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Month: December 2016
What is the twenty-third letter of the Latin alphabet?
I see what you did there, OP. Yes, the 23rd letter of the Latin alphabet depends on which version of the Latin alphabet you’re using: there’s no universal 23rd letter, because there’s no universal repertoire of Latin letters. Some languages have fewer letters than English. Some have more letters than English. Some languages count letters […]
What does a linguist think of Albanian as he first starts to study it?
Vote #1 Sam Ahmed: Sam Ahmed’s answer to What does a linguist think of Albanian as he first starts to study it? As someone who’s both Greek and who was looking for things about the Balkan Sprachbund, I had the same reactions. With the added component of “… God, this is just like Greek” a […]
What are the distorsions in the various (French, German, etc.) versions of the Erasmian Ancient Greek pronunciation?
Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching – Wikipedia Wikipedia enumerates English, French, German, Italian. I’ll list the pronunciations that I would deem wrong from the currently accepted reconstruction of Ancient Greek. I’m not even going to list the traditional distortions of Erasmian in English courtesy of the Great English Vowel Shift, and some bizarre notions […]
What are some strategies of anaphor binding/coindexation in languages and other strategies to resolve or compensate referent ambiguity?
I should know a good answer to this, as part of my apprenticeship (being a research assistant) was tracking referents in Acehnese discourse for Mark Durie. The obvious answers I think have already been given. Gender in all its manifold forms, extending to noun classes. Deixis. Politeness strategies and social deixis. Reflexives, including long-distance reflexives […]
Linguistically speaking, why is the relationship between the signifier and signified mostly arbitrary?
Vote #1 Michael Minnich: Michael Minnich’s answer to Linguistically speaking, why is the relationship between the signifier and signified mostly arbitrary? It brings up several pertinent reasons. My answer’s simpler: restricting ourselves to lexicon, non-arbitrary signifier–signified relations in a spoken language are going to be limited to referents that make a sound. Most verbs and […]
If the word “homo religiosus” used by scholars mean a ‘religious human,’ what would be an equivalent Latin term for a “meaning seeking human”?
Homo significans, “human who makes meaning”, is already a well established expression. So is homo interpres, “interpreting human”, human who makes sense of things. You’re doing something more subtle: “seeking meaning in the universe, anticipating that there will be meaning”. It’s very close to homo interpres. But if you want to be more explicit: homo […]
What do linguists think of the movie Arrival?
You have waited a long time, Hansolophontes, for me to answer this A2A. I did not read any spoilers. I did not read any of the other answers (which may make this look silly this late). I finally watched Arrival last night. Very well made movie: great sense of atmosphere, and fear, and awe. I […]
Was Greece created by Germany?
Minority view here, and I’m astonished noone’s picked up on it. The Modern Greek state was established in 1829; and while Greeks like to think they won the Greek state with their sword, the Greek War of Independence had pretty much been quelled by 1827. It was the Great Powers’ intervention at the Battle of […]
How offensive is the word “cunt” in Australia?
Just to round off what others have said: yes, it is mostly a more vulgar counterpart of the Australian term bastard, and it almost always refers to men rather than women. (The reductionist misogynist use of cunt to refer to women is unknown here. I only discovered it a few years ago) Just like bastard, […]
What are the differences between standard modern Greek and the Griko dialect?
I am delighted to be A2A’d this question. There has been long-running, nationalistically driven, and tedious argument about how old the Greek dialects spoken in Southern Italy are, with to and fro from Italian linguists and Greek linguists, and with the great Romanist Gerhard Rohlfs kinda weighing in on the Greek side. There is a […]