A2A: long time ago, I was 13, and I don’t clearly remember, but I think I was up and running within a month. Answered 2016-09-06 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/How-long-did-it-take-you-to-learn-Esperanto-What-methods-are-available-to-learn-it/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
As it turns out, I’m the person who has been accused of being a fluent Lojban speaker the earliest on. The answer is yes, it is possible. With some provisos. The vocabulary is small, and you don’t want to be coining new predicates on the fly if you can help it. Especially if you need […]
This question has been sitting lonely in my in-queue for a very very long time. In order to address it, I have seen fit to google a couple of funny swear words, and I came across this delightful thread: melontikos ploiarxos . Someone on that education forum was graduating from a maritime college, and asking […]
Shulamit Widawsky is right about the emotive loading of words affecting their memorability. In the specific context of dirty words, you may well have been highly motivated to learn them. (There’s always keen motivation to learn dirty words in foreign languages, as evidenced here on Quora.) If you were strongly motivated and were delighted by […]
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 […]
Maybe. There is a plural megara word in ancient Greek, which means “a kind of crypt into which live pigs were thrown during the Thesmophoria festival”. This is related by both Chantraine and Frisk to Hebrew me‘ārā “cavern”, meaning it is Semitic (in all likelihood), and thus related to Arabic Magharat. The singular megaron “hall” […]
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 […]
Because, contrary to what you might think, interjections are not always pure spontaneous exclamations from deep in the neural cortex, that are universal to all humans. A few are; as I noted in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are there any short expletives that sound the same in different languages? Nick Enfield [Page on sydney.edu.au] (who […]
As far as I can tell, you are referring to Maroneia in Thrace, and the rendering Marogna appears in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854) Maroneia is reckoned among the towns of Macedon. The modern name is Marogna, and it has been the seat of an archbishopric. Cramer (1828) also gives the name […]
Good question, Anon! By design, they’re not supposed to. Linguistics makes a point of segregating them hierarchically: Phonetics: how individual sounds work Phonology: how sounds are organised into meaningful contrasts as phonemes Morphology: how phonemes are organised into meaningful components of words as morphemes Lexicon: how morphemes are organised into meaningful words Semantics: how the […]