Search
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...
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...
After getting various inputs, I can offer a partial answer to my own question. I'm not a native speaker, so feel free to offer a better one. The explanation Duden offers covers most of the bases. ...
I was trying to explain to someone that my door can only be opened with a key, regardless of whether the door is locked or simply closed. I figured schließen would fail to express that unambiguous...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The site list has a short description of each community. This description is sometimes also used in ads. It's outward-facing, what you want people who aren't already here to know. Some examples:...
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...
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...
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 ...
I speak Hebrew as a second language, and probably worse than most people expect - I live in Israel, but my Hebrew is still not that great. I ride with a cycling team, and one thing that we do is to...
I'm trying to edit this question at Chinese Stack Exchange: Does Chinese have an equivalent to Arabic-style praising grammar (translates to 褒贬句)?. The user originally wrote: In Arabic we have a ...
As we start on building a new community here together, we're bound to find some sticking points. Those might be bugs, new features you need, things you need support with... whatever they are, the C...
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...
