I am looking for a text file of a list of words (roughly the 5000-10000 most common English words) and their root word and root word language. My Google Fu only turns up single words or pages that I can type in a word to get to another page to get the etymology.
Wikipedia has some stuff, but it is sorted by language root, which is not what I am looking for.
I would like to have a long list of words in a text file so that I can manipulate it programatically. Comma separated or whatever, any format would be great.
Here is one use case:
Yoke - [list of words that have yoke in the etymological history] (Many, many many English words come from the root work for Yoke.)
All answers appreciated!
posted by Monkey0nCrack
on May 16, 2013 -
6 answers
In English, scientists customarily use the word "significant" or "statistically significant" to refer to an effect that is distinguished from zero at a p < .05 confidence level. On the other hand, the word "significant" in non-technical English carries a connotation of being meaningful, important, or substantial; this creates confusion when researchers write about "a significant effect," since the effect might be significant in the statistical sense while being so small as to be insignificant in the common-English sense.
In your native language, what word is used for "signficance" in the statistical context? Is the same word used outside the technical context, and if so, is it a word whose common meaning is something more like "detectable," more like "important," or something else entirely? In particular, does the confusion that arises in English also take place in your language?
posted by escabeche
on Apr 24, 2013 -
5 answers
How come that various forms of the verb "to be" have different degrees of similarity across German/English/Romance languages? The third person singular ist/is/est seems to have an obvious common root, whereas I don't see it jump out on me for bin/am/suis at all, and in other forms it seems like German and French are close with English the odd one out (sind/sommes/are), which I found puzzling given that I usually think of English as the bastard child of these two.
posted by themel
on Mar 31, 2013 -
6 answers
'Think tank' and 'thought leader' not 'thought tank' and 'think leader'. Can you help me construct a good argument for why we have settled on the first two and not the second?
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posted by stavrosthewonderchicken
on Mar 17, 2013 -
7 answers
I found some stone tablets written in a strange alphabet amongst a bunch of graves from different eras at the city museum of
Tire, Turkey. The guy working the desk at the museum didn't know what they were. Pictures in extended.
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posted by Theiform
on Mar 15, 2013 -
12 answers
Are grammatical genders, as a rule, consistent across the Indo-European languages which use them?
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posted by obloquy
on Dec 4, 2012 -
30 answers
Which language is claimed to have shifted between language families?
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posted by Jehan
on Oct 14, 2012 -
6 answers
Is there a word or term for not being able to understand a word of a language, but still being able to correctly
recognize it if you hear it? For example, if I hear someone speaking German, Italian, Portuguese, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian, I can probably correctly identify that they’re speaking said language they’re speaking EVEN THOUGH I can’t understand a thing they’re saying. Has this been studied before?
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posted by huxham
on Jul 19, 2012 -
12 answers
Do we cry over spilt milk or spilled milk? My spell checker says the latter but I remember the former.
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posted by patheral
on May 9, 2012 -
31 answers
Help me sort out the best way to approach language preservation, as an academic interest and as a guideline for volunteer work.
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posted by mammary16
on Feb 21, 2012 -
16 answers
In Korean, the words for 'mom' and 'dad', respectively, are umma and appa. In Hebrew (maybe other Semitic languages, too), they are ima and abba. Is there a link between Korean (maybe other east Asian languages?) and the Semitic languages?
posted by KingoftheWhales
on Sep 22, 2011 -
19 answers
"American English is like a mugger in a back alley who, instead of taking your wallet, takes your pocket dictionary".
I read a quote in this vein a while ago and I'm trying to identify the actual quote and the source.
posted by chara
on Sep 12, 2011 -
4 answers
Is there any data out there relating to the relative speeds that different spoken languages can express human thought?
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posted by merocet
on Jul 20, 2011 -
18 answers
A textbook that I once read contained a passage from some famous author (possibly Mark Twain?) that attempted to illustrate the usefulness of jargon by describing how to saddle a horse, or hitch a horse to a wagon (something like that) without using any specialized terminology. It was marvelously long-winded and impossible to follow. Textbook long since discarded, Google-Fu fails; any idea what this might have been?
posted by lordcorvid
on Jul 2, 2011 -
3 answers
Can I compute how frequently a word occurs in
general English text? I have a list of about 2000 words, and I want to sort it with the most common words first.
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posted by Chicken Boolean
on Mar 28, 2011 -
27 answers
What are these phrases called? Examples: "amazingly odd and oddly amazing"; "terribly basic and basically terrible"; "embarrassingly hot and hotly embarrassing". I could swear I came across a name for this type of word pairing once before (quite possibly on this very site, in which case sorry), but my searches to find it again have been hopelessly awful and awfully hopeless.
