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In a Sound Symbolism sense, "high" contains a high pitch vowel, "low" a low pitch. Therefore, Ger. "hell" (bright) is a better translation than "hoch" (high), and "dunkel" ("dark") fits better than "t …

It's a plain old pleonasm. For example German "weißer Schimmel" is the prime example of pleonasm to the point that it is the vulgar name for the concept. In english it's a white white horse but Schimm …

It's a Grammatical Particle and for sake of the argument assume a rather broad meaning for grammatik (ie. that which is well said or written). In one sense it's a clitic like the s in "it's raining", …

Changing a words PoS without changing anything else is conversion. This may include changing position in the sentence. Using a borrowed word that was derived in the donor language may still count as d …

The key, I guess, is "the crudest level of description" - it's a descriptive view of grammar. Traditionally grammar had been a prescribed model - is my interpretation of your remark. But that's a fals …

The expected answer seems to be Folk Etymology or a less biased euphemism like Reanalysis, as per Wikipedia a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a mo …

Wikipedia mentions mistake as a linguistic term in the context of language learners, found at Error (linguistics) (via Malapropism) citing H. Douglas Brown (1994) for a definition a failure to uti …

This answer is still incomplete! Chinese is grouped in the Sino-Tibetan language family as determined by experts on account of certain features that are unlikely to be coincidental, pointing to a deep …

What do we call it when the Initial sound of a word, eg. beth vel sim. "house", is assigned to a symbol of that word, eg. the floorplan of a house(?), to use the sign as the unique representation of t …

But are there any known cases of this kind of thing really happening? "this thing" is far too broad. The general idea is Folk Etymology. The word itself is a neat example. Folk or German Volk (Volks …

If this is a thing, as the other answers imply, then German sprechen "speak", from *spreg- could be seen as composed of *pr-, *per (whence pro, for), *eks- (whence "ex"; reconstructed variously) ei …

Replacing "He" in the antecedent by "one of two boys" would be ambiguous, because mere repitition could mean the other boy. "the/this/that one of the two boys" makes a difference, to begin with. There …

What you are asking for is idioms. I have not read the examples yet. We'll see. "Idiom" can be defined variously. In the sense that is pertinent here I understand it in the broad sense of an idiomatic …

The double zero grade *ǵʰi-m- is preserved in the compounds with numerals. (de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin 2013: hiems) E.g. *dwi-ǵʰim-os “two years old”, literally “of two winters” (en.W …

Apparently Leiden had a conference on "sub-Indo-European". Google isn't very helpful, resulting in a dead link: Sub-Indo-European Europe: Problems, Methods and Evidence - Leiden University 30.08.2021 …