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Month: December 2016
Linguistically speaking, are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian different languages or dialects of a modern Norse language?
There’s one hiccup which I’m surprised other respondents have not brought up, Habib le toubib. There are two standard languages of Norway, and a mess of dialects in between. Norway used to be ruled by the Danish. The official language of Norway at the time it gained independence, Bokmål (“Book Language”), has been uncharitably described […]
Instead of creating Pinyin, why didn’t the CCP use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)?
Practical Roman alphabets do need to stick as close to ASCII as possible. Particularly before computerised typography, getting hold of letters outside the Latin-1 and Latin-2 repertoire (letters and standard diacritics) was painful, and you’d avoid it if you could. So if you had a choice between tʰiantɕʰi pu xao and Tianqi bu hao … […]
How did the pre-Persian Semitic peoples of the Levant, Assyrian and Babylonian call the Greeks?
As OP clearly knows (by his “pre-Persian” restriction), the main Semitic name for Greeks, Yunan, derives from Persian contact with Ionian Greeks. We know that the Hittites used the term Achiyawa to refer to what we reasonably guess were the Achaeans; that’s contact dating from Mycenaean times. From Greek Contact with the Levant and Mesopotamia […]
Do letters exist?
Phonemes exist. That’s one of the key findings of 20th century linguistics. Where do they exist? In the Noosphere I guess; but they are mental constructs which underlie not only our articulation of language, but also our mental organisation and understanding of language. So unlike a lot that is in the noosphere, they do have […]
How did the verb esse end up suffixed to the back of the perfect stem in the latin’s perfect conjugations?
Vote #1 Christopher Kowalewski: That’s the working through of internal reconstruction that you only see the results of in the textbooks. Now, Chad Turner suggests I’d know the answer. God, *I* don’t know the answer. But Sihler does: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Or at least, Sihler knows as much of the answer […]
What were the musical notes’ names in Ancient Greece?
The notes of the Ancient Greek musical system were organised into tetrachords, groups of four notes. Two tetrachords made an octave. The central octave went: {Hypate, Parhypate, Lichanos, Mese}, {Paramese, Trite, Paranete, Nete} It gets rather more complicated than that; the paramese, for example, is an interstitial note, and the tetrachords keep going above and […]
Should I continue learning Esperanto?
Was Newspeak inspired by Esperanto? We know what Orwell was satirising, and why he was annoyed with Esperanto. Don’t worry about it. Orwell was if anything more annoyed with Basic English, and would likely be annoyed with any conlang. (One of the examples he gives in Politics and the English Language is from a text […]
Is there a clinical term for a “shart?”
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shart Thanks for A2A… I think. From Fecal incontinence – Wikipedia, the closest I’m seeing is fecal leakage. But that doesn’t have the implication of controlled but misconstrued bowel movement that a “shart” has. Googling is not yielding a more formal term. Answered 2016-12-24 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-a-clinical-term-for-a-shart/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
If a Turkish Cypriot is a Christian, does that make them a Greek Cypriot?
Under the millet system, which is still recent memory in former Ottoman countries, creed was the determinant of identity. If you were Orthodox you were Rum/Romios, if you were Muslim you were a Turk—no matter what your ethnicity, and what your main language was. So a Greek Cypriot that converted to Islam 200 years ago […]
How do you define cliché in your own words?
The definitions offering are actually missing something here: A clichéd expression is an expression that was figurative or otherwise had rhetorical potency—but which has become deprecated by stylists in a language community, because they value novelty and freshness over familiarity and conventionality in discourse. This is a cultural judgement, and one that English-language culture in […]