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Month: April 2017
Are there similarities between Turkish and Greek Music?
There are underlying similarities between Turkish and Greek music at a deeper level, and there are clear similarities between Greek pop and Turkish pop at a more proximate level. At a deeper level, the scales and instruments used by Turks and Greeks are related, through close to a millennium of coexistence. The tunings and modes […]
Which languages lend themselves particularly well for poetry?
They all do. And let me elaborate on that. For starters, there’s the element of formal craft in poetry, and there’s the allusive use of language in poetry. Both of them are essential. For allusiveness, what you need is a culture expressed through that language. All natural languages that people live their lives in are […]
Is Sanskrit still spoken today?
By way of corroboration of Chandra Mohan’s answer to Is Sanskrit still spoken today?— The villages mentioned by others in their replies are just show pieces. They do use some Sanskrit in communication, which was taught to them by some activists, but I was given to understand that their vocabulary may not be more than […]
Why do I have to place an emphasis mark on some vowel in every Greek word on writing, even if the meaning might not even change if you just leave it?
Well there’s the simple reason, and there’s the historical justification for it. The simple reason is: BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE RULES. 🙂 And if it were up to me, you’re not putting enough accents on Greek words. The blanket rule that all monosyllabic words are unstressed, whether they are function words or content words, does […]
Why did you think the Greek population disappeared so completely from Anatolia after the Ottoman conquest?
To clarify what this question is likely talking about: We know that there was a continuous Greek presence in Thrace up to Constantinople, the Pontus (Black Sea), and Cappadocia, after the arrival of the Ottomans. We know that there was a substantial Greek population in Western Asia Minor in the 19th century, which is linguistically […]
What does the suffix “ostomy” mean?
stoma is Greek for mouth. –stomia is stoma plus an abstract noun ending: “-mouth-ation”. In medicine, a Stoma (medicine) is also a surgically made opening. So a colostomy is a surgical intervention creating an opening (a stoma, a “mouth”) in the colon: kōlo-stom-ia > colostomy, “colon-mouth-ation”. The Wikipedia article gives 16 other stoma operations. The […]
Why do my classmates like using my Chinese name instead of my English name?
Two contrary reasons. In the particular context you’re detailing (them laughing), one is likelier; but both should be stated for others coming across this question. One tendency is mockery of the exotic; teenagers in particular have a strong, even brutally, conformist ethic, and they deride names that they find out of the ordinary. The contrary […]
Why did the post-structuralists ignore linguists such as Chomsky, who is far more important than Ferdinand de Saussure?
I’m not convinced by Michael Minnich‘s account, which makes a French Swiss linguist a Teuton. But it is certainly true that poststructuralism, as a European invention, was always going to draw more inspiration from what was happening in the generation of the European linguists who had trained the first poststructuralists, than in what was happening […]
somnambular
Michael Masiello’s answer to If a healthy person suddenly starts preparing for their funeral, does that mean they’re subconsciously aware of impending death? I suppose if someone were to make these arrangements while on Ambien, in a remarkably focused somnambular state, one might say the person was unconsciously aware of impending death. But “subconsciously” just […]
Does our alphabet encompass almost all possible sounds?
The question details ask for a meticulous and specific answer (though the question itself is neither). The original 24 letter alphabet used for Latin did not even encompass the sounds of its daughter languages, let alone the sounds of other languages. Centuries of often messy digraph and diacritic solutions ensued. But any language using a […]