Unanswered Questions
40 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
10
votes
0
answers
3k
views
Is there any evidence of language contact between the Inuit and Ainu languages?
The Eskimo-Aleut and Ainu languages were historically spoken in the same region (near the Kamchatka Peninsula), and they share some features that are common in Paleo-Siberian languages, including ...
5
votes
0
answers
451
views
Is rising intonation (almost) universally associated with questions across languages, and why?
It seems that in most languages, rising intonation/prosody (towards the end of the sentence) is typically associated with questions. Thus:
How prevalent is this practice, and are there major ...
- 597
5
votes
0
answers
62
views
Have there been any reconstructive efforts of proto-languages, where aspects of historic culture have been inferred for languages other than PIE?
I'm not sure if this is the right SE to ask this question (possibly History SE?), but here goes!
Similar to the source material for this video, have there been any efforts to infer aspects of culture ...
- 151
4
votes
0
answers
441
views
What language is most similar to Basque?
While Basque remains firmly a language isolate and AFAIK it's origins (along with that of the Basque people) remain shrouded in mystery, I wonder if there are any languages, living or dead, that ...
- 217
4
votes
0
answers
127
views
Sound Changes From Proto Bengali to Bengali
What are the sound changes that occur from Proto Bengali to Bengali? In which order did they occur historically?
Ex.
PB Būdhā became B Buro
PB Karisi became B koriš
PB dahī became B doi
- 31.6k
4
votes
0
answers
43
views
Calculating conceptual similarity of distinct languages
I'm new to linguistics (fresh off the boat) and am curious if there is some type of equation/field/sub-field that tries to quantify the conceptual similarity between distinct languages. Not just the ...
- 141
4
votes
0
answers
248
views
The expressive power of languages : Information content in a sentence : How do we measure it
What is your name
Isme shoma chi e
Two sentences - same content.
My question is about the way to measure information content in a language. How do we do this? Because quite evidently count of the ...
- 1,265
3
votes
0
answers
39
views
List of counter examples + statistics of Greenberg's universal
I could not find a list of counter examples/ statistics of Greenberg's linguistic universals.
There are numbers that I could find relevant information on WALS. There are some I could not find anything....
- 404
3
votes
0
answers
46
views
Quantitative methodology for contrastive pragmatics in corpus-based settings
I am interested in literature regarding methodology that could be relevant for quantitative research into differences in pragmatic meaning between two 'equivalent' concepts in two languages (in other ...
- 37
3
votes
0
answers
203
views
What is the etymology of Tibetan ཁང་ [khang]?
I've just discovered that ཁང་ [Wylie: khang], the Tibetan word for 'building' used as a part in many everyday vocabulary items sounds strangely familiar to the word of the same meaning in Farsi, which ...
- 2,779
3
votes
0
answers
896
views
Linguistic idiomaticity in different languages
I've been reading this article about linguistic idiomaticity, and there's a good research on English idioms and indirect speech, in general.
I've been thinking on different amounts of idiomaticity in ...
- 8,652
3
votes
1
answer
140
views
Are the gramatical cases slowly disappearing in Romanian or they were never that used in the common speech?
Where I live in Muntenia, people rarely use the dative anymore and replace it with the preposition “la” + the nominative/accusative form of the noun or pronoun. “Am dat la băiat să mănânce” instead of ...
- 137
2
votes
0
answers
88
views
Are Flora and Fauna unreliable in language reconstruction?
I have glimpsed a paper, perhaps it was a review, that spoke negatively of the use of animal and plant names in the reconstruction of language families.
This has impressed me a lot but I was ...
- 1,393
2
votes
0
answers
30
views
Request for Texts Giving an Overview of the Evolution of the Indo-Iranian Laguages
Does anyone know of any good accounts of the evolution of the Modern Indo-Iranian languages?
I'm especially interested in comparative overviews of either the entire family's historical phonology, or ...
- 31.6k
2
votes
0
answers
110
views
Languages with homophonous IF-clauses
In English, most grammars tacitly or explicitly recognise two types of if. One of these introduces subordinate interrogative clauses:
I don't know [if I passed the exam].
The other introduces ...
- 4,127