Posts by 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...
One difficulty I’ve seen in learning languages is matching orthography to pronunciation - especially vowels. English has several distinct sounds that a native speaker will describe as the vowel ‘e...
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...
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...
The closest term I’ve found is anaptyxis, the form of epenthesis that refers to inserting a vowel, but this is still fairly vague. A similar phenomenon is mentioned in this paper, regarding the pr...
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...
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...
Definitions Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the usage of the word humor has expanded to several distinct meanings that are all still in active use. Humor as mood, as shown in good humor...
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...
It seems like what you are hinting at is the degree to which an instruction contains the context required to understand it, answer it, and evaluate the answer. Moreover, the question hints at an ob...
