Posts by Jirka Hanika
In Icelandic, certain accented vowel letters (especially ó, á) are consistently explained as diphthongs ([ou] and [au], respectively) in pronunciation guides. Accented vowel letters are also encou...
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...
The oldest known usage of "nifty" is in an American poem from 1868. If you read the poem at this link, you'll find that that author found it useful to comment on the meaning of the word inside the...
Following an earlier comment which indicated that this could be a typo for a "roach colony", @msh210 was able to confirm that this 1980 edition of the book indeed had a "roach colony" where the 198...
The term "multiligualism" is generally used to characterize the linguistic capabilities of a single speaker. If the person uses exactly two (or at least two) languages, they are bilinguial even if...
In Icelandic, you are, I suppose, more likely to refer to a single person and their family, than to the family without naming any single person as well. Random example from the web: "Fjölskylda Ei...
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...
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...
The same thing can be expressed in any given language in many ways. You have not provided any source for the claim that "Kecamatan ini terdiri atas sepuluh desa." would be using the wrong word. T...
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...
It is tempting for a foreigner, but perhaps not accurate to identify "Sie" as the polite (respectful) pronoun and to identify "du" as the impolite (less respectful) one, and it could be more accura...
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...
In some languages, the distinction between singular and plural of a noun isn't obligatorily marked at all. There are ways to be explicit about singular/plural but they are optional. (English adje...
The direct parallel of the example from Finnish does not exist in English dialects know to me. Which does not stand for much, I'm not even a native speaker. There are some basic uses of "it" whic...
This usage seems to be common not only in English, but in Western cultures in general. (The two parties do not need to be on first name terms for this pattern to work: "Oh, Mister Bennet! Have som...
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...
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...
(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...
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...
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"...
