Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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) |
— | 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) |
— | 5 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) |
— | 5 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) |
— | 5 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) |
— | 6 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 |
| Comment | Post #289905 |
Wow, that's obviously a killer fact. Incorporated. (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) |
— | 10 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) |
— | 11 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) |
— | 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) |
— | 12 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) |
— | 12 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) |
— | 12 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 |
| 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 |
| Comment | Post #287281 |
I agree that American English (as well as Australian English) normally uses singular verb agreement with company names while British English uses plural verb agreement. The Australian adherence to singular usage is a strict one, the American one isn't universal, especially if neilpzz is indeed an Am... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #287281 |
Source: That first example sentence was uttered by neilpzz and is googlable. neilpzz is a Windows Insider program participant who seems to be expressing themselves in (U.S.?) English and posting, over the last 7 years, in times of day consistent with living in the Western Hemisphere.
The second e... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #286840 |
I just checked, as a random sample, Luke 24:51 in Vulgate (the most popular Latin translation I'm aware of) and its counterpart of the English "take up" isn't any cognate of "assumption"; there's *"et factum est dum benediceret illis recessit ab eis et ferebatur in caelum"*, so similarly to Greek the... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #286840 |
Well, you may well be right and I wrong about this. Undoubtedly, some uses of "take up" are spatial (*"Take up the carpet."*), others are not ("*He took up basket weaving* [as a hobby].")
Is heaven a place - literally? metaphorically? If it is, does it lie in the same direction as the sky? ("S... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #286733 |
It's certainly interesting to look at other languages, too. (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286733 |
That article doesn't seem to be covering German with any examples or timelines, does it? In German, ihrzen was way older than siezen. (The oldest known instance of ihrzen is from 865. Some dialects use ihrzen even today.) The early written examples of siezen are mixing siezen and ihrzen (by the s... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #279490 |
Oh yes, it did. The English word wasn't borrowed from modern French, it was rather borrowed from Old French. The word "partir" is intransitive in modern French ("depart") but primarily [transitive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_verb) in Old French ("distribute", i.e., "make depart").
... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284296 |
It seems to me that even after nine more years we haven't grown (in the volume of traffic) to the point where it would be clear that any particular splitting or excluding would be likely to produce lively, compact, more focused communities.
There's no objective, easy to check boundary between "lan... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286623 |
This example does prove that there's a change in progress. A nice write-up on the predicative nominal case is [here](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/it-is-i-or-it-is-me-predicate-nominative-usage-guide). They even suggest a timeline of the change.
Note also that we are using the ... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286553 |
Regarding "who" - "he" - "the", I'm afraid that I was oversimplifying to the point of not being quite right on that point. Old English had a word "sē" which was both a definite article and a pronoun (= article usable without the noun). Masculine singular in both cases; Old English had separate arti... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286553 |
I'm afraid I'm unable to answer the main question as asked, primarily because I haven't gone through the exercise of looking up the etymologies and Proto-Germanic, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit... parallels of enough candidate words for a clear picture to emerge. Looking at only the modern forms can be mis... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286553 |
This stuff is of Indo-European (and then Germanic) origin and as such it had more grammatical cases and genders (even as recently as in Old English). In this sense English must have lost some entries through neutralization of those grammatical categories in some forms.
It's not just lexemes and f... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286522 |
Expletive pronoun, also called dummy pronoun, is a useful term here, thanks. [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/it) uses the following example for item 1: *"don't know who it is"*. I would suggest the following test to probe the boundary between a dummy pronoun and one wit... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286522 |
Very true. I think that children (and animals) form almost the totality of the first bullet. An adult whose sex is unknown or disregarded would be much more likely to be referenced with a singular "they" or with a gender-neutral "he" or with "one" (if undeterminate) or with "he or she". It's doubt... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284801 |
Is this a duplicate of https://languages.codidact.com/posts/280932/280980#answer-280980
? (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #285636 |
I believe so. Let me remark that the verb "tracto" had the meaning "negotiate" already in Latin. From 2nd century Latin, two examples from the same text: "ubi ... negotia tutores tractant..." or " ...ipsae sibi negotia tractant..." It's perhaps not exactly "negotiate", but it's close. Something l... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #285607 |
The last example is especially eloquent. That cow/sheep/pig are parallel but not quite synonymous with beef/mutton/pork. You use the Germanic word if you feed it, you use the Norman word if you eat it.
Having a different word for a "cow", for "(horned) cattle", and for beef, isn't at all unusua... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284296 |
Some of the questions about languages other than English are also rather basic for any native speaker of those languages.
Our current "main purpose" is currently defined as "General Q&A about specific languages, language in general, and linguistics"; different members have different backgrounds an... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #285121 |
I consider the upvote count of your answer a proxy measure of such general interest. I like your idea of drawing the entire community already into the stage of idea collection. It will be great if you decide to spearhead this (after a few more upvotes here, I guess). (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #285121 |
I'm very neutral on what questions will/should be asked. I only care about questions that did get asked. I'm more likely to join a coverage event if one is organized than to initiate or organize one myself. Coverage events are a smart idea but having at least a small group of people interested in ... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #285125 |
Opinion: The site currently has a wide scope ("all of the above") and questions all over the scope are currently welcome and tend to get answered. (At a rather slow pace.) I don't hesitate to ask any simple question when it genuinely puzzles me for a while. And some seemingly simple questions beca... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #285121 |
Keelan, those events could be an interesting experiment and I don't have any prediction over whether those would solicit many further questions. I could perhaps ask you likewise: Your post contains six "general linguistic questions". What made you decide not to ask any of those? And I am not conte... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284914 |
That's a nice parallel metaphor. (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284466 |
I think that that's so thin a difference that most users wouldn't be able to use voting versus Helpful/Unhelpful for any consistently distinct purposes. In particular, there's a soft, unwritten rule that whenever I'm downvoting, I should also consider commenting - not to defend the downvote, nor to ... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |