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Posts by Jirka Hanika‭

82 posts
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Q&A What is a good translation for "waypoint" into Catalan?

Stick to the "waypoint". You could also encounter "punt d’inflexió" meaning a "turning point". However, the meaning isn't identical. An inflection point is a point where the direction of travel ...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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 o...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A What semantic notions underlie "gasket" with "little gird, maidservant"?

Whether "gasket" comes from French "garcette" or not, I have no idea. If a particularly misogynistic and at the same time naval etymology is sought, then the thing called "garcette" was, among oth...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Why word future events in the present?

There is some arbitrariness in what you are[1] going to call (formal) future tense in an almost analytical language. The idea of grammatical categories, including which tenses to look for in a ver...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Why is the third person singular conjugation different in the past tense?

Your question is about a particular subclass of German verbs, namely weak verbs. Weak verbs, along with their conjugation, are a Proto-Germanic invention. Proto-Germanic isn't an attested languag...

posted 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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 Bengal...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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 paidei...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A How did 'less than' semantically shift to mean 'if not'?

It is generally easier to track down the earliest usages of a word, than the earliest usages of an entire phrase from which the word eventually developed. I'll offer two speculative answers; they ...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A How can a problem or puzzle be analogized as a knot?

The metaphor should be very accessible for a fluent speaker of Russian, therefore I suspect that the misunderstanding possibly involved some additional words that also occur in the quote. In Russi...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Why past tense in imaginative play in Finnish?

The younger the child, the less established the grammar. You can respond with "Nyt se menee nukkumaan" and put the toy into its sleeping house, thus just implementing the suggestion using your own...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A How did 'equity' semantically shift to mean 'Assets — Liabilities'?

The term (semantic) "shift" implies not just the emergence of a new meaning, but also abandonment of the old one. The old meanings you refer to are still present in current English, so it is perha...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A How did « re » + « partir » compound to 🡲 "repartee", which means "rejoinder"?

partir is intransitive in modern French ("depart") but primarily transitive in Old French ("distribute", i.e., "make depart"). The transitive meaning is still preserved, as an archaism, in the set...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Meta 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 ...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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 bet...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Meta Split off Linguistics into a site category?

This is one of four (or more) alternative answers. (I am posting the alternatives separately and simultaneously to allow separate voting and commenting. They represent elaborations of potential c...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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 independ...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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 o...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A 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/ rath...

1 answer  ·  posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by Lundin‭

Question Icelandic
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Q&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 p...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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"...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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 ...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&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 ...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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