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Day: April 10, 2017
Why don’t current-day Yugoslavians speak a Latin-based language but Romanians do?
They did: Dalmatian language – Wikipedia Istro-Romanian language – Wikipedia Aromanian language – Wikipedia Megleno-Romanian language – Wikipedia What happened is quite simple: Slavic tribes moved into the area quite rapidly, between 500 and 800. Slavonic displaced Romance languages in most areas they moved into, with a few enclaves surviving. The real question is not […]
In Christian historical movies, why aren’t the Romans speaking in Greek instead of Latin?
Because lots of Westerners know Latin (or at least know about Latin), relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek, and Latin is the language Westerners associate with the Roman Empire. Having Greek spoken in a movie would really just confuse people, who’d expect the Romans in Palestine to be speaking Latin. That, and the logistics of […]
How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?
I’m not contradicting Warren M Tang (see Warren M Tang’s answer to How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?), but let me try a different formulation. A functionalist explains language structures by appealing to the communicative function of those structures. (They do linguistics by metaphors.) A cognitivist explains language structures by appealing to general […]
Do you think there is a mother language for all the other languages?
Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are there so many languages in the world? Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities. Myself, I suspect there was monogenesis, but that’s a hunch; […]