Category: English

Why are so many people today using the word “fuck,” like it’s a common everyday word, and not sparingly, like the vulgar, profane word that it is?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-15 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Quite apart from the changing nature what is considered taboo in the English-speaking world, fuck has undergone weakening though overuse, and has lost its potency. It is simply not as profane as it used to be. This inflation of profanity is a linguistic commonplace: 150 years ago, the profanity to avoid in polite company was […]

Which is correct, “Describe who you are” or “Describe whom you are”?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

I am going to refine Justin Franco‘s reasoning, while agreeing with his answer. Justin says that it’s “describe who you are”, because We wouldn’t answer “Who are you?” with “You are him.” We’d answer it with “You are he.” Oh really? the ruppes: Jesus, You are Him You are him by Margo You are him, […]

Why do people think I’m a snob because I always speak in standard English?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

This is Tony Mulqueen’s answer. I’m just being a little more abstract. There is a popular misconception that the primary purpose of language is to communicate. Language is a social phenomenon, practiced by social beings. And one of its primary functions is to demonstrate allegiance to the groups the speaker belongs to. If you speak […]

Why do English-speaking people not prefer to say natrium, silisium, kalium, and use other Latin names of elements instead?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-11 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

EDIT: QUESTION HAS BEEN MANGLED BY QCR: It is about Natrium, Kalium, Silicium vs Sodium, Potassium, Silicon. Faulty premiss. Sodium – Wikipedia, Potassium – Wikipedia. Sodium and Potassium are not more or less Latin than Natrium and Kalium. (If anything, that K in Kalium is not particularly Latinate.) They are just alternate names proposed for […]

Is there an aorist in English grammar?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-05 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

I’d argue there is. Aorist means “indefinite”, and was intended to mean “indefinite (unmarked) as to aspect”, which the Greek Aorist tense was, contrasting with both the Imperfect and the Perfect tense. Tense naming conventions, however, are dependent on different grammatical traditions. Latin did not refer to aorists, and neither did Germanic grammars or Romance […]

Why do we not use morpheme analyzers for English language?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-05 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Do you mean, why is something as ludicrously unlinguistic as Snowball the state of the art of stemming in English? And why do we stem words, instead of doing detailed analysis of affixes, when we parse words in Natural Language Processing of English? Because English lets us get away with it. There’s not a lot […]

Why don’t most Modern English speakers rhyme “thou” with “you”?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-04 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

From OED, the dialectal survivals like Yorkshire thaa reflect unstressed variants of thou (which were short); thou is a long vowel that has gone through the Great English Vowel Shift—just as house has an /aʊ/ vowel, and is still pronounced huːs in Scots. The irregularity is you, and apparently the yow pronunciation was around in […]

How come does is not pronounced as /doʊs/?

By: | Post date: 2017-06-19 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

If you want to make sense of English vowel pronunciation, Middle English phonology – Wikipedia is always a good place to start. Do had a long ō. (As it still does, allowing for the Great English Vowel Shift.) The Middle English 3rd person of do was dōeth, if the verb was a main verb, and […]

How come rude is not pronounced as /rjuːd/?

By: | Post date: 2017-06-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

It used to; the [j] was regularly dropped after certain consonants: Phonological history of English consonant clusters – Wikipedia The change of [ɪ] to [j] in these positions (as described above) produced some clusters which would have been difficult or impossible to pronounce; this led to what John Wells calls Early Yod Dropping, in which […]

What does the term “turn turk” mean and how did it originate?

By: | Post date: 2017-06-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

‘Turn turk’ in the Renaissance meant to convert to Islam. The Turks were the Muslims that the English had the most contact with, through the Ottoman Empire. A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612) is a play by the English dramatist Robert Daborne. It concerns the conversion of the pirate John Ward to Islam. Because of the […]

  • Subscribe to Blog via Email

  • March 2024
    M T W T F S S
    « Jul    
     123
    45678910
    11121314151617
    18192021222324
    25262728293031