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Day: December 30, 2016
What unpopular opinions do you have about linguistics?
Not that controversial, but I think there’s a lot to be said for diachronic explanations of language, and the synchronic/diachronic distinction is somewhat artificial. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is functional grammar? will explain that a little bit: functional accounts are kind of diachronic to begin with (what function does this linguistic component serve in […]
What are some examples of sentences that can be either Ancient Greek or Modern Greek?
Hm. No participles, no infinitives, no relativisers, no conditionals. Some conjunctions are the same, but you can already see we’re surrendering a lot of syntactic complexity to do this. No future or perfect, no unaccented augments, no datives, no prepositions with genitives (and the rest look different anyway), bits of the 1st and 3rd declensions […]
Is the Ancient Greek contribution to Western civilization overstated?
Whensoever you get a silly-looking premiss, think harder. 🙂 It’s a very good question, Habib le toubib. I mean, in one way, of course not, Western civilisation started with the Greeks, and throughout the renaissance, it kept checking back with the Greeks, to see whether they were Doing It Right. But on the other hand, […]
Did George Michael speak Greek?
My father used to to work with a nurse who was from the same village as George Michael’s father. I asked him years ago, and he sneered that George Michael doesn’t know what Greek means. There’s also this: “Thank you… for thir-… twenty five… years.” Very halting, and no accent fluency. Comments in the YouTube […]