Activity for Jirka Hanika
Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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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 |
Comment | Post #284801 |
Is this a duplicate of https://languages.codidact.com/posts/280932/280980#answer-280980
? (more) |
— | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #285960 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #285684 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #279315 |
Post edited: Fixing a typo where "2nd person" was used meaning "1st person" by restructuring the message |
— | almost 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #284976 | Initial revision | — | about 3 years ago |
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) |
— | about 3 years ago |
Comment | Post #284914 |
That's a nice parallel metaphor. (more) |
— | about 3 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) |
— | about 3 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) |
— | about 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #284634 |
Post edited: |
— | about 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #284634 | Initial revision | — | about 3 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) |
— | about 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #284504 | Initial revision | — | about 3 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) |
— | about 3 years ago |
Comment | Post #284423 |
Yes I suppose so. (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #284423 | Initial revision | — | about 3 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) |
— | about 3 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) |
— | about 3 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) |
— | about 3 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) |
— | about 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #283248 | Initial revision | — | over 3 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 3 years ago |
Comment | Post #282694 |
That should perhaps be the answer rather than a mere comment. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #283081 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #283040 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
Comment | Post #282880 |
@#54114 Yes, the same. (more) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #282837 |
Post edited: |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #282837 |
Post edited: |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #282837 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #282731 |
Post edited: |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #282731 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #282684 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
Edit | Post #282389 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |