Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #281981 |
"language evolution"? (more) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281780 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281804 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281804 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281804 | Initial revision | — | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281798 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281798 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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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) |
— | over 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) |
— | over 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 |
— | over 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) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281780 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281780 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: What sound did the letter ℵ encode in ancient Hebrew, and why did it morph into the greek vowel Α? It is not accurate to say that the Greek alphabet developed from the Hebrew alphabet as we know it. Instead, the two have a common predecessor in the Phoenician alphabet. In this sense you could say that the common predecessor of the Greek letter alpha (α) and Hebrew 'aleph (א) was a Phoenician alp... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281594 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: How did 'solicit' semantically shift to signify ‘manage affairs’? You are trying to absorb too many centuries in the stride at once. I don't know what happened between Latin and Middle French, but by the time the (French noun) "soliciteur" got derived from the (French verb) "soliciter", the meanings involved seems to be like "to ask/request with urgency", "to as... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281515 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why do the most spoken human languages in 2021 greet with words related to health or peace? Well, some languages do, some don't. Some specific greetings do, some don't. A bit of sampling of the omniglot collection of greetings, with the help of the indispensable wiktionary for the translations and etymologies, shows a number of other commonly encountered components; some greetings contain... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281436 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: How did “negotiable” mean “a good or security whose ownership is easily transferable”? I'll address the etymology of "negotiable" (noun), which is a shorthand for "negotiable instrument of payment", where "negotiable" is a deverbal adjective from the transitive sense of the verb "negotiate". "Transitive" means that the verb requires an object, and that object is going to become called... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #281330 |
This sounds like a rather vague question right now. Greetings belong to pragmatics more than to semantics; even if they are analyzed semantically, one can't equate their "meaning" with their earlier meaning (etymology) in the same or another language. The same language may have a wide spectrum of c... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #279828 |
Showing that Russian has the same metaphor like English does couldn't have possibly helped the original Russian student, because they needed to discover that on their own. That answer was intended to help you better understand that Russian student's situation, waiting for them to discover. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #279828 |
@PSTH - The right answer is probably tautological - each student has to spend more time of contemplating the relationship between untying a (difficult to untie) knot and solving (a difficult to solve) problem. It is time consuming because lots of other cognates should be explored in the process, and... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281303 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How did "join issue" mean ‘jointly submit a disputed matter to the decision of the court’? The oldest occurrence of "join issue" I can find is from 1624, i.e., not medieval. In fact most records of legal proceedings by that time were still in Latin - so I am far from saying that the phrase couldn't be older by a few centuries like your source suggests. Courts like to address conflicts ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #280585 |
You aren't alone, but the form is on the rise, well past deniability. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281300 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How did "put under" shift to signify "cause to take the place of", then "enough"? I doubt that "sufficere" ever meant "put under"; I'll assume that this meaning was just suggested as a crude literal translation rather than attested as real Latin usage. The same Indo-European morpheme that entered Latin as "sub-" is actually also reflected in English "up" and "above" (and in San... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281234 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why “chose” in action? Why not “right/droit” in action? "Thing" isn't an obvious supernym for a "right". The legal definition of a "thing" is narrower than "simply anything" and it varies not just by a language, but also by jurisdiction. Any chose in action is associated with a specific kind of a right: a property right. That's what makes it a "t... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281220 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281220 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281220 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281220 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: How did 'quibus?' shift to mean 'evasion of a point at issue'? Skeat's Etymological Dictionary offers a competing theory which I find more persuasive: "quib", in the sense of a taunt or mock, could be a phonological weakening of "quip" (or "quippy"), still in the sense of a mock ("quip" attested in this sense by 1552). English "quip" would then be from Latin "q... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281201 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281201 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: How did kúklos ("circular") shift to signify "general"? The specific form of the word in Latin and English is mediaeval, but it draws on much older concepts and constructs on other languages. Two thousand years ago, εγκυκλιος παιδεια ("enkyklios paideia") would refer to a concept called "orbis doctrinae" in mediaeval Latin, i.e., to a something that wo... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281197 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281197 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why are service or maintenance contracts called 'warranties', when they aren't Legal Warranties? The term "warranty", in its common law meaning, is a contractual term whose breach does not automatically entitle the innocent party to terminate the entire contract. A special case of a contract is the sale of goods; probably every jurisdiction extensively regulates this type of contract. Conseque... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #280943 |
@JohnDoea - Thank you for drawing my attention to my error concerning the Formosan languages. I had simply misunderstood that wiktionary entry (from my previous comment) on that point. No relationship to any Austronesian language is suggested by any wiktionary page. Answer rewritten. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #280943 |
Post edited: Correcting a factual error |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #280943 |
@JohnDoea - I relied on the mainstream classification in my answer (and I can't speak either language myself); I was initially open to the possibility of a combination of borrowings providing a connection for the two words. I took the Austronesian (specifically Formosan) connection, judging from my ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #281076 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How did "as" amass all its confusing "broad and vague meanings"? We are talking about the 17th most common word in current English - it is a very successful member of the language, and also a constituent of many idioms, and most of those idioms have a single meaning each. I will ignore the idioms and also the few distinct meanings which "as" can have as a noun, p... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |