Word Facts

Neither sentence: "I see he" nor "I run him" can be considered acceptable, but the reason for each is different. In the first one, the problem is that 'he' is only used as a subject, even when it appears in the middle  or end of a sentence, but given that 'see' takes an object, it would require 'him' to be used. This issue does not have to relate to what each word means semantically, but how it all fits together syntactically (or not in this case). On the other hand, with "I run him", while it is possible for 'run' to take an object, such as in "I run a race", this sentence does not make sense considering the meaning of each word together. Chomsky's famous sentence—whether you agree with his conclusions—" colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is an example of how people can see that something is grammatical but nonsensical.

Sounds are not created the same way physically, and this not only—though most obviously—changes the way the sound (phoneme) sounds, but also it changes how loud it will be on average. Vowels, for instance, are the loudest while stops (such as [t] or [b] are the least sonorous. All phonemes can be placed on the sonority hierarchy which goes, from loudest to quietest: vowels, approximates (like [l] or [r]), nasals (like ([m] and [n]), fricatives (like [f]), affricates (like [d͡ʒ], or the J in 'jump') and the last category is stops. Aside from simply being an amusing fact that some sounds are generally louder than others, it is because of this hierarchy that syllables exist, because when one speaks, as the sounds decrease and then increase in volume, more or less accidentally or at least coincidentally, this creates—simply put—the rhythm of syllables. This is a rich topic, and this hardly at all scratches the surface, so expect more in the future soon.

For a long period of time, articles ('the', 'a', or 'an') were considered to be a type of adjective rather than a type of determiner. Though they do act differently in some ways, they do—at least at first glance—seem to modify nouns and though they have to go before adjectives, there is already an order to adjectives anyway. The difference is not only in the way it operates syntactically, but also differences semantically. Determiners  create a reference to the noun, rather than a modification thereto, so saying 'a dog' doesn't change the quality of the dog. Genitives  like "Mike's" is also a determiner, for the same reason, but also a noun cannot take two determiners, so there can be "the dog" or "Mike's dog" but not Mike's the dog".

The most similar language to English is generally said to be Frisian, specifically West Frisian. Still, if an English speaker heard West Frisian  for the first time, he or she not likely understand what was being said, because even though they share the Ingvaeonic root (see photo below*) there are still many centuries of foreign influence  and geographic isolation that made the two languages distinct. Because they are both so famous, and because they are spoken quite near to each other, one might assume that the most similar language to Modern German would be Dutch , and while the two are certainly quite similar to the point that there is some level of mutual intelligibility  (though not 100% or anywhere close to that) Yiddish is actually closer related. Though German and Yiddish occasionally differ in some vocabulary, accent, and word-order, they are remarkably similar, in part because the two only diverged relatively recently, and were spoken in a similar region. * ht...

To many people, ‘dinner’ is the last meal of the day, which can also be called 'supper' or in some places 'tea', while to many other people in certain places, 'dinner' is the mid-day meal, as opposed to something else like ' lunch '. Though 'dinner' as the final meal of the day may be more common globally, neither that nor the alternative labelling of what would otherwise be 'lunch' was not without reason. The word 'dinner' comes from the Old French, 'disner' meaning 'to dine' and when it was adopted into English, it often would denote the largest meal of the day, not when it was timed. Moreover, it is believed that 'disner' comes from 'desjëuner' meaning ' to reverse ' and 'fasting', or somewhat more idiomatically: ‘to break fast’. In this way, a word that originally that either descended from or at least is related to breakfast now means 'supper' or 'lunch'.

There are lots of ways to describe types of words, and all of them have different applications. Words are broken up into well-known categories like ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’ ‘adjectives’ etc based upon the way they function in a clause. Beyond that, types of words in various lexical classes are also broken into categories like ‘mass nouns’ and ‘count nouns’ which have different sorts of meanings when they get pluralized or have determiners, such as ‘milk’ and ‘cookie’ respectively, bu t classifications for words are not always—albeit they usually are—syntactic. Telic verbs, for example, relate to actions or goals that have a defined end, such as “build” whereas atelic verbs do not. This does relate to syntax, as certain phrases can only be added to certain verbs, such as “he ran in an hour” which sounds bad, while “he built (something) in an hour” is fine, but this is also somewhat of a semantic issue.

There are a lot of ways to report speech, but not all of them are treated the same way, both socially and grammatically. A traditional way to do this is “[person] said/ordered/mentioned/stated/posited (that)...” which reports, obviously, what was communicated verbally. There are plenty of verbs other than “said” such as the ones before, but these all use the same syntactic structures, and while they all communicate the same thing more or less, certainly some of them would sou nd clunky outside of written work. Other phrases such as “[person] was like” sounds less formal generally—one wouldn’t find it in a newspaper or academic journal—and (at least for the second half of that statement) there is good reason. “[person] was like” allows the person reporting the communication to include non-verbal cues, and it is certainly possible to simple utter the phrase and make a face, or gasp etc, which wouldn’t serve written work much, but does allow for people to include much more information abo...

There are many different accents and dialects of English spoken all over the world , but since this is the same language, the differences will only be slight. Even if people do not know the linguistic academic terminology, people are generally able to pick out the ways variation appears, such as how the same sound can appear two distinct ways in the same context, e.g. rhotic or non-rhotic R  in a New York and London accent respectively. When people are aware of this difference, it is called a 'salient variable'. Not all variables can be called salient for every person, which could be a small part of the reason why some people are bad at putting on other accents. These variables can also be emphasised or diminished in order to adapt to situations, and appear either more or less to belong to a certain group.