Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Etymology of "ohyra"? This is not a proper answer as I cannot verify this etymology beyond Old Swedish "ohýris" meaning something like "immense". I'm rather inclined to think that the word could be related to even older Old Norse "úhýrr" meaning "unfriendly looking"; you can readily see its reflections (in both meanings ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How can a problem or puzzle be analogized as a knot? The metaphor should be very accessible for a fluent speaker of Russian, therefore I suspect that the misunderstanding possibly involved some additional words that also occur in the quote. In Russian, "to solve a problem" is "решить проблему". ("решить" is the verb.) With a suitable prefix, we ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why word future events in the present? There is some arbitrariness in what you are[^1] going to call (formal) future tense in an almost analytical language. The idea of grammatical categories, including which tenses to look for in a verb, came into English through Latin[^2] whose morphology of verbs was considerably richer. There is a... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: What semantic notions underlie "gasket" with "little gird, maidservant"? Whether "gasket" comes from French "garcette" or not, I have no idea. If a particularly misogynistic and at the same time naval etymology is sought, then the thing called "garcette" was, among other uses, an instrument of corporal punishment. However, that's probably not the original meaning in... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: What is the difference between 'u heeft' and 'u hebt'? This article explains a shift from 19th century usage of the 3rd person[^1] "heeft" to current day 2nd person "hebt". Both forms currently have the same meaning, both are correct. However, some sources indicate that "u heeft" is now considered formal in contrast to the unmarked "u hebt", while othe... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How can a prepositional phrase shift to become a verb? Like any language change, it can be a bit confusing to current speakers while it is happening, but once the resulting verb is established, nobody will blink anymore. Latin was especially fond of verbification of prepositional phrases. Prepositions simply became prefixes. To overcome your unset... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why past tense in imaginative play in Finnish? 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 "adult" grammar. (I don't see the verb form used by the child as incorrect either. In their powerfu... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How did 'equity' semantically shift to mean 'Assets — Liabilities'? 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 perhaps premature to speak of a semantic shift; this answer attempts to explain the emergence of the particul... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How did « re » + « partir » compound to 🡲 "repartee", which means "rejoinder"? 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 phrase "avoir maille à partir avec...". Analyze the prefix separately from the root: re- - again... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Split off Linguistics into a site category? 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 courses of action touched upon by comments on the question post. Comments on the answer post can now... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Split off Linguistics into a site category? 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 courses of action touched upon by comments on the question post. Comments on the answer post can n... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Split off Linguistics into a site category? 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 courses of action touched upon by comments on the question post. Comments on the answer post can now... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Split off Linguistics into a site category? 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 courses of action touched upon by comments on the question post. Comments on the answer post can now... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Styling language tags Languages already stand out more because they just got capitalized. However, I like the idea to make them stand out even more. There are two good ways to do it: topic tags and required tags. Topic tags We currently don't have tags for (genetical) language families. For example this question ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Who should the temporary moderators be? 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 voting structure. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How did 'consideration' shift to signify grounds and the act of deliberation, then inducer of a grant or promise? 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 vice versa. 2 to 3 is an even clearer case of synecdoche, as long as the decision is understood to... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: What drives the complexity of a language? This is a frame challenge answer. There is no objective measure of "language complexity" known to me, not even attempts to define one. Bigger tasks require more complexity, but just very little Languages used for a drastically wider range of communication functions tend to be a little bit ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Is Swedish more conservative than Danish and Norwegians? 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 between the spoken form and the written form, or between various available registers) early in the proces... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Are questions on linguistics of "languages" like music, math, or coding on-topic? This site is young and asking some questions and seeing how they end up received is a good way to judge what kind of coverage can be found here. That said, questions entirely disconnected from a mainstream interpretation of what are "languages" or "linguistics", questions unlikely to be studied by... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Are conlang (artificially constructed natural languages) questions on topic? Questions about constructed languages are on topic to the same extent as questions about natural languages. A question about a world or a book series is not automatically on topic just because that world contains constructed languages, or because the books were written in a natural language. How... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why no "to"-infinitive in pual and huf'al? Grammatical categories are just tools to decompose a language into very simple, independent processes and rules that can be studied separately. But the actual language is much more convoluted than just a vocabulary and some universally applicable grammar rules. Let's take the English word "can". ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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Icelandic patronymic pronunciation I find the pronunciation of Icelandic highly regular and predictable on the whole, but male patronymics continue to puzzle me. The suffix "-son" is consistently pronounced with an initial /ʃ/ rather than /s/, for example here. Also, and possibly related, I'm unable to tell why the "son of Jón" woul... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: What is the Thai word for plurally numerical answer expectancy? The concrete word to be used depends on the kind of the object you want to count and it is called a "classifier"). There are hundreds of classifiers in Thai; much fewer classifiers than nouns, but still a lot of them. So you might associate each classifier with a class of nouns. If you cannot use ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Using adjectives that are related to taste for describing emotions Some interesting experiments have been reported by Yanyun Zhou and Chi-Shing Tse (The Taste of Emotion: Metaphoric Association Between Taste Words and Emotion/Emotion-Laden Words). They were conditioning test subjects with this or that taste and tested how that influenced their attitudes in various ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why is linguistics limited in how much it can look back in time? Deciphering a language which has left behind only a limited number of very short texts is hard. There are lots of undeciphered ancient languages; for additional distraction, some of those scripts might turn out to be representing non-languages, say, heraldic or ornamental symbols. Successful de... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: What is "these gentry" in Marxist writing? To understand Orwell's point, more context is in order. I'm leaving out most examples of Bad Writing indicators he gives which tend to be single words each. > Foreign words and expressions such as [...], individual (as noun), [...] are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the u... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Has Japanese always had the polite "masu" form? The precursors were respectful body movements (kneeling, creeping) accompanying speech in certain contexts for centuries, used for example (but by far not only) when talking to a person of divine origin. The earliest forms of honorific speech eventually replaced those body movements at the Emperor... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: What is the origin (etymology) of the word مسدس (pistol)? In English, "pistol" might primarily mean pretty much any single shot handgun, and only by extension the word my also be used to mean a revolver which can shoot several times, for example six times, before reloading. In Arabic, it's the opposite. مُسَدَّس primarily means a "sixshooter", and only ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How do linguists determine historical pronunciation? Language change, including phonetic changes, proceeds slowly and for the most part without language users being fully in control, or even aware of it. (You might ask why. The intentional component of language change for a speaker is limited by the listener's capability of understanding their "wanna... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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