Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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| Edit | Post #278909 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Is Swedish more conservative than Danish and Norwegians? Every language has lots of varieties) which differ in conservativity among themselves. This effect can be massive[^1]. If any particular methodology for assessing conservativity forces a choice between the spoken form and the written form, or between various available registers) early in the proces... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278822 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Are questions on linguistics of "languages" like music, math, or coding on-topic? This site is young and asking some questions and seeing how they end up received is a good way to judge what kind of coverage can be found here. That said, questions entirely disconnected from a mainstream interpretation of what are "languages" or "linguistics", questions unlikely to be studied by... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278818 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Are conlang (artificially constructed natural languages) questions on topic? Questions about constructed languages are on topic to the same extent as questions about natural languages. A question about a world or a book series is not automatically on topic just because that world contains constructed languages, or because the books were written in a natural language. How... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278240 |
I agree with the existing comments, partly because languages are complex systems and it's quite subjective to choose between syntax, morphology, phonology, lexicon, and so on. Further complicating dimensions of comparison are media (spoken/written), genres, styles, registers as those can greatly dif... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278623 |
Post edited: Responding to comments |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #277129 |
@user53100 - Re _"I'm interested to know universal and applicable it is."_ - Are you asking whether a similar distinction between Greater and Lesser etymology would apply, apart from Classical Arabic, also to modern dialects of Arabic? Or within the Semitic family? Or across all language families?... (more) |
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| Edit | Post #278623 |
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| Edit | Post #278623 |
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| Edit | Post #278623 |
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| Edit | Post #278623 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why no "to"-infinitive in pual and huf'al? Grammatical categories are just tools to decompose a language into very simple, independent processes and rules that can be studied separately. But the actual language is much more convoluted than just a vocabulary and some universally applicable grammar rules. Let's take the English word "can". ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278590 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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Icelandic patronymic pronunciation I find the pronunciation of Icelandic highly regular and predictable on the whole, but male patronymics continue to puzzle me. The suffix "-son" is consistently pronounced with an initial /ʃ/ rather than /s/, for example here. Also, and possibly related, I'm unable to tell why the "son of Jón" woul... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278583 |
@Moshi - That was my first impression from the question as well, but I reconsidered as part of celebrating the Codidact anniversary. A classifier is obligatory in a simple question of the "how many" type. There's also "กี่" which means simply "how many" which would hardly strike a fluent speaker of... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278583 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278583 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: What is the Thai word for plurally numerical answer expectancy? The concrete word to be used depends on the kind of the object you want to count and it is called a "classifier"). There are hundreds of classifiers in Thai; much fewer classifiers than nouns, but still a lot of them. So you might associate each classifier with a class of nouns. If you cannot use ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278561 |
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| Edit | Post #278561 |
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| Edit | Post #278561 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Using adjectives that are related to taste for describing emotions Some interesting experiments have been reported by Yanyun Zhou and Chi-Shing Tse (The Taste of Emotion: Metaphoric Association Between Taste Words and Emotion/Emotion-Laden Words). They were conditioning test subjects with this or that taste and tested how that influenced their attitudes in various ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278483 |
So our chances of excavating a stela from 20,000 BCE or of a primitive audio recording from that period are about the same. It won't happen because the stuff is not under the ground. We need more than purely linguistic _methods_ if we want to see much further back than we already do. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278483 |
Writing also tends to co-occur with urban development, social stratification, high population density, high intensity agriculture, and other phenomena which you'd think you'd excavate first; the oldest currently known city in the world is only 11,000 years old, while some anthropologists conjecture t... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278483 |
@Lundin - Excavating more text would certainly help, and it doesn't need to be multilingual in order to be useful. The problem is that writing seems to be orders of magnitude younger than speech. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278483 |
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| Edit | Post #278483 |
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| Edit | Post #278483 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Why is linguistics limited in how much it can look back in time? Deciphering a language which has left behind only a limited number of very short texts is hard. There are lots of undeciphered ancient languages; for additional distraction, some of those scripts might turn out to be representing non-languages, say, heraldic or ornamental symbols. Successful de... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #277480 |
The referenced post actually shows an example where you can go wrong with _who_. (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278433 |
Post edited: I noticed a typo on my part where I was paraphrasing Orwell, and an additional discrepancy. |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278433 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: What is "these gentry" in Marxist writing? To understand Orwell's point, more context is in order. I'm leaving out most examples of Bad Writing indicators he gives which tend to be single words each. > Foreign words and expressions such as [...], individual (as noun), [...] are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the u... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278403 |
@Moshi - OK (*) (more) |
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| Edit | Post #278403 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278403 |
@Moshi - OK (*) (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278403 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278403 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: Has Japanese always had the polite "masu" form? The precursors were respectful body movements (kneeling, creeping) accompanying speech in certain contexts for centuries, used for example (but by far not only) when talking to a person of divine origin. The earliest forms of honorific speech eventually replaced those body movements at the Emperor... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278400 |
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— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278400 | Initial revision | — | over 3 years ago |
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A: What is the origin (etymology) of the word مسدس (pistol)? In English, "pistol" might primarily mean pretty much any single shot handgun, and only by extension the word my also be used to mean a revolver which can shoot several times, for example six times, before reloading. In Arabic, it's the opposite. مُسَدَّس primarily means a "sixshooter", and only ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278383 |
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| Edit | Post #278383 |
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