A Germanic language, which originated from England, and is considered the leading language in international communication.
-1
votes
0answers
23 views
Correctly Translate a “Hospital” reference [closed]
How do I correctly translate this into Danish..?
Patients are reminded not to die in the corridors.
My Guess would be:
Patienterne bliver mindet om ikke at dø i korridorerne.
It's the most ...
2
votes
0answers
74 views
Why do only a few English demonyms have a -man suffix?
Several English demonyms (Englishman) are compound words ending in -man, but most are not (Greek).
The vast majority of -man demonyms refer to England and close neighbors: Frenchman, Irishman, ...
-1
votes
0answers
25 views
Jargon and technical terms [closed]
I am writing and english essay comparing two jargon and technical terms and i have asked to comment on the use of technical terms and jargon what does this mean?.sorry for my bad english
3
votes
3answers
230 views
Why do Richard and Robert become Dick and Bob?
Is there a phonological reason for this change?
I know there are names where, when clipped, there is /r/ in coda position. For example:
Derek > Der
Sarah > Sar
Harold > Har
So in non-rhotic ...
3
votes
4answers
160 views
Do I need to learn Esperanto?
I am native Armenian speaker. I know Russian from childhood. Recent years English became my second language and I am using it in everywhere except interaction with friends. Now I want to learn ...
4
votes
0answers
40 views
Origin of actual order pattern in English/German
It is well-known, or better said, well-accepted, that the ancestral language Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was a OV language with a very limited (or nonexistent) use of subordinate clauses. In ...
0
votes
3answers
105 views
What prevents people from pronouncing 'nowhere' as 'now + here' instead of 'no + where'?
I'm an English student (English is not my native language) and I once encountered this word nowhere, but I first recognized it in that moment as now + here and I literally pronounced it so.
Maybe my ...
5
votes
1answer
209 views
Common English bigrams / trigrams - recognising that a jumble of letters contain only valid English words
I have a database of one million strings which I want to rank against one another so that I can tell which contain meaningful English words / sentences.
These strings contain no spaces or ...
0
votes
0answers
40 views
Schneider's Model: What's the differences between stages 3 and 4?
Schneider's dynamic model gives an account of the evolution of languages in a post-colonial setting.
According to the Wikipedia article, Stage 3 is defined as:
(3) Contact-induced changes can be ...
0
votes
0answers
53 views
Asian English Varieties
Why might one regard “Japanese English” “Korean English” and “China English” as varieties rather than interlanguages? What are the educational implications?
0
votes
0answers
25 views
Dictionary lists without names [duplicate]
Are there comprehensive free dictionary lists without names in English and German, at best with word flexions?
I.e.: frank and bush would be in it, george, georgetown and washington wouldn't be.
The ...
3
votes
0answers
71 views
How is rhoticity distributed among varieties of English? Why is it like this?
The Wikipedia entry on rhotic and non-rhotic accents gives a pretty good overview of which countries and states are rhotic or non-rhotic. What I want to know is what the pattern (or link) between the ...
1
vote
1answer
60 views
Is the word “abjad” borrowed from Arabic or was it coined in English then borrowed by Arabic?
"Abjad" is a technical term for a kind of writing system which is used when contrasting them with other writing system types such as alphabets, abugidas, and syllabaries.
There is also an Arabic word ...
3
votes
0answers
53 views
Particular verbal inflection classes in “The Proclamation of Henry III”
I'm reading a document about "The Proclamation of Henry III", in which the text is presented and a short commentary and glossary follow.
I'm interested in the survival of some of the distinct verbal ...
3
votes
2answers
127 views
Is the similarity between the Arabic word Gayyid and the English word Good due to a borrowing?
Why is the Arabic word جید (jayyid) which is pronounced gayyid in Egypt and means good, so similar to the word good or the German word gut? Is it a borrowing? (since the word for good is very ...
1
vote
1answer
70 views
Is the word E “able” related to the suffix E “-able”?
able(1)
From Middle English, from Old Northern French able, variant of Old French abile, habile, from Latin habilis ("easily managed, held, or handled; apt; skillful"), from habeō ("have, hold").
...
4
votes
1answer
148 views
How can nasalized vowels in English be explained?
