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When playing house with a child, they say things like "Nyt se meni nukkumaan." when they mean that I should have the toy I am playing with go to bed. Similar use of the simple past / imperfect tens...
I don't know why, but the embolded semantic shift for agree (v.) below unsettles me. a gré is a prepositional phrase, correct? If so, how can a prepositional phrase transmogrify into a ve...
The OED 3 ed, June 2007 defines b. privity of contract n. the limitation of a contractual relationship to the two parties making the contract, which prevents any action at law by an interested...
The term (semantic) "shift" implies not just the emergence of a new meaning, but also abandonment of the old one. The old meanings you refer to are still present in current English, so it is perha...
I ask about Equity = Assets — Liabilities here, not its meaning as stock. See Personal Finance For Canadians For Dummies (2018), p 468. equity: In the real-estate world, this term refers to the...
I asked a native speaker and the following are his responses representing his theory, edited slightly (posting here with permission). N.B. He emphasises many times that this is speculation. Also, A...
partir is intransitive in modern French ("depart") but primarily transitive in Old French ("distribute", i.e., "make depart"). The transitive meaning is still preserved, as an archaism, in the set...
This is one of four (or more) alternative answers. (I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential c...
This is one of four (or more) alternative answers. (I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential c...
This is one of four (or more) alternative answers. (I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential c...
This is one of four (or more) alternative answers. (I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential c...
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...
Languages already stand out more because they just got capitalized. However, I like the idea to make them stand out even more. There are two good ways to do it: topic tags and required tags. Top...
(Continued discussion of a specific idea from What tag hierarchy and ontology should Linguistics use?) As you've probably noticed, we have the ability to put style tags differently. For example, t...
For background, there exists a stereotypical Danish pronunciation of English. "Danglish" can also mean other things, but this is what I am referring to, here. I lived one year in Denmark and can r...
Please welcome your two new moderators, Moshi and Jirka Hanika. If the community wants more moderators later (or the existing mods want help), just start a discussion so the community can decide ...
No. "Language" on this site refers to the natural languages of intelligent beings, not machine languages, music etc. In the absence of another qualifier a "language" is, as I wrote on another site,...
So to be honest, I have basically zero interest in any of the etymology, language usage, or language learning questions here. I'm here for the linguistics questions. And there's really not a lot of...
Unlike the other answerer, I speak Hebrew well but not much Spanish. Hopefully between the two of us we can resolve this question sufficiently. The original Hebrew reads, הגיד לך אדם מה טוב ומה...
According to Snopes, who knows what the true origin is. The faintly derogative epithet “son of a gun” has been documented as part of the lexicon of the English language since 1708, but no one ca...
What's the origin of the expression "son of a gun"? This comic explains a possible origin: British Navy used to allow women on naval ships, and any child born on board who had uncertain paternity ...
The RAE (Real Academia Española) included for a short time "elle" in addition to the masculine and feminine pronouns "el" and "ella", for "those who may not feel identified with either of the tradi...
One example: The best canonical/formal source for the Swedish language is considered to be the Swedish Academy Dictionary and the word hen [hɛn] was added to it in 2014 (source: SVT news article ...
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 ...
According to Chappell & McGregor (1996: 4) there are four typical types of inalienably possessed nouns: spatial relationships such as the ’top’ or ’front’ of something physical parts, espec...
