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You may be interested in Head, Brian F. (1978). 'Respect Degrees in Pronominal Reference', in Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson, and Edith A. Moravcsik (eds.), Universals of Human Language, ...
A certain question has twice now been hit by the dreaded "You can find this information by Google" I've noticed this has occurred quite frequently, especially link-only answers which I delete as a...
This has been implemented [Citation needed] As a more academically focused site, it might be useful to mark answers as lacking sufficient citations to back the answer up authoritatively. This g...
The direct parallel of the example from Finnish does not exist in English dialects know to me. Which does not stand for much, I'm not even a native speaker. There are some basic uses of "it" whic...
He/she may be used to refer to an object. The accepted practice in English is for boats and ships to be considered female; this is unusual enough to be remarked upon by non-sailors. All other uses...
Most reliable sources say that the Arabic-derived "djinni" is a singular word and its plural is "djinn." (Or "jinni" and "jinn," if you prefer.) The dropping of a final letter or syllable to plural...
In some languages, the distinction between singular and plural of a noun isn't obligatorily marked at all. There are ways to be explicit about singular/plural but they are optional. (English adje...
Many quantity words trigger agreement with their object rather than themselves. For instance, syntactically, "a lot, "a bunch", "an amount" seem to all be singular. However, as a native speaker, "T...
Following an earlier comment which indicated that this could be a typo for a "roach colony", @msh210 was able to confirm that this 1980 edition of the book indeed had a "roach colony" where the 198...
In Icelandic, certain accented vowel letters (especially ó, á) are consistently explained as diphthongs ([ou] and [au], respectively) in pronunciation guides. Accented vowel letters are also encou...
This is a known phenomenon also in Swedish where it is called särskrivning ("writing apart"). The wikipedia article Särskrivning (Swedish, no English translation available) with sources claims that...
As the title says. Background I often find myself in the need of building an English sentence that I almost know how to get right. The scaffolding is there, but there are maybe one or two words ...
Maybe https://quillbot.com/? I haven't used it much myself, but it might perhaps be handy. It can paraphrase, check grammar etc. Trying it out with your sentence as-is, it proposes to paraphrase i...
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...
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...
When reading this section of Amos on Saturday, something struck me about this verse (Amos 9:11): :בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֔וּא אָקִ֛ים אֶת־סֻכַּ֥ת דָּוִ֖יד הַנֹּפֶ֑לֶת וְגָדַרְתִּ֣י אֶת־פִּרְצֵיהֶ֗ן וַהֲרִ...
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...
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 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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Many non-binary people now request that new third person pronouns (neopronouns) be used to refer to them, for example xe or ze. These have not been widely used by English speakers yet, but it's sti...
The final forms of ך, ן, ף, and ץ are the original forms. From a Quora answer to What's the origin of the final (sofit) forms for some of the Hebrew alphabet? Four of the five “sofit” letters ...
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...
