Forbes wrote: I am at something of a disadvantage as I do not know Chinese, only what I have read about it. I always used to read that Chinese was monosyllabic, but apparently this is a misconception. The misconception here is in what is

Anonymous wrote: Although Chinese syllable structure is as you suggest, this is completely different from the importance of word structure. Words in Chinese are composed of a single syllable, whereas words in English and Spanish can be composed

This is interesting, IMO: Background on Grammaticalization (8) Grammaticalization makes use of the "observation that grammatical morphemes develop gradually out of lexical morphemes or combinations of lexical morphemes with lexical or

Gary Williams wrote on 28 Jul 2004: It's like "ice tea" and "teenage". They ought to be ... to update has turned these past-participial adjectives into nominal adjectives. Hmmm...I understand "ice tea" (the -d

Me neither. If the saying is meaningful to those that ... who put forward explanations which (to me) don't stack up. Sorry, but this has me stumped. What would either of you make of "I really care" used sarcastically to mean

Hi, this is just a cut & paste job from various internet resources: 1 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology 2 The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar 3 Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language 4 The Concise Oxford