Subscribe to Blog via Email
Archive:
Month: July 2016
What is the relationship between syntagmatic and paradigmatic?
They are the two relationships between linguistic elements that define how language works, according to structuralism. They are complementary. The syntagmatic relationship is how linguistic elements can be sequenced. It’s syntax. And morphology. And phonotactics. The paradigmatic relationship is which linguistic elements behave in the same way in syntagmatic relationships. It’s lexicon. And phonetics. And […]
Are there any true Spartans in Greece today?
There are two subgroups of Greeks in the general neighbourhood of Sparta, which were isolated from the Greek mainstream for a while, and who speak more archaic variants of Greek. You’ll hear people call them the descendants of Spartans. I don’t think it’s a meaningful thing to say; there’s been a lot of DNA traffic […]
What is one random thing you like about Albania?
The way familiar words (Greek or Turkish) look in Albanian. xham. suxhuk. trëndafill. And the word you just gave me: sufllaqe. Answered 2016-07-02 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-one-random-thing-you-like-about-Albania/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Does an equivalent of cursive exist in other alphabets?
Greek: there was a cursive modelled after Western cursive in the 19th/20th century. It fell out of use long before computers (I was never taught it in school); I have seen it in letters from the 50s. The main differences to what you might expect: kappa looking like a <u>; pi as an omega with […]
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 […]