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Month: October 2016
What is the future of Machine Translation?
So… lemme get this straight. A guy who was worked for Google Translate is A2A’ing someone who did a couple of graduate courses on Machine Translation 20 years ago? Once again, Adam, you flatter me. We agree, and I defer to your superior expertise; I’ll just, eh, restate what you said. Machine Translation is AI-hard: […]
What does the inscription SOEGENG RAWOHIPOEN mean? Which language is it in?
Thank you Google RAWOHIPOEN SOEGENG. As Daniel Lindsäth pointed out, SOEGENG is Indonesian. When you google SOEGENG, you get Sugeng, which reminds me that Indonesian used to be spelled more Dutch than it is now, including using oe. I also realised that the SOEGENG comes first, the writing forms an arc. SOEGENG RAWOH IPOEN. Switch […]
Is there a region in Canada where they have adopted the southern accent?
Not that I know, but there’s a region of the South that does a stereotypically Canadian thing. The stereotypically Canadian thing is Canadian raising: pronouncing the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ as /ɐɪ/ and /ɐʊ/ before voiceless consonants. It’s the thing that Americans make fun of, by saying Canadians say aboot instead of about. Canadian raising […]
If Salento’s Pizzica dance is Dionysian, could the Dabke be Minoan, given the Cretan religious influence in Gaza?
Let me try to unpack OP’s question. The Tarantella, known in Salento as pizzica, is a dance associated with a hysterical condition known as Tarantism (supposedly triggered by a tarantula bite). A couple of scholars have speculated that tarantism is a survival of Ancient Greek bacchanalian rites, which were driven underground by the Roman senate. […]
What do you know about Tsamouria (Chameria)? What is your opinion on ‘the Cham issue’?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham_issue?wprov=sfsi1 What do I know about Çamëria/Τσαμουριά? Less than Dimitris Almyrantis, but still, I assume, more than most Greeks: I looked into the ethnic mix of the Balkans for my thesis in dialectology, since I needed to know where Greek was natively spoken. I’ll add a couple of curios: The Tsamiko is one of the […]
What auxiliary language or constructed language (conlang) would you like to learn and why?
I can’t count Esperanto, since I have already been fluent in it. Nor Klingon, ditto. Nor Lojban, ditto. So let me go through the others, and say why or why not I’d like to learn it, if I was 20 again, back when I had the free time. Ranking from less to more. Láadan. Pfft. […]
Do the men of Crete still practice their archery for which they were so famous?
Like Vasilios Danias said, archery would have died out in Crete when rifles came to town; the point of archery, after all, was hunting. And Cretans sure love their rifles now, as Dimitra Triantafyllidou illustrates. But there’s ample evidence of archery used in hunting during Venetian rule, when guns were but new (and presumably not […]
Do Greeks who came from Turkey in 1960 have a different accent?
1960 in the question certainly alludes to Istanbul Greeks. There has been minimal attention paid to the dialect of Constantinople/Istanbul, because it was an urban dialect, and historical linguists were interested in the countryside, as more archaic material: Constantinople itself had all unstressed vowels, like Southern Greece, and unlike the villagers of Thrace, who reduced […]
What is the right way to say “congratulations” in Greek?
Sofia Mouratidis is right. She’s also right in the formal synonyms, and in one of the informal synonyms. I’ll add a second informal synonym: συγχαρίκια. Amusingly (to me anyway), the original meaning of συ(γ)χαρίκια is “congratulatory gift”. When you brought someone good news, they were expected to reward you with a synkharikin. In fact, before […]
What is the correct pronunciation of dysania? I have found it in three references and all three listed different pronunciations.
Peter J. Wright is correct that it is [dɪsˈeinia], but doesn’t explain why. And I knew he was right, but I also confirmed that the first -a- in the Greek word ἀνία is short. So is the first -a- in the Greek μανία. So why is it a long a? Traditional English pronunciation of Latin […]