Posts by Jirka Hanika
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...
The question alludes to at least three correlated, but quite distinct dimensions. Objectivity/subjectivity Room for model's creativity (information theoretical) Crispness of the boundary betwe...
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 "neg...
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 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 ...
This question touches on many topics, and this answer doesn't hope to be comprehensive. Research on language didactics generally focusses on institutional settings (with an instructor), or, at the...
In your example, "lot", bunch", "amount", are collective nouns. There are many collective nouns that aren't quantifiers. For example: "Microsoft have never said they have extended the free period...
You are right, "raise (someone) out of trouble" is not a common English idiom. It is used to connect the English meaning (denotation and connotations) to the original Latin and/or Old French meani...
Indo-European spatial prepositions, when analyzed across all attested languages, are rich in beautiful, unexpected relationships[1]. You could think that the spatial relationships (above, below, b...
Any understatement could be unintentional, or it could be motivated by pragmatic reasons such as hesitation to bring up a controversial point. However, more often than not, blatant or ridiculously...
I think that this shift in meaning happened already as part of the process of borrowing from Latin. Look at the following example use of "videlicet". This is 16th century legal Latin as used in E...
Wikipedia has a very nice article on what the term meant when "saeculum" was adopted into Latin from Etruscan, and Studies in Words has an extensive section on mundus/saeculum/ecclesia which explai...
Your hesitation to accept the interpretation on Etymonline as is may be well founded. Some scholars (e.g., Hahn) consider the idea that the first component is from the infinitive ("scire") unsubst...
I will venture a guess that it is Haketia (also called Ladino Occidental) written in Solitreo ("Sephardic cursive"). That's a dialect of Ladino that had a strong local presence in Tangiers around ...
Let's digress by looking at how the meaning of "computer" developed during the 20th century. A "computer" used to be a person, somebody doing computations; devices eventually took over the job. T...
You seem to be inquiring primarily about present-day adverbial/prepositional meanings. (However, as your quoted resource mentions, the adverbial usage is actually older than the also mentioned con...
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 i...
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 (...
I think that you just read the sentence with a subtly different meaning than the one intended by the author. Both spellings are correct. Syntactically, you expect the subordinate clause to be gov...
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 phr...
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 mo...
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 ...
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...
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...
"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 ...
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