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Month: April 2017
When was the first time that Chinese was translated into any Indo-European language, e.g. Latin, Greek, etc.?
There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled. Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the […]
What do Greeks think of the song of Çelo Mezanit?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kachak Greeks don’t know the song. Most Greeks barely know about Chameria. And nationalist Greeks who know how the song has become a rallying point for Çam identity may well react with hostility. God knows I read a couple of shitfights on YouTube. But given the translation and someone who’s not nationalist (e.g. Dimitris Almyrantis: […]
Have you ever created your own language?
Yup, around 10. Set in Liliput, because I’d just read Gulliver’s Travels, and accompanied by some map drawing. Inspired by the Latin textbooks I was poring over, and it had a hell of a lot of declension tables. And diacritics. El Glheþ Talossan-level diacritics. Coz they’re k00l. It wasn’t full, because I don’t think I […]
What are the purposes of doing a research study on how dialects impact gender?
As Joe Devney said, depends on the study, but I have a fair guess. That would be gender, presumably, as in grammatical gender, in those languages that have them. The wording would then presumably be something more like how does assignment of entities to particular genders vary from one dialect to another within the same […]
Is language production very important in order to be good at reading comprehension in classical or biblical languages?
It certainly is not regarded by most language teachers as important. Latin and Greek prose composition, which required students to produce original text (even if as a pastiche of Thucydides or Caesar) was huge a century ago, and I get the impression is extinct now. There are some ancient Greek text books that trying to […]
What is the Ancient Greek translation of ‘Stachys’, and what are the modern Greek translations of ‘Hydrobius’, ‘Kornephoros’, and ‘Protrygater’?
They’re all Ancient Greek, really, and they’re all Greek star names from Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are all the Greek star names? α Virginis: Stachys is “Ear of Wheat”. It’s Aratus’ name, and the established name Spica is its Latin translation. ζ Hydrae: Hydrobius (whatever the name’s provenance) is “living in water” (or in […]
trice
A doctor has suggested me Combiflam trice a day for five days for a liquid problem discharge in my breast. Is it fine? What are some amazing pictures one has to see trice to understand? If the value of each letter in the alphabet series is made trice of its serial number then L-H+O=? … […]
In your country, what are high-prestige and low-prestige languages for L2 speakers?
Thirty years ago, the most popular languages to learn at school in Australia were those that have inherited prestige from Britain: French, with German a somewhat distant second. They are being overtaken now by Spanish and Chinese and Japanese, but they remain entrenched, particularly in elite schools. The French lecturers I use to hang out […]
How does the linguistic concept of “time depth” compare to the intuition of “language age”?
Not very well. Linguists have an understanding of some languages being more conservative in certain aspects than others. Informed by history, they also have a notion of how far back two languages branched apart. Linguists are quite reluctant to make the further claim that one language is overall more archaic than another, compared to their […]
Do words have intrinsic meaning? Does it make sense to argue over the definition of a word?
Do words have intrinsic meaning? No. The meaning of words is negotiated constantly (and mostly unconsciously) within a community. That’s why meanings change. Meaning inheres not in the word but in the community, because language as a code inheres in the community. Where by code, I mean a mapping of forms to meanings, which enables […]