Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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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) |
— | 2 months ago |
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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) |
— | 2 months ago |
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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 |
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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 |
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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) |
— | 11 months ago |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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A: Plural agreement with a syntactically singular subject In your example, "lot", bunch", "amount", are collective nouns. There are many collective nouns that aren't quantifiers. For example: "Microsoft have never said they have extended the free period." or "The team agreed." Collective nouns that denote various groupings of animals appear to have st... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
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A: What does Etymonline mean by 'to raise (someone) out of trouble'? You are right, "raise (someone) out of trouble" is not a common English idiom. It is used to connect the English meaning (denotation and connotations) to the original Latin and/or Old French meanings (denotation and connotation). The bolded phrase is an explanation of a notion operating in Latin,... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
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A: If assūmptiō = 'take up', then can ad- (prefix) = 'up'? But why, when super- = 'up'? Indo-European spatial prepositions, when analyzed across all attested languages, are rich in beautiful, unexpected relationships[^1]. You could think that the spatial relationships (above, below, beside, etc.) are independent of the language studied, but that is not so. Like everything in languag... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
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A: Why does German use the third person plural for the second person polite? It is tempting for a foreigner, but perhaps not accurate to identify "Sie" as the polite (respectful) pronoun and to identify "du" as the impolite (less respectful) one, and it could be more accurate to describe the distinction as one of distance[^1] ("Sie" indicates a more distant relationship than ... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: How can fulsome constitute "a case of ironic understatement"? Any understatement could be unintentional, or it could be motivated by pragmatic reasons such as hesitation to bring up a controversial point. However, more often than not, blatant or ridiculously formed understatements are used ironically; and the irony very often concerns the understated quant... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: Why is "djinn" the plural of "djinni"? In some languages, the distinction between singular and plural of a noun isn't obligatorily marked at all. There are ways to be explicit about singular/plural but they are optional. (English adjectives use the same forms in singular and plural, too, while another language might mark the grammatical... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: English dialects and he/she versus it The direct parallel of the example from Finnish does not exist in English dialects know to me. Which does not stand for much, I'm not even a native speaker. There are some basic uses of "it" which do refer to a person and which are available rather uniformly across dialects of English. 1) Pers... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
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A: Calling another by name when one is exasperated This usage seems to be common not only in English, but in Western cultures in general. (The two parties do not need to be on first name terms for this pattern to work: "Oh, Mister Bennet! Have some compassion on my poor nerves!" and so the availability of the pattern is unaffected by T-V distinction... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
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A: Why did the Tironian et survive in Irish, when it died out everywhere else? 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 reason for the present day difference that I can offer. But the two symbols continued to compete valia... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
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A: How did 'videlicet' (it's permissible to see) semantically shift 🢂 to signify 'to wit, namely'? 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 England. The sentence captures a defamation deposition. The language of the court is Latin, but the d... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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A: How does saeculum ( “generation” or “lifetime") semantically relate to PIE root *se- "to sow"? Wikipedia has a very nice article on what the term meant when "saeculum" was adopted into Latin from Etruscan, and Studies in Words has an extensive section on mundus/saeculum/ecclesia which explains in even more detail how "saeculum" can also be understood to mean (a time-bound) "world" in certain (... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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A: How did « histoire », in « histoire de/que », semantically shift to signify "in order to/that"? (I will suppose that the connection of French "histoire" to English "story" is rather clear, except that the English word is closer in its meaning to a "story as it is told", whereas the French one is a little bit closer to "events as they have happened", or "events as they are canonically told".) ... