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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:...
I nominate msh210 because he has an analytical mind, familiarity with sign languages (which I think is useful background during the scope definition period of the site), and, like Moshi, a healthy ...
This post is a blatant copy of this SE post. It lacks the little "hamburger icon" that's supposed to pop up when a post is imported by staff. So either there's some glitch here with missing hamburg...
I realize that we don't have an official stance on translation questions, so I am looking for community feedback. Should translation questions of words/phrases be considered off-topic?
I think these sort under the "too broad" category and should be closed. Questions should ideally have some lasting value to future readers, meaning that they must be rather specific. It is fine to...
The closest term I’ve found is anaptyxis, the form of epenthesis that refers to inserting a vowel, but this is still fairly vague. A similar phenomenon is mentioned in this paper, regarding the pr...
Your question is about a particular subclass of German verbs, namely weak verbs. Weak verbs, along with their conjugation, are a Proto-Germanic invention. Proto-Germanic isn't an attested languag...
Focusing on native English speakers from the UK, inserting an r between words is a hyper correction of a phonetic rule in British English; the final r in a word is silent unless followed by a vowel...
Definitions Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the usage of the word humor has expanded to several distinct meanings that are all still in active use. Humor as mood, as shown in good humor...
Verbs with "me-" as a prefix are active verbs. In the definition of active verbs: Active verb is a term in traditional English grammar for a verb used primarily to indicate an action, process, o...
The speakers you have encoutered may be adding Erhua which is common in the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The '-er' that is added serves various semantic purposes (e.g. diminutive suffix) and is co...
One misconception: They/them has not been strictly plural for quite a long time. Even Shakespeare used it. There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / as if I were their well-acquainted friend...
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 ...
Why is the -an in "شُكْرًا" (shukran) pronounced? I've heard it pronounced this way in Modern Standard Arabic and in colloquial. In both, I'd usually expect the -an to not be pronounced, especiall...
This is one of four (or more) alternative answers. (I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential c...
If you're around tomorrow, stop by. I'll eat when I'm hungry. She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes. You're around tomorrow, I'm hungry, and she comes are describing fu...
In Spanish.SE we used to have quite a lot of fun with the Translation Golf: we would pick some English text and the goal was to translate it into Spanish using the less amount of characters as poss...
It seems like a somewhat oxymoronic term, but I think that destí intermedi communicates the correct idea. Once I'd thought of that, I searched for prior usage: the Spanish equivalent seems to be fa...
I'll address the etymology of "negotiable" (noun), which is a shorthand for "negotiable instrument of payment", where "negotiable" is a deverbal adjective from the transitive sense of the verb "neg...
German - 63 characters Willkommen in unserer Community für Sprach- und Linguistikinteressierte! Thanks to German for allowing to cobble together words. A literal translation of it would be: ...
quibble [17] _Quibble _probably originated as a rather ponderous learned joke-word. It is derived from an earlier and now obsolete _quib _‘pun’, which appears to have been based on quibus...
Quoting from https://svenska.se/tre/?sok=ohyra&pz=1: sedan första årtiondet av 1500-talet (Helige mäns lefverne); fornsv. ohyra ’odjur; stor mängd’; urspr. ’ngt otäckt, otrevligt’ Se...
