Subscribe to Blog via Email
November 2024 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Category: English
Why is an article inserted before a proper noun that has been qualified by an adjective?
Proper nouns in English are not normally qualified by adjectives; the adjective would be taken to be part of the proper noun (This is Lucky Phil). Some authors do qualify proper nouns with adjectives, although as this discussion notes (Adjective with proper noun), it is stylistically quite marked (“Stylistically, attributively modifying a proper noun isn’t […]
Is it correct that the word “Dune” comes from a very old Greek root?
A dune is a heap of sand. We can track it to Gaulish *dunom. Maybe. A θίς can be a heap of several things, including sand. A relation between the two has been suggested, but it’s not certain. To quote Frisk: No satisfactory explanation. Wackernagel compares Old Indic dhíṣṇya– ‘situated on a knoll’, ‘knoll strewn […]
Should primary and ESL teachers use an English alphabet that has the 44 or so phonemes that the language has?
“44 or so”. And there’s your problem. English phonology trap bath palm lot cloth thought The vowels in Received Pronunciation group as: (tɹæp) (bɑːθ pɑːm) (lɒt klɒθ) (θɔːt) They group the same way in Australian English, though as (tɹæp) (bɐːθ pɐːm) (lɔt klɔθ) (θoːt) The vowels in General American, however, group as: (tɹæp bæθ) (pɑːm […]
Are there any Placeholder names we can use to represent different kinds of person?
Placeholder name List of placeholder names by language The typical use in English of placeholder names for persons is to emphasise their random selection, or their representativeness. Hence the rich assortment of List of terms related to an average person, including J. Random Hacker for computing, Tommy Atkins for the British Army, or The man […]
How do I join Latin and Greek base words to form a new word for a lover of jewelry?
As others have said: mixing Latin and Greek is no longer a problem; mixing English and Greek is not that much of a problem, as you can see in Category:English words suffixed with -phile I admit: I find brandophile, a lover of brands, and foodophile, horrible (foodophile? really?). And computerphile is way too close to […]
Does the pejorative meaning of the word Silly “to pray, holy” have any relation with the word Wasilas “priest” in ancient Greece?
OK. This is still A2A clearing out season. (I’m almost done, because for some reason Quora is throttling my unanswered legacy A2As.) I’m not aware of basileus “ruler, king” being used in Ancient Greek to mean “priest”, or of any hint of Caesaropapism/conflation of the sacred and the secular in the word. I’m not an […]
Do some incorrect or imprecise terms stick just because English language hasn’t better options?
Never, never, ever underestimate the power of inertia. In the instance you cite, of sex addiction vs compulsivity: the distinction is itself fairly new, and the use of the description to describe the patient has not yet stabilised, because the notion of compulsion as a medical condition has not been pervasive. So there’s a huge […]
Why is the word “the” declining in English?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cthe%3B%2Cc0 The drop is indeed puzzling, but unlike Brian Collins I don’t think it reflects an actual change in English usage (such as the perishing of the encyclopaedic the—that wouldn’t make that much of a dint). I also don’t think Second Language Learner English would make such a dint. It’s about the representation of texts […]
Why are uppercase i, lowercase L and the number 1 similar looking?
An unfortunate number of coincidences. The coincidences all ended up converging in Sans Serif Latin script, because a vertical line is a simple thing, and any simplification of glyphs can’t get any simpler than a | . The letter I started as Phoenecian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodh, which did not look like a |: But by the time […]
Why do we lose our accents when we sing?
Originally Answered: Why do British/ Irish/ Australians when singing have the same American accent as American singers? Brian Collins and Robert Charles Lee, I disagree. They do too. And I do have a tin ear, but I’m not the only one to think so: Non-American pop singers (e.g. New Zealanders) tend to subconsciously adopt an […]