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Day: July 1, 2016
Why do some Australians have accents similar to the English while others sound more like Crocodile Dundee?
I’m sure I’ve already answered this more fully elsewhere on Quora, but: The distinction in Australian accents has historically been much more about class than region; the three distinctions identified 50 years ago were Cultivated Australian, General Australian, and Broad Australian. Cultivated Australian was pretty much the same as British Received Pronunciation, except that its […]
What is the variation in the Greek pronunciation of ντ, μπ, γκ?
In brief: The prenasalised pronunciation is older, as the spelling shows. There are dialects that prenasalise and ones that lose the preceding nasal. E.g. Cyprus for the former, Crete for the latter. Within Standard Modern Greek, prenasalisation has been associated with Puristic Greek, and un-prenasalised stops are becoming more common in casual speech; there are […]
What does ‘Ζωή μου, σᾶς ἀγαπῶ.’ mean?
I’ve actually been puzzled by this myself. I mean, I know the answer, obviously. It’s a politeness plural, patterned after French Vous (and Early Modern English you). And it’s been mainstream in Greek since the 19th century, although Greeks in practice avoid out when they can—because to them it’s much more about distance than respect. […]
How did USA end up with quite a few distinct dialects and Australia end up with more or less one, given their similar colonial pasts?
Speaking Our Language by Bruce Moore, Oxford University Press 2008, explained the homogeneity of Australian English as follows—as I summarised it in History of Australian English on my Hellenisteukontos blog: Moore puts forward the formation of an Australian English as a dialect koine in Sydney, within two generations of settlement, and then diffusing out of […]
Greeks, which do you identify most with: Ancient Greece or the Byzantine Empire?
(Nice question, Aphrodisia Xanthopoulos! You and Aziz Dida should get together and plot more questions; the Greece feed has been getting boring lately.) OP’s question touches on the old dichotomy in Greek identity between Hellene and Romios (Roman); see for example Romios or Hellene? It’s a dichotomy that may be dying down now, as the […]