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Month: January 2016
If the compound words, “insofar,” and “inasmuch” require that they be followed by “as”, why haven’t we made the leap to “insofaras,” and “inasmuchas”?
Constituency. If people are going to run words together, they don’t so randomly. They run words together when the words form a syntactic grouping. And the stop running words together when they run into a syntactic break. A clause like “in so far as I am able” is analysed syntactically as: [in [so far]] [as […]
Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages?
What Tomasz Dec’s answer to Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages? said. Icelandic is likely the most successful, as the poster-child of conservative intervention in language change in general. Lots of European languages have had bouts of this. German fought the good fight for a fair while, and their […]
How do I teach myself the Byzantine/Medieval Greek language, i.e., around the 9th century?
Hm. Noone teaches Byzantine Greek as something distinct from Ancient Greek. That’s because for most purposes, it isn’t distinct. I’m going to go through a potted history of Byzantine Greek for others who might stumble on this question. There are three registers of Mediaeval Greek to consider; I’ll use Mediaeval to include Greek under Latin […]
Modern inventions have made it possible to hear how our great grand parents spoke. Will this influence how the language and dialects change?
*Probably* not. Language change is influenced by several things, in both a conservative and a innovative direction. Input from older versions of the languages demonstrably has an effect in holding back language change — or at least, in promoting use of the older version’s features in parallel. Outright reversing language change doesn’t happen that often, […]
Is it possible to make a language out of only one type of word (noun, verb, adjective etc)?
Logan R. Kearsley has written a comprehensive answer on one angle. I will throw a hint on another angle: if you have enough Noun Incorporation (linguistics) and polysynthesis at a language, you’re going to end up with languages where what European languages treat as nouns or adjectives usually end up as affixes—so what look like […]
Did the ancient Greeks use a different language for a special purpose like it was the case with Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in India?
Did the Ancient Greeks have a different *language* for sacred purposes? No, Ancient Greek was their language. But the Ancient Greeks did use different dialects for different genres of literature, to an extent that has not been paralleled since. Epic dialect (a mix based on archaic Ionic) for epic poetry, and allusions to it, is […]
What’s your favorite word etymology?
This is NSFW. Kinda. The Greek word for a porn film is tsonta. The word comes from the Venetian word zonta, which is cognate with Italian giunta and English joint. The original meaning of tsonta was the same as Louisianan lagniappe: it’s an extra helping, an extra portion of the merchandise you’re buying, that the […]
What does Felidae mean? How was the term coined?
Felidae is the Family (biology) that cats and great cats belong to. All animal families are formed with the suffix –idae. In this case, –idae is suffixed to the Latin word felis, meaning cat. The –idae suffix is a Latin plural counterpart to Greek –idai (singular –idēs), meaning offspring. In the plural, the –idai suffix […]
Is there any language that uses the Greek Alphabet other than Greek?
Currently, no. Historically, Greek has been used routinely to write other languages, including the Bactrian language (hence Sho (letter) ), Karamanli Turkish, and Albanian. Answered 2016-01-13 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-any-language-that-uses-the-Greek-Alphabet-other-than-Greek/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Is there a term for borrowings from a language’s own proto-language?
There’s lots of these—Modern Greek from Ancient Greek, Russian from Old Church Slavonic—but I’m not aware of a generic term. In Greek. for example, these are referred to as learnèd loans (λόγιο δάνειο)—but a learned loan in English is a loan from Latin, not Old English. (In fact we do have a term for learned […]