Wordwizard

All that came to mind, Bob, is that the English word farm derives (via French) from Medieval Latin firma meaning a 'fixed payment'. Not sure what gibbets and firmae have to do with one another.

I first heard the word cremains used back in 2002, when I had to transport my father-in-law's cremains from Ohio to California. The word was used by the funeral director and on the paperwork we filled out.

The German prefix ur- is related to the or- in ordeal (< Old English ordāl 'judgment'); the English word is related to the German word Urteil 'judgement'.

What the British call flan, I would call a custard tart. What they call crème caramel, I would call flan. Flan, where I live, is a common dessert menu choice in many Mexican restaurants. The only places I've had custard tarts is at dim sum restaurants and Chinese bakeries.

it is not a flan as it does not have a case

This is is perhaps case of UK English diverging from the French and Spanish flans. The item shown in the opening post is called flan here in the western portion of the USA. See the Wikipedia article.

Here on the Left Coast of the States, we tend to call it flan.

You may already know that in the UK, 'beamer' is also a colloquial term for a BMW car.

Same here in the States, Erik. When I first heard "beamer" used (in the wild), I explained this meaning in English and my German friends werre shocked.

My favorite English-to-German loanword is "beamer" for video projector.

It's also spelled phonaesthesia and called sound symbolism. (I did not find anything relevant searching those on the site.)

I looked up Professor Klein at Cal (link) and was pleased to find some interesting software posted online that he has written or contributed to. The first one I tested and downloaded was a parser for English. It's pretty good.

Thanks for pointing out the link, which I missed the first and second time I looked over this topic. I did notice that the author of the piece alleges that pelagus another second declension neuter noun 'sea' lacked a plural, but according to Hale & Buck, to whom I linked, there is ararew plural (usi...

In any case, the reference in the post on page 1 says that there was no Latin plural for their virus. You talking to me or the other guy. I did not see any reference (link or Ken's summary of virus in English?) in the post on page 1. I was not so much posting about the plural of virus in English, w...

Viri is the correct plural of virus (slime) and also rather coincidentally vir (man) so perhaps the computer will be safe from him as well. A lot of strange opinions about Latin plurals. (And a thread that predates my joining these forums. While many nouns that end in - us in Latin are masculine, n...

Middle English biȜetel 'profitable (bargain)'.

But this is English. OK. Confine yourself to English. If by 'any theory' you have the idea of a universal consistent interpretation of two orthographic words (ie separated by a white space) being two separate parts of speech (eg adjective + noun, or noun + noun) and never one, this isn't the way th...