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We are talking about the 17th most common word in current English - it is a very successful member of the language, and also a constituent of many idioms, and most of those idioms have a single mea...
Polite language got turned into legal language maybe? The first example that comes up when I google the word "payable" is "interest is payable on the money owing." And from Dictionary.com I get "...
Whether "gasket" comes from French "garcette" or not, I have no idea. If a particularly misogynistic and at the same time naval etymology is sought, then the thing called "garcette" was, among oth...
Vietnamese and Thai are normally classified into separate primary language families, meaning that the languages as a whole are unrelated. Whenever you find a similar word with a similar meaning, t...
In an examination in my country (India) I had a multiple choice question on the order of pronouns. Q: Please try to remember when I, you and my wife were talking there. Options: A. you, I and ...
The Tironian et was a scribal abbreviation for the Latin word et; it was used for centuries across Europe, but finally died out and was replaced with & in almost all languages. The exception wa...
In normed Finnish language hän (he/she) refers to people, while se (it) refers to non-people. However, in spoken language, at least in many dialects, se is used also for people. (Both hän and se ar...
There isn't an established procedure, but I personally would ask either on Meta for visibility (asking for the creation of a post seems Meta-y) and/or create the resource post itself, even if empty.
This site has the category Resources which will grow over time with great posts. But what if I want to get some of these resources? I mean, how can I suggest one? Let me be specific: I want to im...
I don't have any references for the first coinage of the term Patient. However, in grammars in the Latin tradition it is still customary to find the Latin terms agens and patiens rather than Agent ...
When I first moved to Israel, one of the first things I was warned about was using the word "maniac". As an American, this is considered a very minor insult - minor enough for little kids to use wi...
Working on the principle that language is defined by the users and not a 'Formal Committee on Language', I submit the use of double contractions by Lewis Carroll is close enough to formal recogniti...
When an observed verbal habit has more than one potential source, and that source is likely to be a different language or dialect, how do linguists determine the most likely origin? For example, i...
English speakers from certain areas, in particular British, seem to add an extra r sound after vowels. For example: Idea -> idea-r Drawing -> draw-r-ing China -> China-r What is th...
The original meaning of humor of course refers to the obsolete theory of the four humors and their effect on human temperament. I'm not asking about that. It appears that initially, the meaning sh...
While learning a language, there are a surprising (to me at least) number of people who say that you should never output until fluent - that is, as long as you get enough input, you will eventually...
You can express the same meaning as "closed, but not locked with a key" with: "Die Tür ist zugezogen" (if the door was deliberately closed) "Die Tür ist ins Schloss gefallen" (if you did not cl...
It seems like a lot of humor has an element of surprise. Sudden meanings, unexpected turns of the plot, language unexpected given the context (impolite language in polite context, technical in a no...
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...
Suggestion (based on a comment discussion on another answer): create a category called "resources" or "wiki" or something similar. In this category, use the article type (not Q&A). Create one...
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 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 ...
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...
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...
