Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #288182 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year 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) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #288158 |
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. (more) |
— | over 1 year 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) |
— | over 1 year 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) |
— | over 1 year 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) |
— | over 1 year 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) |
— | almost 2 years 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) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #287759 | Initial revision | — | almost 2 years 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) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #287542 | Initial revision | — | almost 2 years 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) |
— | almost 2 years 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) |
— | about 2 years 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) |
— | about 2 years 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) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #287281 | Initial revision | — | about 2 years 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) |
— | about 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286913 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286840 |
Post edited: typo correction |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286840 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years 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 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #286733 |
It's certainly interesting to look at other languages, too. (more) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286658 |
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— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286658 |
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— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286658 |
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— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286658 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286619 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286601 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286522 |
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— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286522 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279731 |
Post edited: Correcting a dangling footnote reference |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286381 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 2 years ago |