Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edit | Post #290982 | Initial revision | — | about 2 months ago |
| Question | — |
Are Icelandic unstressed diphthongs in loanwords supposed to be reduced? In Icelandic, certain accented vowel letters (especially ó, á) are consistently explained as diphthongs ([ou] and [au], respectively) in pronunciation guides. Accented vowel letters are also encountered in many loanwords, perhaps to emphasize the foreign origin of a particular vowel. This frequen... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290959 |
I had bimodal crispness in mind, but you could probably find a way to define crispness to be more like discreteness, thus ending up with yet another dimension. The original post uses the term "clear-cut" which could perhaps mean either; the degree of bimodality is easier to define than the degree of... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
| Edit | Post #290959 | Initial revision | — | about 2 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What underlying principle is at play for how objective or subjective a natural language instruction is? The question alludes to at least three correlated, but quite distinct dimensions. Objectivity/subjectivity Room for model's creativity (information theoretical) Crispness of the boundary between "correct" and "incorrect" productions. To define them, introduce an additional agent, perhaps a... (more) |
— | about 2 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288727 |
We are all hesitant to answer this question, lest we get voted upon and burdened with undeserved reputation. However, our collective silence also seem to indicate that the status quo works well enough for us.
(more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290447 |
"Die Weihnacht", a single night starting by the sunset on 12/24, marks the beginning of "das Weihnachtsfest", the multi-day period also known as "Weihnachten". In German-speaking countries, at least Saint Stephen's Day (Boxing Day) is understood to be _part of_ Christmas, and not a holiday _followin... (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290447 |
Let's not confuse the use of articles with grammatical genders.
IF an article is to be used, then the gender becomes relevant for the choice of the article. Otherwise it's best to stop equating der/die/das with the grammatical genders for that particular word. "Weihnachten" goes without an art... (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290467 |
Thank you for the summary. The original question also sought to place the word in a class of similarly behaving "frozen" forms. The only other example I can think of is "Ostern" (Easter). (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290456 |
I'd appreciate if you leave this question open because I would love reading any answers that may arrive, even if that takes time.
Asking additional questions as separate question posts makes perfect sense, too. (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290456 |
"Orthographic depth" is the concept that lets you compare a language with another language. Different researchers define it differently and they rarely offer any numeric values for individual languages.
When learning a _second_ language, however, any prior linguistic background trumps everything ... (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290456 |
I think that you are asking some valid, but extremely complicated questions to even define/ask properly.
It starts with the definition of a "language". What if we consider cases like Chinese or Arabic where many different spoken languages arguably map to the same or somewhat similar written langu... (more) |
— | 4 months ago |
| Edit | Post #289960 |
Post edited: Did a more careful job of counting the Latin (grammatical) morphs |
— | 4 months ago |
| Comment | Post #290214 |
The only British English pronunciation [recording](https://forvo.com/word/nobly/) of "nobly" currently present at forvo does not seem to capture the phenomenon. Consider finding or providing an example recording online - or provide an IPA transcription within your question if that is easier for you... (more) |
— | 5 months ago |
| Comment | Post #278583 |
Let's not get carried too far away from the question at hand, however. Thai grammar *needs* to invoke the concept of classifiers precisely because they serve way more functions than counting; counting is just a textbook example of a context where they are obligatory. English does not come anywhere ... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
| Comment | Post #278583 |
An arguably obligatory use of classifiers (whether we call them that or not) in English is when counting uncountable nouns. While ordinary nouns are used for that purpose, the choice of the specific noun is often idiomatic... leaving the speaker with no other choice. Conversely, the list of Thai cl... (more) |
— | 6 months ago |
| Edit | Post #289960 | Initial revision | — | 7 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What is "nift"? The oldest known usage of "nifty" is in an American poem from 1868. If you read the poem at this link, you'll find that that author found it useful to comment on the meaning of the word inside the poem itself. That's an incredibly unusual circumstance. Should we trust the poem's own interpretati... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Comment | Post #289905 |
Wow, that's obviously a killer fact. Incorporated. (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Edit | Post #289905 |
Post edited: |
— | 7 months ago |
| Edit | Post #289905 |
Post edited: |
— | 7 months ago |
| Edit | Post #289905 |
Post edited: Incorporating improvements suggested through further comments and further research |
— | 7 months ago |
| Edit | Post #289905 | Initial revision | — | 7 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What's a "road colony"? Following an earlier comment which indicated that this could be a typo for a "roach colony", @msh210 was able to confirm that this 1980 edition of the book indeed had a "roach colony" where the 1987 edition mentioned by the OP has the "road colony". Three pages down the story, we get an independen... (more) |
— | 7 months ago |
| Comment | Post #289306 |
That's a lot of nice examples. I'd tend to label those in boldface as a mix of "showing power differential" (most of them) and "showing intimacy" (the Laura one), whereas those in italics as "showing politeness".
