Subscribe to Blog via Email
February 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
Category: General Language
Could saying words one phoneme at a time have been a common practice before the invention of written language?
Neeraj Mathur is quite right: syllables, not letters. Some circumstantial evidence for this from Ancient Greek drama. When literacy was a very new thing, and the tools of grammatical analysis (such as words) were still not very popular. (https://www.quora.com/Could-sayi…): the differentiation between utterance and word was newfangled with the Greek sophists. Aeschylus avoids Euripides’ new […]
How did certain words become homonyms?
Several ways. Dimitra Triantafyllidou has already answered; I’ll answer as well, a little more schematically, but it’s essentially the same answer. Sound mergers in the language. meet and meat used to be pronounced differently [meːt, mɛːt]; now they’re pronounced the same, [miːt]. Sound un-mergers in the language—or at least, a spelling system out of sync […]
What do we call the process of creating all of the possible morphological extractions of a given word?
In traditional grammar, this is conjugation for verbs, and declension for nominals; both are limited to inflectional morphology. Answered 2016-08-30 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-do-we-call-the-process-of-creating-all-of-the-possible-morphological-extractions-of-a-given-word/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Is there a more specific word for endonyms which simply mean “our language” or similar and are semantically awkward for outsiders to use?
Not aware of such a term, but it’s a nice distinction: the endonym is really just a pronominal reference, so much “ours” that it doesn’t warrant a name at all. I could coin the term hemeteronym, “ours-name”, for it, but I won’t. It’s a pronominal, or deictic, endonym. Answered 2016-08-28 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-a-more-specific-word-for-endonyms-which-simply-mean-our-language-or-similar-and-are-semantically-awkward-for-outsiders-to-use/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What is the Origin of idiolect?
If you’re asking about the etymology of idiolect: idio-: from Greek idios “particular, individual”. Cf. idiosyncrasy, idiot (originally: private citizen, loner), idiom. -lect: back-formation from dia-lect, originally “something conversed about/in”, from dia “through” and lektos “spoken”. See: What are some examples of idiolects? How is an idiolect different from a sociolect? If you’re asking why […]
Why does the definition of one word recall other n words and m definitions?
The question is somewhat opaque, but OP is getting to the question of, why is the definition of a word such a complex, and potentially circular, graph of links to other definitions. Your original question, OP, was in fact about circularity. The answer is: Dictionary definitions aren’t particularly concerned about rigour or non-circularity: you’re assumed […]
What are the drawbacks to standardizing languages?
You lose linguistic diversity, as the dialects gradually die out, or at least are marginalised. You may not may not care about linguistic diversity, of course. You lose ways of saying things that are specific to non-standard dialects. Cretan dialect for example has a distinct word for “trickle”. (To my annoyance, I don’t remember it.) […]
What’s the onomatopoeia for a computer?
Thing about onomatopoeias is, they get conventionalised and stick around, even if the referent no longer makes that sound. I mean this sound? This sound, the doot doot doot bloop bleep flurgh frump virrrr of a dial up modem? Hasn’t been heard in functional use for what, twenty years? And yet it is still used […]
Why is linguistics considered a science?
Supplemental to the list given by David Rosson (ah, your American bias is showing, David 🙂 cc C (Selva) R.Selvakumar As Dmitriy Genzel points out, Historical Linguistics is an observational science, like Astronomy. A lot of hypothesis testing though. To add to Tibor Kiss’ list of German words, Linguistic Typology is a Versammelnde Wissenschaft: a […]
Are there axioms in linguistics? If yes, which are they?
Linguists don’t like the word axioms. as you can tell from the other answers: they imply a degree of mathematical rigour that just isn’t compatible with someone as messy as human language. But there are foundational assumptions to disciplines in linguistics, which are pretty much axioms. And they would be more overtly acknowledged, were linguists […]