Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Edit | Post #287281 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #286913 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| 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 |
| Edit | Post #286840 |
Post edited: typo correction |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #286840 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| 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 |
| Edit | Post #286658 |
Post edited: |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286658 |
Post edited: |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286658 |
Post edited: |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286658 | Initial revision | — | almost 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| 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 |
| Edit | Post #286619 | Initial revision | — | almost 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #286601 | Initial revision | — | almost 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| 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 |
| Edit | Post #286522 |
Post edited: |
— | 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 |
| Edit | Post #286522 | Initial revision | — | almost 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #279731 |
Post edited: Correcting a dangling footnote reference |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286381 | Initial revision | — | about 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| 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 |
| Edit | Post #285960 | Initial revision | — | about 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| 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 |
| Edit | Post #285684 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| 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 |
| Edit | Post #279315 |
Post edited: Fixing a typo where "2nd person" was used meaning "1st person" by restructuring the message |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284976 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years ago |