linguistics

The following article is AI generated and comes from Perplexity news. Based on reports from Johns Hopkins University, archaeologists have unearthed evidence of the world's oldest known alphabetic writing in an ancient Syrian tomb, dating back to approximately 2400 BCE and predating previously...

Ancient ‘Unknown’ Middle-Iranian Script Is Finally Deciphered Abstract Several dozen inscriptions in an unknown writing system have been discovered in an area stretching geographically from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to southern Afghanistan. Most inscriptions can be dated to the...

Wikipedia has list of words of Arabic origin by language. But these lists are typically long and include plenty of rare and arcane words, or words that are specific to Arabic culture or to Islam. Other words came from Persian (e.g. assassin, aubergine, candy, caravan, cheque, chess, lemon, lime...

If you already speak one Romance language, learning another one is going to be relatively easy. The grammar is basically the same and over 80% of the vocabulary is shared. The lexical similarity is even 89% between Spanish and Portuguese, and also 89% between Italian and French. But there are...

Mutations are not exclusive to genes. Languages mutate too and often in a similar way as genes, with just single letter changes (like SNPs in genetics). This happens because humans aren't perfect. They mishear words or mispronounce them. It was all the more frequent before universal education...

A great advantage of being a native speaker of a Romance language is that the gender (masculine or feminine) is the same in over 99% of cases in other Romance languages, which makes learning them much easier than for speakers of non-Romance languages (and English, which is half-Romance but lost...

One striking characteristic of Spanish language is the number of words that start with 'a'. Many among those are Arabic loan words (adobe, ajedrez, alcade, aldea, alquiler), including words that are an amalgamation of the Arabic preposition al (the) + the word itself (e.g. albahaca, alcázar...

I am currently reading a book in Spanish and watching a few series in Spanish as well. I thought it was the perfect opportunity to analyse a bit the language as I came across words that seemed to have undergone a change of meaning from their Latin root. There are of course many words like that...

Anyone who speaks Spanish and at least one other Romance language will probably have noticed that many f sounds have disappeared entirely in Spanish, usually at the beginning of words. This atavistic 'f' has been replaced by a silent 'h', which at one point during the Middle Ages might have been...

One particularity of French is that many 'c' sounds changed into 'ch' (pronounced 'sh'). I have made a list of most of the words I could think of derived from Latin that underwent that mutation. Many of them were inherited by English (chain, chamber, change, chapel, charge, chaste), but a few...

Many of you probably have heard of Esperanto, the world's most famous constructed international auxiliary language. The concept is admirable: creating a new language that is easy to learn for speakers of most European languages. Esperanto has over 100,000 fluent speakers and is taught on...

How much did the ancient Romans understand the Gauls when Caesar set on his 9-year campaign? Would the language have appeared outlandish to Latin ears, like Basque is to us today, or on the contrary rather familiar like Romance and Germanic languages are to English speakers? Or maybe somewhere...

I believe this article from September of last year has not been mentioned in the forum. My apologies if it has, I have not frequented much lately. This fantastic article uses Statistics/R/ML and provides the codes for anyone to run and verify the results. Most importantly it provides...

Pretty informative podcast. The expert they have on stated that linguistics doesn't necessarily care about words. But rather how a language is spoken, is where the experts draw a lot of their conclusions. For example, English is a solidly Germanic language, because of the way it is spoken...

We do not know exactly how the ancient Romans pronounced Latin. But thanks to reconstructive linguistics, it is thought that: - the letter c was always a hard c (like k). Likewise g's were always hard as in good, never as in giant or gist. - the t was always a hard t even in words ending in...

I've read some of Gianfranco Forni's texts on how Basque actually is an Indo-European language. Is it true, or not? And if not, can you debunk it in detail?

Johane Derite posted a list of different phylogenetic trees of IE languages proposed by various linguists in another thread. I thought it would be an ideal opportunity for me to post my proposed phylogenetic tree, which I have not only based on linguistic evidence, but also on archaeological and...

[I]Often, you can tell where someone grew up by the way they speak. For example, if someone in the United States doesn't pronounce the final "r" at the end of "car," you might think they are from the Boston area, based on sometimes exaggerated stereotypes about American accents and dialects...

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS—According to a report in The Boston Globe, linguist Shigeru Miyagawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues think that cave art could offer clues to the evolution of language. Ancient paintings are often found in acoustic “hot spots” in caves, where...

Scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London, have studied more than 200 million Twitter messages to try and unravel the mystery of how language evolves and spreads. The aim of the research was to consider if the spread of language is similar to how genes pass from person-to-person. The...