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List of anatomical features required to produce each type of speech sound, from an evolutionary perspective?
Is there a resource which lists each IPA vowel/consonant (or many of them), and the anatomical features required to produce each sound? I guess I can go to each Wikipedia page and figure it out ...
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