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Several West European languages, most spoken in 2022, feature cognate adverbs with the meaning of ''nevertheless' by univerbating "nothing/not/none/no" +"less". What semantic notions underlie...
It would take a literature search to prove it, but I think that the claimed etymology is not precisely correct for English. It is often the case for English that a word is adopted and then a mutati...
What does the prefix ad- semantically mean here? How did the compounding of ad- + rogare yield 'to make great claims about oneself' and "to claim for oneself, assume"? What semantic n...
Pretend that you're Devil's Advocate. 1. How can you possibly contend that fulsome is "a case of ironic understatement"? What's ironic? What's fulsome understating? "fulsome" feels r...
Let's look at the described phenomena, as they changed over the years. First we have ownership: the idea that a particular person has a right to determine what is done and not done with a physical...
Irish literature is really, really old, and the Tironian shorthand had its best days before 1100, i.e., before the most of European vernacular literatures came about. This is the closest meme to a...
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...
Note: I am not an expert on Latin and I do not understand Latin. This answer is written purely from online research. Using Latin dictionary (39k+ Latin words) and leafing through each of the word ...
In classical Latin, the letter C is pronounced like K. Hardly any words use the latter K; even imports from Greek turned kappa into C. A handful of words, such as "kalendae," held onto their K. In...
I think that this shift in meaning happened already as part of the process of borrowing from Latin. Look at the following example use of "videlicet". This is 16th century legal Latin as used in E...
As the title mentioned, what's the difference between these two terms? The question has troubled me for some time. Hope somebody can answer me. Thanks!
I revamped Serious-Telephone142's answer for grammar. Negotiation involves a metaphorical pushing and pulling, a give and take. This sense is preserved in the modern English word 'intractable,' ...
Etymonline below blazons the sense of "negotiate, bargain" in treat. Please see the green line for the sense of "pull, drag" from tractō. I added the red lines beside 8(b) and 9, because these sen...
How did the adverb vērum semantically shift from "truly" to mean 'but, yet, however'? These 2 senses look completely unrelated to me! Oxford Latin Dictionary (2012 2 ed), pp 2254-5.
If you rephrase this question to ask about "the influence of Norman French on English", you will discover a myriad of searchable sources and references, and the book Contact: The Interaction of Clo...
Where should I learn about words that came into Modern English most likely from Norman? Please example some words which most likely came to Modern English only from Norman (i.e. words which are li...
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 ...
THEMES and PATIENTS are rather similar, and not all linguists distinguish between these roles. A THEME typically moves from one location or one person to another, like the letter in (31...
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...
Disclaimer: Swedish native here, but no grammar expert. Without the preposition, then in most contexts the verb blanda means mix. The verb röra can mean either move, stir, touch (physically or emo...
I do a research on Swedish verbs with the meaning of mixing something. I struggle with some of words. There are two words 'blanda' and 'röra' which are usually used with prepositions, like 'om', 'i...
I quote Etymonline on impute (v.): early 15c., from Old French imputer, emputer (14c.) and directly from Latin imputare "to reckon, make account of, charge, ascribe," from assimilated form of ...
I think the answer is a lack of a clear scope. I mentioned this in various comments in the past, but are we a linguistics site (like Linguistics SE), a language learning site (Like English Language...
I am active on the Linguistics Stack Exchange but would really like to leave there completely. I see this site as a potential alternative, but haven't become active here yet. So in a way you could ...
I admit I'm unschooled at Googling! Only after I wrote this post, did I stumble on Draconis's answer on Latin SE. While emō normally means "buy", the ancestral meaning seems to have been somethi...
