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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.
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, ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
One difficulty I’ve seen in learning languages is matching orthography to pronunciation - especially vowels. English has several distinct sounds that a native speaker will describe as the vowel ‘e...
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...
Looking at English, its complexity seems to have been in constant decrease. For example, in the past, there were conjugations and a separate informal form of “you” (”thou”); all in all, the languag...
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...
I nominate Jirka Hanika, because they're (relatively) active and have good answers here.
I speak Spanish well, but not Hebrew. As user7078 suggested, the sentence as translated in the NVI says "Already it has been declared to you what is good. Already it has been told to you what J...
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...