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posted by d11
on Feb 12, 2011 -
16 answers
I'm trying to write Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg, in latin characters. I have nearly all the literature on this -- the problem is, there are a variety of proposed systems, and all of them seem to be based on a largely impractical phonetic alphabet. Most of the proposed alphabets are around 36 to 50 letters, rendering it largely ineffective, especially when trying to teach writing to illiterate native speakers or second language learners.
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posted by iamck
on Oct 2, 2010 -
14 answers
in english, for the most part, it's vowel sounds that differ across regional accents. in other languages i've studied (italian, hungarian), consonant transpositions seem to be more common. what gives? or am i even drawing accurate conclusions?
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posted by nevers
on Jul 13, 2010 -
23 answers
Can you reccommend a good, in-depth primer on grammar? I don't mean where to use a comma, but rather a clear definition of, for example, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive cases. What exactly are tense, mood, person, number, and voice. That kind of thing.
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posted by Nothing
on Jun 6, 2010 -
16 answers
So what do you know about "sugar", "sugar diabetes", or "the sugar" being used as synonyms for "diabetes"? And how did that meaning come to be, exactly?
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posted by skoosh
on Mar 6, 2010 -
32 answers
Looking for reciprocal of "Engrish" on two counts: 1) Asians imitating "how Americans(/Anglophones) talk" with gibberish, and 2) Asians making fun of "how Americans(/Anglophones) talk" with heavy English/American accents on their own language. seeking audio and/or video for entertainment and cultural edification.
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posted by herbplarfegan
on Feb 25, 2010 -
14 answers
Sacrifice, speech, writing and art: I am interested in the different ways in which a sacrifice, a sacrament, a spoken word and a written word act as signifiers. The notion for instance that the sacrament, at the point of its acceptance, is understood as
becoming the signified. What can you tell me / what has been written about the notions of sacrifice and their relationship to speech, art and the technologies of writing?
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posted by 0bvious
on Feb 24, 2010 -
8 answers
Linguisticsfilter: I'm looking for experiments that reveal something surprising or fascinating about the way we use and respond to language.
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posted by mossicle
on Dec 3, 2009 -
9 answers
Can anyone point me to a resource where I can learn construction industry-related lingo?
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posted by eliina
on Nov 22, 2009 -
1 answer
I'm very seriously considering the foreign service, but I've never been any good at languages. Will I likely be able to learn a language, with the intense training the Foreign Service provides, without a natural apptitude for languages?
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posted by anonymous
on Nov 18, 2009 -
7 answers
I'm looking for "black best friend" supporting characters in movies who also come with a black love interest. I'm interested in their language patterns and dialect usage.
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posted by ms.codex
on Nov 9, 2009 -
35 answers
Looking for podcasts or radio shows with women talking in Mancunian accents or similar Northern English accents.
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posted by reenum
on Sep 5, 2009 -
6 answers
Looking to purchase some awesome linguistics-related posters. I've searched for hours on the internet and I can't seem to find any family tree posters, IPA posters, or even anything remotely related to linguistics that is interesting and somewhat academic.
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posted by iamkimiam
on May 28, 2009 -
8 answers
In the distant past the megabyte and gigabyte were honorable quantities of storage and we referred to them by their full names; now they are too familiar, and we call them "meg" and "gig." Has a common spoken abbreviation already emerged for the
terabyte? Or must we wait until TBs are readily available in larger multiples before the linguistic hivemind of digital humanity collectively determines the spoken shorthand? Sysadmins and data center pros--you know best. What do you call 10,000,000,000,000 bytes?
posted by lucius
on May 17, 2009 -
24 answers
In a languages that uses both the formal and informal "you," is there any situation in which people using the informal "you" with each other would ever go back to regularly using the formal "you" with each other?
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posted by mustcatchmooseandsquirrel
on Apr 29, 2009 -
26 answers
Looking for linguistic theories that describe why words change in meaning, particularly because they look and/or sound like other words.
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posted by hiteleven
on Apr 26, 2009 -
5 answers
I'm kicking around a concept for a theoretical piece I hope to work on in the near future, dealing with the way "femininity" and the "female" category are conceived of linguistically. Help me find some empirical data!
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posted by parkbench
on Mar 24, 2009 -
24 answers
Looking for a flash exercise/game or some way to train my ear to recognizing tone so that I can be a better transcriber. I'm currently researching two tonal languages and I need a way to practice/improve on my skills so that my data is more complete. I don't want to devote a lot of time to this, maybe a few hours. Are there any tools out there that can help me?
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posted by iamkimiam
on Mar 4, 2009 -
6 answers
