Activity for Jirka Hanika
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edit | Post #279282 |
Post edited: |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279282 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Who should the temporary moderators be? I nominate msh210 because he has an analytical mind, familiarity with sign languages (which I think is useful background during the scope definition period of the site), and, like Moshi, a healthy voting structure. (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279210 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #279206 |
@celtschk - Yes I'm pointing out some tendencies and theories rather than hard and fast rules. French or English is further ahead on the Dixon's wheel than German or Latin. If you consider just morphology, especially just that of nouns, the latter are objectively more complex than the former. Stil... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279210 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How did 'consideration' shift to signify grounds and the act of deliberation, then inducer of a grant or promise? It is a sequence of shifts of meaning. 1 to 2 is a metonymy. Some, such as Burke, would even call it a synecdoche, as long as they are ready to consider an "effect" to be a part of its "cause" or vice versa. 2 to 3 is an even clearer case of synecdoche, as long as the decision is understood to... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #279206 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What drives the complexity of a language? This is a frame challenge answer. There is no objective measure of "language complexity" known to me, not even attempts to define one. Bigger tasks require more complexity, but just very little Languages used for a drastically wider range of communication functions tend to be a little bit ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278909 |
To be very clear about icke, had wiktionary listed it for Swedish (which it didn't at the time of my experiment), alongside "inte" and the more Old Norse like "ej", I would have counted the item as a draw per my acknowledged bias toward a drawn result, ignoring the additional alternatives. (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278909 |
If you choose to compute and post your totals on the same word list, or from an independent word list (let me suggest the last 107 words from the same 207 word list) I'm sure that multiple people will be interested to see how much we differ numerically. (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278909 |
@Lundin, this is repeatable science with its flaws of the method and errors of measurement. I had bound my hands, as to the choice of lexemes representing each language, by strictly perusing the referenced 207 word list in the wiktionary (you can click on "comparing" in the answer to access it). A su... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #278623 |
Hi @msh210, thank you for your reactions. Good points, answer updated. (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278822 |
Post edited: Correcting typos |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278909 |
Post edited: I realized I'm inconsistently mixing attention to spoken and written forms to the detriment of conservativity of Danish. |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278909 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278822 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278818 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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) |
— | about 4 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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278623 |
Post edited: Responding to comments |
— | about 4 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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278623 |
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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 | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278590 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Question | — |
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) |
— | about 4 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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278583 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278583 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278561 |
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| Edit | Post #278561 |
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| Edit | Post #278561 |
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| Edit | Post #278561 | Initial revision | — | about 4 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) |
— | about 4 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) |
— | about 4 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) |
— | about 4 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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278483 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278483 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278483 |
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— | about 4 years ago |
| Edit | Post #278483 | Initial revision | — | about 4 years ago |
| Answer | — |
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) |
— | about 4 years ago |
| Comment | Post #277480 |
The referenced post actually shows an example where you can go wrong with _who_. (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |