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The term for this is autological word. An autological word (also called homological word) is a word that expresses a property that it also possesses (e.g., "word" is a word, "noun" is a noun, "E...
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", ...
In fact, the homonyms "את"—one of which shows the form ʾitt- with suffixes and is the preposition "with", the other being the sign of the definite direct object in classical Hebrew, and having the ...
I grew up in western Pennsylvania (US), where constructs like "the car needs washed" are common. I was taught (yes, in schools in that region) that correct formal grammar requires "to be" in this ...
Wikipedia gives me the impression that Appalachian English is a member of the Southern U.S. English dialect collection and can be subdivided into a southern variety called Smoky Mountain English an...
In classical Latin, the letter C is pronounced like K. Hardly any words use the latter K; even imports from Greek turned kappa into C. A handful of words, such as "kalendae," held onto their K. In...
Going through the History of the Spanish language article in Wikipedia, I read the section Latin f- to Spanish h- to null some interesting insight: F was almost always initial in Latin words, an...
Welcome to the Codidact site for Languages and Linguistics! We're glad you're here and we're excited to see what you will build. This community is starting "from scratch", without importing Q&...
Arnold Zwicky and Geoff Pullum's paper "Cliticization vs. inflection: English n't", published in the September 1983 issue of Language (volume 59, number 3), indicates that I'd've exists. While I'm ...
A quick search gives a regular pattern in the form of trisyllabic laxing Trisyllabic laxing, or trisyllabic shortening, is any of three processes in English in which tense vowels (long vowels or d...
Mandarin is represented in characters. Each character is a single syllable. A guide can be found here showing the pronunciations as romanized in Pinyin (alternative romanization patterns exist but ...
I've been studying German lately, and came across something that sparked my curiosity: The way to say "me too" in German is "ich auch" - that is, "I too". A shallow glance at other Germanic languag...
It depends on the context, but generally "in doing so" refers to something that happens along with or as part of the action, and "by doing so" refers to a result of the action. In many cases either...
What arguments are used to answer this question? Does it stem from a lack of agreement over how to define a pronoun? Essentially, yes. Even your own Wikipedia quote has the infamous [citation ...
Hi. I'm learning Icelandic and planning to visit the country a few months later. But there is a thing I can't figure out yet. For clarity, in majority of English speaking families there is just on...
The oldest known usage of "nifty" is in an American poem from 1868. If you read the poem at this link, you'll find that that author found it useful to comment on the meaning of the word inside the...
it is not -> 'tisn't 1739 D. Bellamy Innocence Betray'd ii. iii. 112 'Tisn't a Virtue, Lucia, but a Vice, To be so very coy! so very nice. https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry...
In my English-speaking culture, when two people are in conversation, usually we don't bother addressing each other by name—or even by any substitutive term of address, like ‘sir’/‘ma'am’ (formal) o...
English tends to use accusative pronouns whenever they aren't clearly the subject of a sentence or clause, even when classical grammatical rules call for the nominative. Another example: "Who's the...
In many places around the world there are different languages that coexist: some people speak one, some the other, and many can speak both. There are as many cases as situations: some of the langu...
I recently stumbled upon this wikipedia page and it got me thinking. Take a look at the following table (terms are lifted from the Wikipedia page) W (interrogative) H (proximal) T (medial)...
This usage seems to be common not only in English, but in Western cultures in general. (The two parties do not need to be on first name terms for this pattern to work: "Oh, Mister Bennet! Have som...
It is tempting for a foreigner, but perhaps not accurate to identify "Sie" as the polite (respectful) pronoun and to identify "du" as the impolite (less respectful) one, and it could be more accura...
Is obrigado used in case of unclear gender of the author? Yes. Can I deduce that the writer of the text is male or is there some kind of neutral male default that might be in use here? T...
Some words are examples of the concept they name. Examples: "Word" is a word. "Noun" is a noun. "Eggcorn" is an eggcorn (a mistaken word that sounds like and has some connection to another wor...