. . .Auntie *Ma*rge's present, see, it's here under. . . [audio source]
In the audio above, [mɑː] sounds like this:
[..m..]
[......ɑː.....]
---- (time) ---->
This sounds close to ...
5
votes
1answer
150 views
What is this feature of British English called?
In British English you'll often hear them post-fixing expressions that American English tends to keep up front.
For example, I've heard British English speakers (golf commentators in particular) say ...
1
vote
1answer
344 views
Having trouble drawing a tree diagram
I'm having trouble drawing a tree diagram for the following sentence:
Chrissy believed that the earrings she bought for Sue were real silver.
In the task we have to divide the sentence into its ...
5
votes
2answers
131 views
Are English homonyms distinguishable by pitch profile?
I was told years ago by a teacher at a Carden School that they teach their students that English homonyms, especially those with diphthongs, can be told apart by the pitch profile of the vowel sound. ...
5
votes
1answer
168 views
Why did English borrow more from Latin and Greek than, e.g., German did, in scientific and philosophical subjects?
Is there any known reason why the scholars of the time didn't think it easier to use calques, as for instance the Germans did for the names of some of the basic chemical elements?
0
votes
0answers
47 views
Place of an adverb in the passive present perfect progressive [closed]
I was wondering where an adverb should (or could) be placed in the passive present perfect progressive in English.
I have been being carefully tickled.
OR
I have been carefully being ...
6
votes
1answer
207 views
Why are only yes/no questions asked with a rising tone?
There is a rule used almost subconsciously by almost all English speakers (and I'm sure it applies to many other languages too) which is that yes/no questions are asked ending with a rising tone, and ...
0
votes
0answers
123 views
Third-person singular suffix [eth] in Middle English
Related: Grammaticalization of third person singular -s in English
According to responses to this question, there was a dichotomy between northern -s and southern -th in Middle English.
What I am ...
5
votes
3answers
313 views
Does English language stand special in terms of phonology?
I am a native Russian speaker.
When I am listening to songs and music in other languages, which I do not know, such as Italian, Romanian, Greek, Bulgarian, and even Japanese, Finnish, Kyrgyz and ...
1
vote
2answers
205 views
Where does the “t” in some words like “night” and “fight” come from?
The question is on the words with a word-final "ght", such as in "fight" and "wight", which are quite mysterious, I hope to know the connections among these "ght" words.
The question comes from the ...
3
votes
0answers
71 views
Is the Figure-Ground Theory adaptable for inversion in subjunctive condition clauses in English?
People use Figure-Ground Theory to explain inversions. By putting ground before figure, emphasis focus changes.
But how to explain inversion in condition clauses for subjunctive mood?
In English, if ...
0
votes
1answer
75 views
Analysis of “go there”, “turn left”, “move back”, etc
How are phrases such as go there, turn left, move back etc. analysed syntactically?
are they copula + predicate, verb + object, or something else?
Neither of these solutions seem correct to me, so ...
2
votes
1answer
107 views
How does the word “thunder” get the letter “d”?
thunder
O.E. þunor, from P.Gmc. thunraz (cf. O.N. þorr, O.Fris. thuner, M.Du. donre, Du. donder, O.H.G. donar, Ger. Donner "thunder"), from PIE (s)tene- "to resound, thunder" (cf. Skt. tanayitnuh ...
8
votes
3answers
193 views
Are Written and Spoken English distinct languages?
First of all, I am not a linguist, but I was thinking the other night that being literate was almost the same as being bilingual.
My reasoning is that sign language is distinct from written and ...
4
votes
3answers
114 views
How distinctive must a phoneme be?
How much of a functional load must a phone carry to be considered its own phoneme?
For example, my idiolect of English has a marginally distinctive glottal stop. However, it exists distinctively in ...
6
votes
0answers
125 views
Etymology of the word “sport”
I wonder what is the etymology of the word sport.
Vasmer says that it is from disport "amusement", a contraction from Middle English disporten from Old French desporter "to take away", "to distract ...
14
votes
5answers
520 views
Is spoken English more efficient than other languages?
Oftentimes while watching a subtitled foreign film, I find that reading the subtitles aloud (usually in my head) at the same1 pace as the speaker takes less time than what's spoken in the native ...
