Posts by Jirka Hanika
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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"...
(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...
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 ...
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 ...
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