English is such a hodgepodge of different languages – it’s essentially Germanic but a lot of its vocabulary comes from French, and technical words stem from Latin and Greek. This feature makes English fairly adaptable – which is a good thing for a world language – but it causes irregulari...
To take academic corpora as our example once again, it is not obvious what range of disciplinary areas and what text genres need to be included in a representative corpus or how they should be balanced in terms of their relative sizes. It is not obvious if all disciplines should be ...
Directly from my Latin dictionary:-Rhoncus, i -->1. Il russare2. Gracidio3. fig. SchernoTranslation:-Rhoncus (noun)1. The action of snoring(the second and third meaning aren't really important, so don't worry about those)in case you are looking also for the verb, then it is "Rh...
“Language is system of arbitrary(随意的) vocal(发音的,口头的) symbols used for human communication. It is a system, since linguistic elements are arranged systematically, rather than randomly. Arbitrary, in the sense that there is usually no intrinsic(固有的,内在的,本质的) connection between a...
Figuring out which word is the longest of them all isn’t as simple as just counting letters, though. Should you count scientific words? Should obscure, rarely used words be included, or should wegive the honor to a word people actually use? In the interest of fairness, our list includes...
In physics and the philosophy of science, instant refers to an infinitesimal interval in time, whose passage is instantaneous. In ordinary speech, an instant has been defined as "a point or very short space of time," a notion deriving from its etymological source, the Latin verb instare, fr...
Interesting how the slaves, doing what the master said, found in the streets both evil and good, and with these people, they filled the wedding hall with dinner guests. In general. Here is a touch of sarcasm. It does not take long to notice that this group included worthy people likeCal...
On billboards, television, and magazines, it seems like everywhere you look someone is urging you to insure your car, your home, even your vacation. But when it comes to everyday English speech, another verb,ensure, has a broader and more common usage. ...
Democracy is never finished. It is not a place of arrival. It is not a noun. It is an ongoing, living process, imperfect and messy, that generation to generation strives toward a more perfect union. It is an action, a verb. We are what we do. Today -and every day – we are the...
In a coherent text, there are logical links between the words, sentences, and paragraphs of the text. The term comes from the Latin verb co-haerere, which means ‘to stick together’ (OED). Another way to describe coherence is to say that it has to do with good and smooth text flow...