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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A: scilicet: How did 'it is permitted to know' semantically shift to signify 'that is to say, namely'? Your hesitation to accept the interpretation on Etymonline as is may be well founded. Some scholars (e.g., Hahn) consider the idea that the first component is from the infinitive ("scire") unsubstantiated and unlikely; for example, it could simply be the imperative "sci". See also Ernout and Meil... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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A: What language is this (cursive) sample? I will venture a guess that it is Haketia (also called Ladino Occidental) written in Solitreo ("Sephardic cursive"). That's a dialect of Ladino that had a strong local presence in Tangiers around 1912. Mainstream Ladino is another, very similar possibility. Ladino is a language mostly based on Old ... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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A: How did 'in-' + 'putare' compound to mean 'to attribute, credit to'? Let's digress by looking at how the meaning of "computer" developed during the 20th century. A "computer" used to be a person, somebody doing computations; devices eventually took over the job. This unlocked an explosion in the complexity of business applications that required a lot of highly relia... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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A: Linguistics of categorization In a language like English, the distinction between "singular" and "plural" forms would be called a "grammatical feature" or "grammatical category". (This is a different use of the term "category" than in the OP.) The term is most frequently applied to "obligatory (grammatical) categories", i.e., t... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: Malay languages or Indonesian languages --- which is more close to Philippine languages? Let me offer a frame challenge answer: it is pretty much the same (if you pick the Malay language and the Indonesian language as the representatives of the respective "clubs", and compare them to pretty much any language natively spoken in the Philippines - specifically excluding Malay or Indonesian.... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: How tan pronounced? Knowledge of phonetics definitely helps when learning pronunciation of a foreign language on your own. Step 1: Tongue position Tongue position is a two dimensional game. This link shows a Bengali vowel chart. You can interpret it either in articulatory terms (tongue position) or in acoustic... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: What is "phoolon" in Hindi? Some of that is pronunciation, some of that is grammar. फूल "phool" - flower (Sanskrit origin) फूलों "phoolon" - flowers फ़ूल "ful" - foolish (loanword from English) The initial consonant of फूल is an aspirated /pʰ/, much closer to /p/ in English "pull" than to /f/ in English "f... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: How does the original meaning of “but” (“outside”) relate to its current 2021 meanings? You seem to be inquiring primarily about present-day adverbial/prepositional meanings. (However, as your quoted resource mentions, the adverbial usage is actually older than the also mentioned conjunctive usage, and as such the adverbial usage has a closer relationship to the original "outside" both... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: Why didn't the same one (ancestor) language preponderate over China, Japan, Korea? Language is an invention much older than civilization. We have no idea whether all human languages share a single common ancestor language, or whether the capability evolved several times independently. If there was a single common ancestor, then Chinese, Japanese and Korean are distant relatives[^... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: How did 'forfeit' shift to signify ‘penalty imposed for committing such a misdeed'? Here is a semantic midpoint example recorded around 1435, from Prose Brut: > Whan it shal lyke hym to desire of þe Kyng eny oþer landes or lordships...yfte as by escheet, forfait, rebellion, or suche oþer title, þat þei shal so acquyte hem unto þe parformyng of his desire þat his lordship shal be ... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: Is any theory according to which Yiddish is Turkic or Khazar-based supported by any serious evidence? This question deserves a better answer than mine, as I am not familiar with Abraham Polak's work and whatever linguistic evidence he may have offered (if any). However, it is really difficult to imagine how the heavy influence of Middle High German on Yiddish could have been established without ma... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: What sound did the letter ℵ encode in ancient Hebrew, and why did it morph into the greek vowel Α? It is not accurate to say that the Greek alphabet developed from the Hebrew alphabet as we know it. Instead, the two have a common predecessor in the Phoenician alphabet. In this sense you could say that the common predecessor of the Greek letter alpha (α) and Hebrew 'aleph (א) was a Phoenician alp... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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A: How did 'solicit' semantically shift to signify ‘manage affairs’? You are trying to absorb too many centuries in the stride at once. I don't know what happened between Latin and Middle French, but by the time the (French noun) "soliciteur" got derived from the (French verb) "soliciter", the meanings involved seems to be like "to ask/request with urgency", "to as... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: Why do the most spoken human languages in 2021 greet with words related to health or peace? Well, some languages do, some don't. Some specific greetings do, some don't. A bit of sampling of the omniglot collection of greetings, with the help of the indispensable wiktionary for the translations and etymologies, shows a number of other commonly encountered components; some greetings contain... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How did “negotiable” mean “a good or security whose ownership is easily transferable”? 