Search
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...
In Sephardi or Israeli Hebrew today, ט and ת are pronounced the same, at least to my non-native ear, something like /t/. In Ashkenazi Hebrew, on the other hand, sometimes ת is pronounced like ס (...
So, I have a Chinese name. (Specifically, Mandarin, if that makes a difference). What are the common ways to give this name in Japanese? Should I approximate the Chinese reading, use the on'yomi re...
Moshi has explained it excellently. In fact, Trisyllabic Laxing is the reason it happened. I'm going to explain it from another point of view. Pronounce is stressed on the second syllable. When the...
Geoffrey Khan's (open access!) book, "The Tiberian Pronunciation Tradition of Biblical Hebrew"1, discusses the pronunciation of Hebrew according to the Masoretes of Tiberias, who were active about ...
You should probably refer to the promotional content guidelines. Reproduced here: You must explicitly state your affiliation. If you're linking your dragon-riding place, please just include a di...
Speaking personally (I haven't consulted anybody else on the team), I don't see why this would be a problem so long as there's nothing sneaky or sketchy going on. Not all resources are freely avai...
Japanese has what is known as the "polite form"/"masu form" and the "plain form". Notably, the two forms have completely different conjugations despite having the same meaning, differing only in po...
There were two recent questions (here and here) about historical pronunications. I know that languages evolve in sound over time, but how do linguists determine what the original phonology was seve...
One of the infinitives in Hebrew is translated "to [verb]" and starts with ל, l. For example, ללמוד, lilmod, "to learn", and להשאר, l'hishaer, "to remain"; it's used often. But two of the verb cons...
One thing that’s always bothered me about the musical term timbre is its pronunciation. The word begs to be pronounced “timber,” yet it’s widely pronounced “tamber” instead. I understand the etymol...
I have seen the phrase sommaren är kommen. What grammatical form is this and how is it correct? I thought it should rather be sommaren har kommit, for summer has arrived (literally: summer has co...
When conjugating 'hebben' I can see both forms, are they the same, or is only one of them correct? Is there a regional difference between the two?
From ariel.org What is meant by “unused” root is that though the root of the word has a specific meaning, you will not find that root meaning in literature. Only its derived meanings will be fou...
The younger the child, the less established the grammar. You can respond with "Nyt se menee nukkumaan" and put the toy into its sleeping house, thus just implementing the suggestion using your own...
The term (semantic) "shift" implies not just the emergence of a new meaning, but also abandonment of the old one. The old meanings you refer to are still present in current English, so it is perha...
partir is intransitive in modern French ("depart") but primarily transitive in Old French ("distribute", i.e., "make depart"). The transitive meaning is still preserved, as an archaism, in the set...
Yes, it is a common, rather colloquial, way to say "to be in a good mood". The Diccionario de la lengua española, that is, the main Spanish dictionary has an entry on it: de buenas loc. adj. colo...
No. "Language" on this site refers to the natural languages of intelligent beings, not machine languages, music etc. In the absence of another qualifier a "language" is, as I wrote on another site,...
Five Hebrew letters -- כ, מ, נ, צ, and פ -- have different forms when at the end of a word. I have heard that this is true for certain letters in Arabic too, though I don't know if they're th...
Every language has lots of varieties which differ in conservativity among themselves. This effect can be massive[1]. If any particular methodology for assessing conservativity forces a choice bet...
So what is the proposed ontology for the Languages & Linguistics site? I foresee a category for each language and then, eventually, subcategories for the rest. Just so we're on the same pa...
It is a sequence of shifts of meaning. 1 to 2 is a metonymy. Some, such as Burke, would even call it a synecdoche, as long as they are ready to consider an "effect" to be a part of its "cause" or...
A continuation of my previous post. Crowdsourced font stack for Languages & Linguistics I am currently working on crafting font stacks for each script; see the draft pull request here: https:...
