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Posts by Jirka Hanika‭

82 posts
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Q&A What is the origin of the missing "to be" in sentences like "the car needs washed"?

Wikipedia gives me the impression that Appalachian English is a member of the Southern U.S. English dialect collection and can be subdivided into a southern variety called Smoky Mountain English an...

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

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Q&A What is "nift"?

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...

posted 1y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 12mo ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Calling another by name when one is exasperated

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...

posted 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Why is linguistics limited in how much it can look back in time?

Deciphering a language which has left behind only a limited number of very short texts is hard. There are lots of undeciphered ancient languages; for additional distraction, some of those scripts ...

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

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Q&A Why does German use the third person plural for the second person polite?

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...

posted 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Meta Are questions on linguistics of "languages" like music, math, or coding on-topic?

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...

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

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Q&A Etymology of "ohyra"?

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...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A 'Caution' and 'cautious' with ʃ or ʒ?

Any online dictionaries I can find agree on a /ʃ/ across any standard dialects they cover. I don't remember encountering the other pronunciation myself. I suspect that you are looking at an examp...

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

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Meta Do we have any policy on AI-generated or plagiarized answers?

An answer was recently posted and its edit history strongly suggests that it was AI-generated in entirety; that apparently attracted some flagging. The answer happens to be of poor quality, but th...

0 answers  ·  posted 3mo ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A What is the difference between 'u heeft' and 'u hebt'?

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...

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

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Q&A What drives the complexity of a language?

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 ...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Using adjectives that are related to taste for describing emotions

Some interesting experiments have been reported by Yanyun Zhou and Chi-Shing Tse (The Taste of Emotion: Metaphoric Association Between Taste Words and Emotion/Emotion-Laden Words). They were condi...

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

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Q&A How can a prepositional phrase shift to become a verb?

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...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A What sound did the letter ℵ encode in ancient Hebrew, and why did it morph into the greek vowel Α?

It is not accurate to say that the Greek alphabet developed from the Hebrew alphabet as we know it. Instead, the two have a common predecessor in the Phoenician alphabet. In this sense you could ...

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

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Q&A English dialects and he/she versus it

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...

posted 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Why is "djinn" the plural of "djinni"?

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...

posted 2y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Meta Are conlang (artificially constructed natural languages) questions on topic?

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...

posted 4y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A What's a "road colony"?

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...

posted 1y ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  edited 1y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Are Icelandic unstressed diphthongs in loanwords supposed to be reduced?

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...

1 answer  ·  posted 10mo ago by Jirka Hanika‭  ·  last activity 2mo ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A What is the origin (etymology) of the word مسدس (pistol)?

In English, "pistol" might primarily mean pretty much any single shot handgun, and only by extension the word my also be used to mean a revolver which can shoot several times, for example six times...

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

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Q&A Why does the dollar sign precede the number in English?

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...

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

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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 How do linguists determine historical pronunciation?

Language change, including phonetic changes, proceeds slowly and for the most part without language users being fully in control, or even aware of it. (You might ask why. The intentional componen...

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

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Q&A How did "as" amass all its confusing "broad and vague meanings"?

We are talking about the 17th most common word in current English - it is a very successful member of the language, and also a constituent of many idioms, and most of those idioms have a single mea...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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Q&A Why do the most spoken human languages in 2021 greet with words related to health or peace?

Well, some languages do, some don't. Some specific greetings do, some don't. A bit of sampling of the omniglot collection of greetings, with the help of the indispensable wiktionary for the trans...

posted 3y ago by Jirka Hanika‭

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