Eric Isaac‭

When an observed verbal habit has more than one potential source, and that source is likely to be a different language or dialect, how do linguists determine the most likely origin? For example, i...

0 answers  ·  posted 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭  ·  edited 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭

The speakers you have encoutered may be adding Erhua which is common in the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The '-er' that is added serves various semantic purposes (e.g. diminutive suffix) and is co...

posted 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭  ·  edited 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭

Questions about translations could be interesting or useful. For instance, asking about translations that are contested, or wouldn’t be easy to understand by using translation software (perhaps req...

posted 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭

Focusing on native English speakers from the UK, inserting an r between words is a hyper correction of a phonetic rule in British English; the final r in a word is silent unless followed by a vowel...

posted 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭  ·  edited 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭

verbal nouns and gerunds This may be a case where the differences between verbal nouns and gerunds are causing some confusion. In most cases, they are somewhat interchangeable but it should be eas...

posted 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭  ·  edited 1mo ago by Eric Isaac‭

Some believe humor springs from Benign Violations. Basically, that something defies my expectations but I consider it harmless. This is more specific than surprise in that the social context is als...

posted 19d ago by Eric Isaac‭  ·  edited 18d ago by Eric Isaac‭