What's a Sentence?

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1511: "I'll be home in 3 days; don't wash" Might be False Jan 31, 2019

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Check out the latest podcast on the Patreon for as little as $1: • It is very easy for misinformation to spread so long as there is a grain of truth to it, such as the line of ' let them eat cake ', which was probably never said by Marie Antoinette. Another such disputed quote is "I return in 3 (or 5 or 8) days; don't wash" said by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. This quote is more likely to have been written than that attributed to Antoinette as he did often write her love letters, but many of the original lines from which the now-famous quote could have been drawn are often contradictory or not so reliable.
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833: Structure and Inflection Mar 20, 2017

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There are many ways to classify languages, but it should be noted that due to the inherently flexible nature of grammar, these are only ever really just conventions. One way to classify language is based on how meaning is added on to words. Latin and German, inflectional languages, rely largely on suffixes to indicate the subject in verbs and show the case in nouns whereas with nouns in English depend on prepositions and word-order. Other languages take this even further with agglutination, such as in Turkish or Hungarian with verbal meaning indicated with long strings of infixes and suffixes, and the furthest still with synthetic and polysynthetic languages like Greenlandic. In these languages, entire clauses can be just one or two words. Meanwhile, in Mandarin everything from number, tense, etc. relies on using separate words, and it is said that comparatively this is easier to learn for adults than a polysynthetic language would be. Languages tend to shift closer to analytic struct...
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681: termite Oct 19, 2016

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It might be easy, even for those with mighty brain-power, to assume that 'termites' are a type of mite. There are ordinarily plenty of words which can't act as their own words, but still attach to other words, e.g. a 'cran' is not a type of berry even though we have 'cranberry'. This would be an example of what is called a "bound morpheme", and the sure only way to know that 'ter-' is not one is to look it up. In fact, while 'mite' comes from Old English, 'termite' comes from Latin, or you could also look and see that their scientific names are completely different. Termites are also sometimes called, 'white ants', but this is equally misleading.
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