Category: English

It’s a regionally restricted colloquialism, and outside of those regions it sounds odd. I’m surprised to hear it’s showing up in SoCal and Hawaii. I was aware of it in New York English, under Yiddish influence, and South Australian English, under German influence. EDIT: looks like I got my Germanic-influenced American dialects mixed up: not […]

Yes, the Porter Stemmer is the most popular approach by far. See A survey of stemming algorithms in information retrieval  for a survey,  nltk.stem package  for NLTK implementations, and Porter Stemming Algorithm  for Porter’s own description of it. There are tweaks of it around, but noone has gone for anything different; and English being the […]

ego + ism is just about the complete story, but not quite. ego + ism = egoism. In fact, when French coined the word in 1755 (Online Etymology Dictionary ), they coined it as égoisme; and when Greek took the word in from French, they kept it as εγωισμός. But someone somewhere early on found […]

Djent (which I hadn’t heard of coz I don’t get out much… … oh hang on, it’s the onomatopoeia! Djent djent djent. OK, carry on… ) could be a verb, sure. It’s English, we do that. We had a DJ here (the famous Molly Meldrum ) get in legal trouble 30 years ago, because he […]

where the endings “-tion” and “-tio” both were in use. Alack, not so. The Latin ending is nominative –tio, genitive –tionis,  dative –tioni, accusative –tionem, ablative –tione. That’s a pain, sure, but the common pattern is that the underlying ending seems to be –tion– (and that’s what you’d reconstruct the proto-Latin nominative as). The nominative […]

Vertices. Why? Because the word is straight of out Latin, and Latin has a lot of declensions that look weird from the perspective of English. In particular, the plural vertices suggests that the singular should be vertix, just like the singular of matrices is matrix. There are a lot of –ices plurals corresponding to –ex […]

I am going to regret wading into this. I am quite OK to say Czechia; then again, I have been exposed to languages that are quite OK to say Czechia (Tschechei, Tchéquie, Τσεχία, Ĉeĥio). So why the anomaly in English? It could be an endogenous reason—because Czechia doesn’t work for English speakers; or it could […]

Just because two words have identical semantics, does not mean they have identical connotations. Pedophilia in modern society has extremely negative connotations. It didn’t have negative connotations when it was coined in Ancient Greece, because it was coined under different cultural norms. Words carry with them the connotations that a culture puts on them. Advocates […]

Brian Collins’ answer is impeccably correct for why pronunciation was not spelled pronounciation after the combination of the Great English Vowel Shift and Trisyllabic laxing (a long vowel three syllables back is shortened, as in insane ~ insanity). But all the answers aren’t really answering why pronunciation is still being pronounced pronunciation. Let’s look at […]

My parents were first generation immigrants to Australia. My mother had no English when she came here. My father had high school English, but no Australian accent. My parents worked in their fish and chip shop attached to the house, so much of the daytime I was reared by Sesame Street; I interacted with my […]