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Day: November 22, 2016

Would you give up your mother tongue for a common world language, if you knew that it would unite all people?

By: | Post date: 2016-11-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Thx4A2A, Irene. I’d say that in Armenian, but my wife doesn’t speak it. 🙁 This is a painful question for me, as I was an Esperantist for a fair while. But even before the Espereantists split about whether the “final victory” was worth messianically waiting for, they were very careful not to convey a message […]

Which Greek island is the best for traditional music and culture?

By: | Post date: 2016-11-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

You want an island that’s a little out of the way of mass tourism, so you can see some local music and culture. Or an island that’s big enough that not every part of it is soaked with mass tourism. You won’t see much, this is 2016 after all. And as I posted here (Nick […]

What is the etymology of “Therasia”?

By: | Post date: 2016-11-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

The Just-So story of antiquity is as Konstantinos Konstantinides put it: Thera the island was named for its colonist Theras, and Therasia for his daughter. Yeah, I find that too convenient too. I’m not looking up Pauly or anything reputable like that, but I will work from the corresponding common nouns. Thēr means a wild […]

Identify how linguistic is related with historical linguistics?

By: | Post date: 2016-11-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Well, linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is language. Historical linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is the development of language through time. It explains language in terms of how it historically developed to get to this point (its diachrony). Up until the 1920s, historical linguistics was the mainstream of linguistics. […]