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In an examination in my country (India) I had a multiple choice question on the order of pronouns. Q: Please try to remember when I, you and my wife were talking there. Options: A. you, I and ...
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...
What semantic notions underlie any sense of 'backwardness' (like "backward" or "backwards"), with the meaning of 'backwardation' below? Etymonline overlooked this term. OED is too brusque and doesn...
We now have a "Wiki" post type Essentially, wiki posts are articles, but with a lower bar for editing; Unlike with other post types, anybody with the Participate Everywhere privilege can edit t...
This bug has now been raised on Meta I have added an answer to my question and I have seen a notification "New response to your post ..." Is it intentional or a bug? In my understanding one do...
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...
I think that you just read the sentence with a subtly different meaning than the one intended by the author. Both spellings are correct. Syntactically, you expect the subordinate clause to be gov...
I read this sentence in a book ("La Guerra Civil española", by Paul Preston): La tortura explicaba el gran número de suicidios que se registraban en las cárceles, y las autoridades, que se sentí...
Quoting from https://svenska.se/tre/?sok=ohyra&pz=1: sedan första årtiondet av 1500-talet (Helige mäns lefverne); fornsv. ohyra ’odjur; stor mängd’; urspr. ’ngt otäckt, otrevligt’ Se...
This is not a proper answer as I cannot verify this etymology beyond Old Swedish "ohýris" meaning something like "immense". I'm rather inclined to think that the word could be related to even olde...
I'm wondering about the origin of the Swedish word ohyra (vermin). Someone humorously suggested that this would be because vermin are unwanted guests not paying rent (hyra), though they had no sour...
The metaphor should be very accessible for a fluent speaker of Russian, therefore I suspect that the misunderstanding possibly involved some additional words that also occur in the quote. In Russi...
In the Pinyin romanization of Mandarin Chinese, the 't' denotes a voiceless aspirated coronal stop and the 'd' denotes a voiceless unaspirated coronal stop. But, since I'm a native English speaker,...
Polite language got turned into legal language maybe? The first example that comes up when I google the word "payable" is "interest is payable on the money owing." And from Dictionary.com I get "...
Etymonline on "-able" doesn't expound the origin of "requiring". -able common termination and word-forming element of English adjectives (typically based on verbs) and generally adding a notion...
An ESL student was asking about the quotation below at my school, but I don't know how to expound or simplify to her that "A problem or puzzle can be thought of as a knot." Any ideas? She knows wha...
There is some arbitrariness in what you are[1] going to call (formal) future tense in an almost analytical language. The idea of grammatical categories, including which tenses to look for in a ver...
Whether "gasket" comes from French "garcette" or not, I have no idea. If a particularly misogynistic and at the same time naval etymology is sought, then the thing called "garcette" was, among oth...
I don't know the linguistics behind it, but perhaps can address one of your questions— Can you please make this shift feel more intuitive — by noting that prepositional phrases sometimes beco...
I see that Etymonline warns of gasket's uncertain origin, but I still pine to understand this possible etymology. I know little about sailing, and Wikipedia annunciates: gaskets are lengths of r...
If you're around tomorrow, stop by. I'll eat when I'm hungry. She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes. You're around tomorrow, I'm hungry, and she comes are describing fu...
This article explains a shift from 19th century usage of the 3rd person[1] "heeft" to current day 2nd person "hebt". Both forms currently have the same meaning, both are correct. However, some so...
Like any language change, it can be a bit confusing to current speakers while it is happening, but once the resulting verb is established, nobody will blink anymore. Latin was especially fond of v...
When conjugating 'hebben' I can see both forms, are they the same, or is only one of them correct? Is there a regional difference between the two?
The younger the child, the less established the grammar. You can respond with "Nyt se menee nukkumaan" and put the toy into its sleeping house, thus just implementing the suggestion using your own...
