Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer | — |
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 |
| 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 |
| Comment | Post #284634 |
I certainly didn't know about the article nor about that particular theory before I started researching, and I did find it referenced online. I drew a lot of insight and further references from here: https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/2945/the-meaning-and-etymology-of-histoire-de-histoire-qu... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284634 |
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— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284634 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #284504 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Comment | Post #284423 |
Yes I suppose so. (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284423 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Comment | Post #283427 |
Of the options offered, Ladino written in Solitreo makes by far the most sense. Ladino would be the language, also called Judezmo, and Solitreo would be the "Sephardic cursive" script used to write the language.
It's really hard to run into a native speaker of Ladino these days, it's a dying lang... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284168 |
I think that the parallel with "you are" could be made much more prominent and also made easier to understand for people to whom *thou lovest me/I love thee/ye love me/I love you* is no longer recognizable grammar. (Still, it's just a parallel process and not a compelling reason for anything new.) ... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284168 |
Feel free to use some or all of these examples.
Poet called William, William and Werewolf, year 1360 or so: "þan hastely hiȝed eche wiȝt on hors & on fote, / huntyng wiȝt houndes alle heie wodes, / til þei neyȝþed so neiȝh to nymphe þe soþe, / þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere" ("The... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283248 | Initial revision | — | over 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Comment | Post #282694 |
That should perhaps be the answer rather than a mere comment. (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283081 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #283040 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Comment | Post #282880 |
@#54114 Yes, the same. (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #282880 |
A Russian speaker might ask a similar question about the "h" in a word like "shadow". How would you explain such a letter unfamiliar to a Russian speaker who can read English? (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #282837 |
I don't think you can write "tan" in Bengali, because the vowel in "tan" does not exist in Bengali. You need to add a new vowel to your repertoire if you want to be able to pronounce distinct English words in distinct ways. (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #282837 |
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— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #282837 |
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— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #282837 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #282731 |
Post edited: |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #282731 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #282684 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #282389 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Comment | Post #281981 |
"language evolution"? (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #281780 |
That is: Trills, laterals, nasal stops can all be pronounced alone, even sung on, if voiced. Oral fricatives can be pronounced alone, although tend not to become the syllable nucleus in human speech. Oral stops can't really be pronounced alone, but they can at least be demonstrated silently/visuall... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #281780 |
@Moshi - You are right. It's complicated. I was paraphrasing the etymology of "consonant", which goes to the oldest known Greek Grammar τέχνη γραμματική by Dionysios Thrax. The footnotes on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant explain what I meant. What Thrax wrote isn't technically... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281780 |
Post edited: minor clarifications |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281804 |
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— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281804 |
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— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281804 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Edit | Post #281798 |
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— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281798 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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 |
| Comment | Post #281770 |
@celtschk - You might want to read up about the process called "lenition". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition. Pretty much any consonant can disappear over time, but usually not abruptly, but rather through certain articulatory pathways. One of those pathways is debuccalization, and that *may*... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281780 |
Post edited: Clarifying where I'm referring to modern languages and where to languages exposed to the Phoenician abugida |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #281780 |
@MonicaCellio - You got that 100% right. In the context of this answer, I had in mind Hebrew written through Phoenician (or Hebrew) letters 2 or 3 thousand years ago. That gives you ʾaleph as an optional glottal stop, and ʿayin (I guess) as a voiced pharyngeal fricative which is very distinct from ... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |