2019年7月31日 · If it were *rima, Tongan would be expected to have *ima, and if it were *lima, Tongan would be expected also to have *lima. No other Polynesian language fully distinguishes /ɾ/ and /l/. [The reconstruction *rima] assumes that nima evolved out of *ima, which may have been modified to avoid confusion with a common homophone.

2025年1月29日 · I am a statistician working on a curriculum with a chapter on randomness. To illustrate some concepts of randomness (namely Shannon entropy and MDL), I set up a hypothetical scenario with deciphering an alien language. The first part of the challenge involves discerning between a random message and one containing the alien language.

2021年12月23日 · Cool! Thank you for the detail. It's useful to know that 13,000 years also exceeds the splitting of other language families (except possibly Afro-Asiatic), the effect of familiarity on language grouping (that Californian languages might be more related than is currently known, but lack of centuries of written samples or even current speakers could …

2024年8月3日 · See my answer in Maori and Hawaiian. VSO. When the case system is lost, SVO is the best word order that require no case system to tell S apart from O. When changing from SVO to VSO/ SOV, in case the language has no case system, usually it should build one.

2016年10月21日 · Among many languages used in Southeast Asia (especially I want to talk about Malay, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Thai), is there any study about which pair of languages is close to each other in vocabu...

2018年9月24日 · Maori; Navajo; Quechua; Yoruba; Welsh; Nahuatl; Lokele Kele; Esperanto; I would like to know if these linked texts are actually how the respective languages are written (or if they are some undesirable variation). That is, if all the diacritics and whatnot are what is actually used in the common language (or at least in the formal written ...

A more recent attempt to classify Maori word classes is that of Winifred Bauer, in The Reed Reference Grammar of Maori. She takes a very different approach to Biggs, although starting from the same issue that 'Maori, like other Polynesian languages, uses the same form of a word in many different syntactic environments' (p. 65).

2014年12月25日 · There are two general phonological tendencies that are related: the requirement for every syllable to begin with a consonant (e.g. Arabic), and the requirement for every syllable to end with a vowel (e.g. Maori). Taken together, these requirements give you languages which have just CV syllables (Senufo).

The ones that have been claimed to lack the N/V distinction include e.g. Riau Indonesian, Niuean, Maori, Tongan, Samoan, Tagalog, Kambera (and there are more -- just google). If you define N, V etc. as merely syntactic categories then of course a N cannot (by definition) be a V. Usually, N, V etc. are defined as lexical categories already, i.e ...

2018年6月23日 · But it's harder to figure out whether a language can never have consecutive vowel letters. Double vowel letter digraphs are fairly common as symbols for long vowels. And aside from that, many languages allow vowel-initial syllables, which brings up the possibility of double vowel letters arising incidentally from a sequence of the same vowel in ...