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 ...
TL;DR: Similar usage is much older than paper checks. But the rumor is not far from the truth, especially if the question is about the U.S. dollar currency specifically. The usage inside of (mode...
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...
This is not a proper answer as I cannot verify this etymology beyond Old Swedish "ohýris" meaning something like "immense". I'm rather inclined to think that the word could be related to even olde...
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...
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...
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...
This article explains a shift from 19th century usage of the 3rd person[1] "heeft" to current day 2nd person "hebt". Both forms currently have the same meaning, both are correct. However, some so...
Like any language change, it can be a bit confusing to current speakers while it is happening, but once the resulting verb is established, nobody will blink anymore. Latin was especially fond of v...
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...
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...
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...
Languages already stand out more because they just got capitalized. However, I like the idea to make them stand out even more. There are two good ways to do it: topic tags and required tags. Top...
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...
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 ...
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 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 m...
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...
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...
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...
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