General Q&A about specific languages, language in general, and linguistics.
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There were two recent questions (here and here) about historical pronunications. I know that languages evolve in sound over time, but how do linguists determine what the original phonology was seve...
Generally speaking, when adding a suffix to a word in English, while the last letter(s) may undergo changes to accommodate the addition, the rest of the word is left unchanged. As examples in that ...
I sing in a choir that performs medieval and renaissance music in several languages I don't otherwise speak. When we are unclear about pronunciation, we look for recordings from reputable performe...
In Sephardi or Israeli Hebrew today, ט and ת are pronounced the same, at least to my non-native ear, something like /t/. In Ashkenazi Hebrew, on the other hand, sometimes ת is pronounced like ס (...
I speak Hebrew as a second language, and probably worse than most people expect - I live in Israel, but my Hebrew is still not that great. I ride with a cycling team, and one thing that we do is to...
Most פָּעַל-construction verbs have the פּוֹעֵל form as the masculine singular present tense; for example, לָמַד→לוֹמֵד and צָבַע→צוֹבֵעַ. But some פָּעַל-construction verbs have the פָּעֵל form ...
I'm trying to edit this question at Chinese Stack Exchange: Does Chinese have an equivalent to Arabic-style praising grammar (translates to 褒贬句)?. The user originally wrote: In Arabic we have a ...
This article discusses "Greater Etymology" (الاشتقاق الكبير) in Arabic, which "recognizes the common meanings words with different base letters share," as opposed to "Lesser Etymology" (or morpholo...
One of the infinitives in Hebrew is translated "to [verb]" and starts with ל, l. For example, ללמוד, lilmod, "to learn", and להשאר, l'hishaer, "to remain"; it's used often. But two of the verb cons...
I've often seen that "we can only look back in time a short distance in linguistics". What prevents linguistics from deducing information far in the past? Is this limit something that can be pushed...
In English certain pairs words can be contracted with an apostrophe, such as "I've" (I have). I don't know if there are strong rules for which words can be combined in this way and which can't. I...
The word אֶת /et/ is used with the following meanings: In Biblical Hebrew, it means "with". In modern Hebrew it survives, but only with a complement-of-the-preposition pronoun suffix: "with me", ...
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