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Language change, including phonetic changes, proceeds slowly and for the most part without language users being fully in control, or even aware of it. (You might ask why. The intentional componen...
I have read somewhere that Swedish is more conservative than the other continental North Germanic languages, Norwegian and Danish. Clearly Icelandic is more conservative then these all. But is the ...
In Arabic the word مُسَدَّس refers to pistol when an arm is meant (see here on wikipedia). But it also refers to a hexagon (see here on wikipedia) -also سداسي أضلاع or سداسي- as it is a description...
The general rule I learned is to ignore subordinate clauses when resolving cases like this. The "outer" sentence, which contains the verb, is "The oath he swore (verb) just fluff to him", and so t...
I sometimes find myself writing sentences with subordinate clauses where there is number mismatch between the primary and subordinate clauses. For example: The oath he swore, those words about se...
In George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language", he refers to "[t]he jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad d...
French nasalized vowels were lowered from their original quality (i.e. in, im are pronounced [ɛ̃~æ̃~ɑ̃] instead of [ĩ]). In older borrowings (e.g. simple) the original close vowel is retained in p...
Having language tags capitalized and others not might increase their visibility or specialness. This would not be a bad thing. English likes to capitalize some strange things such as language n...
One thing that’s always bothered me about the musical term timbre is its pronunciation. The word begs to be pronounced “timber,” yet it’s widely pronounced “tamber” instead. I understand the etymol...
So, the general consensus on Should we allow capitalized tags? seems to be yes. The obvious next questions is, do we, the Language community, want them? Since we've recently gotten the [Thai] tag, ...
Usually on'yomi is used, but you can choose to use kun'yomi. I can't speak for the reverse.
I know that in Thai language, if someone asks a numeric question and expects an answer which is plurally numerical (two or more objects), it is common to add some special word to the question. I wo...
This would be something called conditional mood (No: kondisjonalis), since is something that comes with a condition, "I should have done it, but...". Kondisjonalis comes in two forms, one with "sku...
I have mostly self-learned Norwegian without much emphasis on grammar. Occasionally I see expressions like "skulle gjort", sometimes with "gjort" replaced by another verb. I would expect to see the...
I have a very little knowledge about Arabic but as far as I know, both spellings are correct and acceptable. Use whichever you want but be consistent. The short vertical stroke on top of meem is ca...
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 '...
I'm a native Swede but not exactly a grammar wizard. "kommit" is past participle for the verb komma: "komma" = to arrive "kom" = arrived "har kommit" = have arrived In order to say "I have arrive...
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...
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...
This are a lot of details as to how French was pronounced, so I'll focus on just this question: When looking at a song (or poem) and deciding on pronunciations, what internal or external clues can...
"kommen" is the past participle (perfekt particip) of komma. From this site, Perfekt particip is used as adjective and declines almost the same way as adjectiv. [sic] An example given in the site...
I have seen the phrase sommaren är kommen. What grammatical form is this and how is it correct? I thought it should rather be sommaren har kommit, for summer has arrived (literally: summer has co...
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'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...
This is the kind of question there's more than one correct answer to. Most trained linguists will tell you to do whatever is most natural or whatever everyone else does. They tend to be a descripti...
