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Month: April 2017
What is the Latin translation of “Even the dead have not seen the end of war”?
Ne mortui quidem belli finem viderunt. Answered 2017-04-26 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-Latin-translation-of-Even-the-dead-have-not-seen-the-end-of-war/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What are some beautiful Greek names for a girl?
I’m going to go all contrarian like Evangelos Lolos did. Way too much antiquity here. Special shoutout to John Salaris, who also went with two overtly modern names: Panagiota (Greek equivalent of Madonna), and Argyro “Silver”. Those names ending in –o are particularly delicious. If they aren’t truncations of other names (Βαγγελιώ < Evangeline, Βαλάντω […]
By what process(es) do complex inflection systems form in natural languages? What influences how they form?
There are languages with clean, atomic, nuggety units of meaning as separate words: isolating languages like Chinese and (mostly) English. There are languages with suffixes as well as words, where those suffixes are still, for the most part, clean, atomic, easy to detect, and easy to take apart: agglutinative languages like Turkish. And then you […]
What is the word for the thief in the every day language of your country and in the New Testament?
Ancient Greek made a distinction between thieves and robbers: kleptēs vs lēistēs or harpax. Both kleptēs and lēistēs are used in the New Testament; the men crucified with Jesus were lēistai. The Modern Greek vernacular had lost the word lēistēs, and had kept the word kleptēs (as kleftis) to refer to both thieves and robbers. […]
How did Byzantine Greeks regard ancient Greek civilization?
As a complement to Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer and Niko Vasileas’ answer: There was an undercurrent of resentment of the ancients and their pagan wisdom, but it remained an undercurrent. There’s the renowned hymn on the Pentecost by Romanos the Melodist, dismissing ancient learning with puns on the pagan scholars—and alas, a favourite of the Greek […]
What is the origin of the terms “Bourazeris” and “Vlamis”, obsolete from the 21st century Greek language?
The Triantafyllidis dictionary is online: βλάμης [vlamis] “blood brother” < Albanian vlam: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής. Obsolete, but certainly familiar from rebetiko and later songs. The 1951 song Παλαμάκια is probably the best known instance of the word—or rather, of its feminine vlamissa: μπουραζέρης [burazeris], variant μπραζέρης [brazeris], was not familiar to me, and is […]
What are the unusual punctuation marks in your language?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language Survey question, and I’m looking forward to someone bringing up the Amharic sarcasm mark. Greek punctuation functionally corresponds to English punctuation—mostly. Upper dot <·> corresponds to semicolon. In Ancient Greek typography, the upper dot is usually also used in the function of the English colon. Modern Greek typography uses the colon. Ancient punctuation had […]
Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country?
To expand on Fey Lepoura’s answer to Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country? Historically, Greece contained a large number of ethnicities, and a large number of distinct cultures to go with those ethnicities: Greek Orthodox Catholic Muslim Turkish Arvanite Albanian (in the Northwest, mostly Muslim, but also Christian) Aromanian Megleno-Romanian Macedonian (Slavonic) Bulgarian Christian Muslim […]
How many types of dictionaries are there?
Dictionary Typology This presentation offers the following typology of dictionaries: Bilingual/Multilingual (translating one language into another) Monolingual Synchronic (contemporary usage) Limited (a particular field, e.g. medical; a particular register, e.g. slang) General: Comprehensive (all of the language, multi-volume) or Standard (single volume, mostly for paedagogical use) Diachronic Historical (the historical paths that words have taken […]
What is your opinion on the unidirectionality hypothesis of grammaticalization?
I am much more of a functionalist than Daniel Ross and Brian Collins, so I am much more sympathetic to unidirectionality, and the fact that there are counterexamples does not bother me. It did bother Brian Joseph, who’s one of the big names against unidirectionality, and who also marked my thesis. He found it pretty […]