I think that social connections (and their signals) are not necessarily classified a... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288998 |
Microsoft released Bengali Windows. It uses Bengali equivalents to various computer terminology. As it happens in every language, those terms are often derived (as metaphors and otherwise) from Bengali concepts and terms that predate computer technology; . (The origin of a particular word or phras... (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288998 |
It is unclear what is being asked due to too many layers of perceived or real humor involved.
Those terms appear to mean, in this context, what already the question suggests that they mean. In other contexts, they may mean also different things, but that doesn't "define" those terms. (more) |
— | 9 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288998 | Question closed | — | 9 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288413 |
Tudor-ætt would be the base form (nominative, without an article. Tudors are foreign to Iceland and they have a family name (Tudor, I suppose). Tudor-ætt is derived from that family name. (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288760 |
[Another wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reference#:~:text=A%20word%20that%20describes%20itself,autological%20word%20(or%20autonym).) presents "autonym" as a synonym for an autological word. However, no reference for that claim is given, which contradicts wikipedia policy. (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288538 |
The question could be improved with some (ideally, dated) examples of the original usage if available. That's because the holdover from radio may have been rather distinct from specialized phraseology such as "hear on TV" (meaning, memorizing a factoid that arrived through the TV) that's still entir... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288413 |
Some Icelanders do have a family name. It is possible for Icelanders born to such a family to inherit the family name (i.e., as a family name, in a surname position, and not as a mere middle name). Before the law changed in 1925, all it took for the extended family who wanted to be easy to referenc... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288468 | Initial revision | — | 10 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Has there ever been a situation of perfect bilingualism, without falling in diglossia? The term "multiligualism" is generally used to characterize the linguistic capabilities of a single speaker. If the person uses exactly two (or at least two) languages, they are bilinguial even if no one else in the world is bilinguial. The term "diglossia" is a socio-linguistic term, it is used ... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288413 |
Post edited: Adding more context on second given names and on middle names and correcting the base form of name I used in an example |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288413 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How to refer to a whole family in Icelandic? In Icelandic, you are, I suppose, more likely to refer to a single person and their family, than to the family without naming any single person as well. Random example from the web: "Fjölskylda Einars Darra Óskarssonar heimsótti mig í forsætisráðuneytið í dag." ("The family of Einar Darri[^1], son ... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Edit | Post #288182 | Initial revision | — | 11 months ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Effectiveness of input-only learning This question touches on many topics, and this answer doesn't hope to be comprehensive. Research on language didactics generally focusses on institutional settings (with an instructor), or, at the very least, on the learner following a defined method, such as a widely used set of learning material... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288158 |
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288158 |
The example I gave was mine, not necessarily Krashen's.
Krashen distinguishes conscious "learning" and subconscious "acquisition". Both are important. You need a certain level of acquisition before you can successfully proceed to a certain step of learning. But both proceed in a lockstep. Ther... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #288158 |
Krashen certainly never posited anything as radical as a recommendation not to produce.
He believes that you can't speed up (or even reorder) language learning by trying to consciously learn to produce on a level that's TOO FAR AHEAD of what you have already subconsciously acquired through previ... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #287281 |
@#60658 -
https://people.howstuffworks.com/shrewdness-apes-collective-nouns-500-year-old-language-fad.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Saint_Albans (Certainly not earliest nor too original, but enormously influential in the spread of the joke throughout the English speaking world.)
G... (more) |
— | 11 months ago |
| Comment | Post #287759 |
The very term "the inflectional suffix" (and especially it's synonym "ending") presupposes that the language is purely fusional - that all grammatical categories are expressed through a single ending located at the very end of the word which cannot be decomposed into morphemes for the individual cate... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #287759 |
Weak verbs have the additional dental consonant in their past forms (which is sometimes presupposed to have originated in a cognate of the auxiliary verb "to do"). That dental consonant is usually analyzed as part of their ending, not of the stem, following a dogmatic assumption that German is a pur... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #287759 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Why is the third person singular conjugation different in the past tense? 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 language itself, but every attested Germanic languages contains some reflection of the original Präteritum mark... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #287542 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: When would a sentence consist of "terdiri" with "atas" or "dari"? The same thing can be expressed in any given language in many ways. You have not provided any source for the claim that "Kecamatan ini terdiri atas sepuluh desa." would be using the wrong word. This page contains the sentence: "Kecamatan ini terdiri atas satu kelurahan dan beberapa desa." That ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #287060 |
Re *"Depending on the starting letter of the base verb, "me-" would get an additional letter/s and said starting letter will be dropped off of the verb to make the word."* - a good way to interpret this process is to think of the prefix as being not just "me-", but rather "meM-" where the "M" is not ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |