Language Overflow

Word of the day: digestives

I like that question, though. It’s a great opportunity to talk about how we end up with ungrammatical structures in our target language when we try to use words the same way we do in our native languages.

Nah, it's a proper HNQ. It meets all the criteria: comments from Lightness. And that's the full list.

@Jasper Grammarly is Very Low Quality. Let’s vote to close their ads as off topic.

@FelipeOliveira You might consider The Sounds of Japanese (Vance 2008). It's a detailed book on Japanese phonetics (with some attention given to phonology) and comes with an audio CD, and it uses IPA, but it doesn't assume prior knowledge of linguistics or IPA. Vance teaches you what each symbol means as he introduces the sounds and describes them.

@DamkerngT. Or maybe success is the secret to not reading.

Compare the single-storey 'a' with the double-storey 'a', for example. The former is typically used in handwriting and the latter in typeset text.

My opinion is that Huddleston & Pullum 2002 is better than Quirk et al 1985, but both books are worthwhile, and Biber et al 1999 is sometimes very interesting but not a book I'd recommend if you don't already have at least one of the other two.

I was getting a page number for a reference. See CGEL pages 378–9 for discussion of each and every.

I have a guess as to where Blue Square lives. I think our Blue Square lives on Earth.

Word of the day: dhole

Some people believe that Christmas Eve is actually Christmas.

I'm starring the smileys. We need some more smiles around here.

Words of the millifortnight: desirable difficulty

See CGEL p.1386 for some rules about when it can be used.