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I'm sure a lot of people have heard it before: the statement "All Chinese words are one syllable (or character)." And because someone is going to ask, no, this is not just a Western thought - my Ma...
I can speak/understand/write/read many Indian languages but my grammar is not good in all those languages which I have learnt later. I have typed using English text here for brevity. Let's say I h...
There's this famous story about al-Asma'i الأصمعي challenging the caliph abu Ja'afar al-Mansur أبو جعفر المنصور by composing a poem that is difficult to memorize, as the caliph himself used to memo...
There's a list of certain letters in Hebrew that have a different form if they're at the end of a word - much like capital letters at the beginning of a sentence in English, but only for specific l...
I sing in a choir that performs medieval and renaissance music in several languages I don't otherwise speak. When we are unclear about pronunciation, we look for recordings from reputable performe...
I never thought about it too much until now, but in Hebrew, the only suffix, if I'm not mistaken, to refer to a person from a country is to add the letter Yod to the end of the name of the country ...
I screenshot Collins and Lexico. Let's treat this like a math problem. How exactly does "the better to —" = 'So as to — better'? Please show all steps between these two expressions.
So, I have a Chinese name. (Specifically, Mandarin, if that makes a difference). What are the common ways to give this name in Japanese? Should I approximate the Chinese reading, use the on'yomi re...
Most פָּעַל-construction verbs have the פּוֹעֵל form as the masculine singular present tense; for example, לָמַד→לוֹמֵד and צָבַע→צוֹבֵעַ. But some פָּעַל-construction verbs have the פָּעֵל form ...
The noun ar-Rahmaan and its adjective rahmaan are pronounced with a prolongation of the letter alif between the last two letters meem and noon, nevertheless it is common that people with the name '...
The word אֶת /et/ is used with the following meanings: In Biblical Hebrew, it means "with". In modern Hebrew it survives, but only with a complement-of-the-preposition pronoun suffix: "with me", ...
There were two recent questions (here and here) about historical pronunications. I know that languages evolve in sound over time, but how do linguists determine what the original phonology was seve...
I'm trying to edit this question at Chinese Stack Exchange: Does Chinese have an equivalent to Arabic-style praising grammar (translates to 褒贬句)?. The user originally wrote: In Arabic we have a ...
Japanese has what is known as the "polite form"/"masu form" and the "plain form". Notably, the two forms have completely different conjugations despite having the same meaning, differing only in po...
This article discusses "Greater Etymology" (الاشتقاق الكبير) in Arabic, which "recognizes the common meanings words with different base letters share," as opposed to "Lesser Etymology" (or morpholo...
One of the infinitives in Hebrew is translated "to [verb]" and starts with ל, l. For example, ללמוד, lilmod, "to learn", and להשאר, l'hishaer, "to remain"; it's used often. But two of the verb cons...
I've often seen that "we can only look back in time a short distance in linguistics". What prevents linguistics from deducing information far in the past? Is this limit something that can be pushed...
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