Category: General Language

Phonemes are groupings of phones (different sounds), which language speakers treat as equivalent. The phones that are variants of the same phoneme are allophones of the phoneme. Normally, the distribution of allophones depends on their context: there is a rule, based on surrounding phonemes, which determines whether one allophone or the other is used. If […]

Yes, it would. I’m not going to bother with examples other than grave (Germanic: tomb; French: serious). It is a common perception that language change is driven by trying to avoid ambiguity. In fact, language has an astounding tolerance for ambiguity, because context usually takes care of it. Instances where words change in order to […]

As Mohamed Essam has commented, linguists are reluctant to accept that there are ever absolute synonyms, precisely because that kind of redundancy isn’t really logical. Usually, there will be some slight nuance of difference between them; if not in their etymology, then in their social register, or their connotations, or even just their sounds. As […]

In languages where adjectives are inflected for case, number or gender, they are indeed considered to be declined. Note that the distinction between nouns and adjectives is not particularly old: it’s 18th century. In the traditional grammar I know, adverbs are considered indeclinable by definition. They don’t have number, case, or person. So they are […]

Shulamit Widawsky is right about the emotive loading of words affecting their memorability. In the specific context of dirty words, you may well have been highly motivated to learn them. (There’s always keen motivation to learn dirty words in foreign languages, as evidenced here on Quora.) If you were strongly motivated and were delighted by […]

Because, contrary to what you might think, interjections are not always pure spontaneous exclamations from deep in the neural cortex, that are universal to all humans. A few are; as I noted in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are there any short expletives that sound the same in different languages? Nick Enfield [Page on sydney.edu.au] (who […]

Here’s another limitation: speech acts. A statement of how the world is (a declarative speech act) can be true or false. A command, a promise, or a performative statement (“I hereby declare…”) cannot meaningfully be true or false: it can only be felicitous or infelicitous (that is, appropriate). Here’s yet another, which Gary Coen already […]

Good question, Anon! By design, they’re not supposed to. Linguistics makes a point of segregating them hierarchically: Phonetics: how individual sounds work Phonology: how sounds are organised into meaningful contrasts as phonemes Morphology: how phonemes are organised into meaningful components of words as morphemes Lexicon: how morphemes are organised into meaningful words Semantics: how the […]

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 […]