Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 3 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 3 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 3 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 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286522 |
Post edited: |
— | almost 3 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 3 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 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286522 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 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 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279731 |
Post edited: Correcting a dangling footnote reference |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #286381 | Initial revision | — | almost 3 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) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284801 |
Is this a duplicate of https://languages.codidact.com/posts/280932/280980#answer-280980
? (more) |
— | about 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) |
— | about 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #285960 | Initial revision | — | about 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) |
— | about 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) |
— | about 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #285684 | Initial revision | — | about 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) |
— | about 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279315 |
Post edited: Fixing a typo where "2nd person" was used meaning "1st person" by restructuring the message |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284976 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284914 |
That's a nice parallel metaphor. (more) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284634 |
Post edited: |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284634 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284504 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #284423 |
Yes I suppose so. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #284423 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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 |