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 "negotiate". "Transitive" means that the verb requires an object, and that object is going to become called... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How did "join issue" mean ‘jointly submit a disputed matter to the decision of the court’? The oldest occurrence of "join issue" I can find is from 1624, i.e., not medieval. In fact most records of legal proceedings by that time were still in Latin - so I am far from saying that the phrase couldn't be older by a few centuries like your source suggests. Courts like to address conflicts ... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How did "put under" shift to signify "cause to take the place of", then "enough"? I doubt that "sufficere" ever meant "put under"; I'll assume that this meaning was just suggested as a crude literal translation rather than attested as real Latin usage. The same Indo-European morpheme that entered Latin as "sub-" is actually also reflected in English "up" and "above" (and in San... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: Why “chose” in action? Why not “right/droit” in action? "Thing" isn't an obvious supernym for a "right". The legal definition of a "thing" is narrower than "simply anything" and it varies not just by a language, but also by jurisdiction. Any chose in action is associated with a specific kind of a right: a property right. That's what makes it a "t... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How did 'quibus?' shift to mean 'evasion of a point at issue'? Skeat's Etymological Dictionary offers a competing theory which I find more persuasive: "quib", in the sense of a taunt or mock, could be a phonological weakening of "quip" (or "quippy"), still in the sense of a mock ("quip" attested in this sense by 1552). English "quip" would then be from Latin "q... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How did kúklos ("circular") shift to signify "general"? The specific form of the word in Latin and English is mediaeval, but it draws on much older concepts and constructs on other languages. Two thousand years ago, εγκυκλιος παιδεια ("enkyklios paideia") would refer to a concept called "orbis doctrinae" in mediaeval Latin, i.e., to a something that wo... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: Why are service or maintenance contracts called 'warranties', when they aren't Legal Warranties? The term "warranty", in its common law meaning, is a contractual term whose breach does not automatically entitle the innocent party to terminate the entire contract. A special case of a contract is the sale of goods; probably every jurisdiction extensively regulates this type of contract. Conseque... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How did "as" amass all its confusing "broad and vague meanings"? We are talking about the 17th most common word in current English - it is a very successful member of the language, and also a constituent of many idioms, and most of those idioms have a single meaning each. I will ignore the idioms and also the few distinct meanings which "as" can have as a noun, p... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: What is the origin of the missing "to be" in sentences like "the car needs washed"? Wikipedia gives me the impression that Appalachian English is a member of the Southern U.S. English dialect collection and can be subdivided into a southern variety called Smoky Mountain English and a northern variety called Western Pennsylvania English. The construct you ask about appears common[^1... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How did 'less than' semantically shift to mean 'if not'? It is generally easier to track down the earliest usages of a word, than the earliest usages of an entire phrase from which the word eventually developed. I'll offer two speculative answers; they are not mutually exclusive, because we are discussing developments over a vast time and space. 1. In ... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: Vietnamese lệnh and Thai เลย Vietnamese and Thai are normally classified into separate primary language families, meaning that the languages as a whole are unrelated. Whenever you find a similar word with a similar meaning, that could be a coincidence; or it could be a borrowing either way; or it could have been borrowed into b... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: 'Caution' and 'cautious' with ʃ or ʒ? Any online dictionaries I can find agree on a /ʃ/ across any standard dialects they cover. I don't remember encountering the other pronunciation myself. I suspect that you are looking at an example of (possibly non-phonological) lenition in non-standard dialects. While lenition can be an obligat... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: What is a good translation for "waypoint" into Catalan? Stick to the "waypoint". You could also encounter "punt d’inflexió" meaning a "turning point". However, the meaning isn't identical. An inflection point is a point where the direction of travel changes, perhaps abruptly, or somehow interestingly, such as in "turn left and then right". A way... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why does the dollar sign precede the number in English? TL;DR: Similar usage is much older than paper checks. But the rumor is not far from the truth, especially if the question is about the U.S. dollar currency specifically. The usage inside of (modern) English texts per se (I mean especially inside full sentences written down) is predated by standal... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Should we use "por que" or "porque" in "las autoridades se sentían estafadas *por que* se escaparan"? I think that you just read the sentence with a subtly different meaning than the one intended by the author. Both spellings are correct. Syntactically, you expect the subordinate clause to be governed by the entire previous clause (so as to supply a reason why authorities felt swindled), while in... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |