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Month: August 2016
Why does The New Yorker use a diaeresis for some double vowels?
You can use a diacritic only when it’s necessary to prevent confusion, or you can use a diacritic consistently, whenever the pronunciation goes one way rather than the other. In the former case, you reduce the number of diacritics in the language. In the latter case, you reduce the amount of pronunciation ambiguity. English has […]
Is there a word which can be used to describe a pair of names which are different gendered variants of the same name?
It’s a fascinating question, and I don’t know that there is an existing word. Partly, that’s sexism, and partly, that’s the bias of historical linguistics in explaining derivation: Martina is the “feminine variant” or “feminisation” of Martin, and it doesn’t occur to people to describe the relationship of Martin back to Martina. In the rare […]
How would you describe your first or almost-native language to someone who doesn’t speak it?
Thx4A2A. I’ve already answered a related question from a linguist’s perspective: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What makes Modern Greek an interesting language to learn, from a purely linguistic point of view?. But this question really should be about a lay description. (But I can’t resist telling Ilir Mezini: it’s Albanian, missing half the letters, and […]