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Every language has lots of varieties which differ in conservativity among themselves. This effect can be massive[1]. If any particular methodology for assessing conservativity forces a choice bet...
From ariel.org What is meant by “unused” root is that though the root of the word has a specific meaning, you will not find that root meaning in literature. Only its derived meanings will be fou...
Yes, it is a common, rather colloquial, way to say "to be in a good mood". The Diccionario de la lengua española, that is, the main Spanish dictionary has an entry on it: de buenas loc. adj. colo...
Often when I search for the origins and meanings of certain words in Tanach, I'll come across something like Strong's saying that it's from or probably from an "unused root". For example: What e...
Recently I read in Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish that the phrase "estar de buenas" is a common way to say something like "to be in a good mood." I've found a bit of evidence of this online in...
What is the purpose of "se" in the following text from Micah 6:8 (Nueva Versión Internacional)? ¡Ya se te ha declarado lo que es bueno! Ya se te ha dicho lo que de ti espera el Señor It doesn't s...
This site is young and asking some questions and seeing how they end up received is a good way to judge what kind of coverage can be found here. That said, questions entirely disconnected from a m...
Questions about constructed languages are on topic to the same extent as questions about natural languages. A question about a world or a book series is not automatically on topic just because that...
tl;dr, English just borrowed other languages' suffixes I shouldn't really come as too much of a surprise to know that the irregularity comes from borrowing endings from multiple different language...
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 ...
Since I wanted to engage in the language community, but there isn't a lot of questions yet, I set up a daily mail subscription to notify me for new content. I expected "daily" to mean that I get m...
After researching a bit more, I found this StackExchange answer. Their answer is very informative, and includes a partial translation of a Japanese research paper (which I'm sadly not at the level ...
As a Japanese learner, I think it would be really helpful if posts could contain ruby text. While I would use it mostly for Japanese, it's not something specific to it. I can see it being used for ...
From Steve Wright on Quora, you can turn an entire phrase or sentence into a noun, and this has an unspoken effect, when suffixed with ～です, of adding up to the message, “I’m explaining this to you...
As far as my knowledge of Japanese goes, there are two ways to form polite negative forms of verbs, the direct conjugation ～ません and the plain negative conjugation ～ない with です added. Take for insta...
Grammatical categories are just tools to decompose a language into very simple, independent processes and rules that can be studied separately. But the actual language is much more convoluted than...
Regarding the two s in Jónsson, it is consistent across all North Germanic languages. It's simply the genitive case - the father's son. That is: "Jón's son" rather than "Jón son" (indefinite articl...
I find the pronunciation of Icelandic highly regular and predictable on the whole, but male patronymics continue to puzzle me. The suffix "-son" is consistently pronounced with an initial /ʃ/ rath...
The concrete word to be used depends on the kind of the object you want to count and it is called a "classifier". There are hundreds of classifiers in Thai; much fewer classifiers than nouns, but ...
Some interesting experiments have been reported by Yanyun Zhou and Chi-Shing Tse (The Taste of Emotion: Metaphoric Association Between Taste Words and Emotion/Emotion-Laden Words). They were condi...
Deciphering a language which has left behind only a limited number of very short texts is hard. There are lots of undeciphered ancient languages; for additional distraction, some of those scripts ...
To understand Orwell's point, more context is in order. I'm leaving out most examples of Bad Writing indicators he gives which tend to be single words each. Foreign words and expressions such as ...
The precursors were respectful body movements (kneeling, creeping) accompanying speech in certain contexts for centuries, used for example (but by far not only) when talking to a person of divine o...
In English, "pistol" might primarily mean pretty much any single shot handgun, and only by extension the word my also be used to mean a revolver which can shoot several times, for example six times...
