Answer

Question 1

The /r/ phoneme in Ukrainian corresponds to two phonemes in Polish, namely a trilled /r/ and a tapped /r/.

Even though the trilled /r/ rarely occurs in Polish, it is often perceived in an intervocalic context or within a post-consonantal position.

Question 2

Polish borrowed “czereda” and “czeremcha” from Ukrainian.

This pair was chosen because it gives an idea of certain sound combinations in Polish and help trace where such unique combinations came from.

Ukrainian has borrowed words like “naHi” (pani) from Polish pani and gudzyk “button” from the word guzik.

Question 3

Declarative, simple sentences follow the same structure in German as they do in English—Subject, verb, other. Often , however, German begins the sentence with a different element from the subject especially when the desired effect is emphasis or for some stylistic effect. A good example is “Heute kommt der alte Mann nach Hause”.

Both English and French have the subject+verb structure, and are in many instances characterised by inversion in which the verb and subject pronoun change places.

The basic sentence structure in Irish is essentially similar to what exists in English. However, the Irish variation is greater in terms of the word order. The increased possibility for morphological markings enables Irish to have more fronting especially when emphasis is desired (Lupyan, & Christiansen, 2002).

Russian and English differ in a variety of ways. Even though both languages have the verb, subject and objects in their syntactic structure, the main difference between them is in the word order. For English, the word order is relatively much more fixed: subject, verb, object. Russian works differently in terms of word order; the object of the sentence can be placed both before and after the verb.

The Italian language has the order subject-verb-object within its structure. The subject is the doer, the verb is the action while the object is the recipient of the action.  This SVO order is the same one that is observed in English too. Differences come about while considering negative sentences or questions.

Question 4

English did split one phoneme into two.

The wide influences that Latin had on English cannot be ignored. Taking the sampled phoneme, the English variation was conditioned to be used in different environments for varied linguistic ends. It was therefore better to split the phoneme into two to satisfy the variations that emerged from the English language.

Question 5

/k/ is the proto-type as it is in fact more natural for /k/ to become /s:h/ than vice versa.

*a is the proto-type

*p is the proto-type because stops more naturally get voiced and spirantized between voiced sounds.

A reconstruction of the zodiac sign would be wrong because basing it on the majority of the descendant languages gives the interpretation the problem of overgeneralization. The differences that exist in languages is not taken into consideration. The sound changes differ from one dialect to another.

An alternative sound change principle in this case is assimilation.