0
votes
0answers
247 views
Is there a computational method to syllabify English words?
There are straightforward ways to convert English words to phonemes via a dictionary that contains such information. However, is there a way to automatically convert English text into syllables? I.e., ...
3
votes
3answers
211 views
Why does “g” in Middle English “boga” become “w” in Modern English “bow”?
With the help of Wiktionary, we know two useful Midlle English etymologies of the word "bow".
bow-1
From Old English boga, from Proto-Germanic *bugô. Cognate with Dutch boog, German Bogen, ...
3
votes
1answer
164 views
When do abbreviations of profanity like WTF and RTFA cease to be profane i.e. socially acceptable?
Discussing recently abbreviations such as WTF, TFA, and OMG as being more commonly used in American English writing (or messaging) as forms of expression. There seems to be some debate over if or ...
12
votes
1answer
186 views
Diachronic devoicing of initial lenis plosives in English
I get the impression that in the "classical Received Pronunciation" of English during phonetician Jones's era, the lenis plosives /b/, /d/, /g/ (and probably the affricate /dʒ/ as well) in initial ...
2
votes
3answers
112 views
Is it possible to create English phonetics of a given word with correct morphology, and phonology?
Dictionaries contain near 80,000 entries (less or more than that) and most of those entries have phonetic pronunciations written beside them.
However, English might have more than a million words, if ...
4
votes
0answers
299 views
How is Nigerian Standard English categorized?
From what I can tell, the only nontrivial difference between Nigerian Standard English and the catalog of commonly referenced dialects of English is that Nigerian Standard English has a different ...
0
votes
2answers
860 views
Why do people singing in English sound like Americans?
This is just my observation, but it seems like Standard American English lacks any distinct accent when speaking. Listen to almost any person singing with an accent, and they sound like any American ...
3
votes
1answer
73 views
What markers can one use to automatically detect a prepositional phrase in an English sentence?
I'm currently working on a project for which I have a need to identify certain aspects of a sentence. What markers can I use to algorithmically detect a prepositional phrase in a sentence?
Obviously, ...
3
votes
0answers
123 views
Small English parser written in Java
I need an English parser written in Java with a small memory/processing input. I have used the Stanford parser, but it is rather heavy. I am also considering using the link grammar parser, which is ...
7
votes
1answer
331 views
Why IPA does not indicate “soft” consonants in English?
I am a native Russian speaker. Sometimes I encounter English speakers who are trying to learn Russian and wonder how to pronounce "soft" consonants.
At the same time while learning English I noticed ...
7
votes
3answers
151 views
Is there a term for when words that sound like antonyms are actually synonyms?
Seeded grapes are actually seedless
An inflammable object is really flammable
It seems to me that, superficially, the use of those affixes make the words sound like they should be antonyms, ...
2
votes
7answers
597 views
Is rhyming a uniquely English language construct?
I will freely admit that this question is based in ignorance of languages other than English (well, American). But do other languages have the concept of rhyming? Thinking back to my few Spanish ...
10
votes
3answers
1k views
The Origin of the Word 'God'
I originally posted this a while ago on my blog, but someone recently suggested that I pose it as a question here.
A brief Wikipedia search on the origin of the word ‘god’ reveals the following:
...
8
votes
5answers
833 views
Do absolute synonyms exist?
By absolute synonyms, I mean words (in the same language) that are interchangeable in all situations.
There can't be differences in register, meaning, or emotional value.
Is there material that ...
5
votes
1answer
329 views
Status of “Mmm” or “Hmm”
I would like to know whether nasally produced sounds like "Mmmm" or "Hmmm" constitute verbal or non-verbal language. Essentially I am a language testing professional, operating within very narrowly ...
8
votes
1answer
249 views
Why exactly is *“I Am America (And So Can You!)” ungrammatical?
Stephen Colbert wrote a book entitled “I Am America (And So Can You!)”. As discussed in a question on English Language and Usage, the title is an intentionally strange way of saying "I am America, and ...
7
votes
1answer
155 views
Is there an automatic way of identifying transitive verbs in Computational Linguistics?
Is there any straightforward way of identifying transitive verbs (or sentences containing transitive constructions) in an BrE English text?
I've looked into semantic shallow parsers, such as Semafor, ...
