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Day: July 15, 2017

Why are so many people today using the word “fuck,” like it’s a common everyday word, and not sparingly, like the vulgar, profane word that it is?

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Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Quite apart from the changing nature what is considered taboo in the English-speaking world, fuck has undergone weakening though overuse, and has lost its potency. It is simply not as profane as it used to be. This inflation of profanity is a linguistic commonplace: 150 years ago, the profanity to avoid in polite company was […]

Which books on Greek and Roman mythology list the most number of mythological characters?

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Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Literature

As I am nowadays saying openly, I worked at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for 17 years, 13 which I spent working on word recognition. As a result, I got to know pretty well where all the obscure names were in Greek literature. In the classical Canon, hands down, the Bibliotheca (Pseudo-Apollodorus). Among online resources, THEOI […]

What do sophisticated, neutral, and unsophisticated typefaces from different writing systems look like?

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Posted in categories: Other Languages, Writing Systems

This is not the most sophisticated of answers; but one bugbear of all type designers outside of the Latin script (and Cyrillic, thanks to Peter the Great) is recent font kiddies slavishly copying the design of Latin fonts. Particularly serifs. Type designers in other scripts hate serifs. Serifs are a Latin thing; Peter the Great […]

Is the word “pray(er)” different between Christians and Muslims in your language(s)?

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Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

I’m guessing rather than certain here, but Muslim Greek and Jewish Greek, as spoken by longstanding religious communities, did have distinct vocabulary about religious practices, and I’d have no reason to think prayer is an exception. The two Turkish terms given in Murat Öz’s answer are namaz and ibadet. As noted in Τι είναι το […]

How could Byzantine writers re-introduce the subscript iota and the breathings, which were long gone at the time?

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Posted in categories: Mediaeval Greek, Writing Systems

From An introduction to Greek and Latin palaeography : Thompson, Edward Maunde, Sir, (1912), pp. 61–62, My summary: The breathings and accents were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, ca 200 BC—when the breathings and accents were still being pronounced. It is believed that they were promoted for the teaching of literary Greek, precisely because they […]