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Day: August 15, 2017
What would it be like to have a made up language as your first language?
If you’re being brought up to speak Esperanto or Klingon or Lojban or (in the case of Itamar Ben-Avi) Revived Hebrew [yes, I’m calling Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s work a made up language], the main issue you’d run into is not having anyone but your parents, and maybe occasionally your parents’ weirdo friends, to use the language […]
What influence has Bollywood had in Greek music?
Material drawn from forum thread ΙΝΔΙΚΑ ΚΑΙ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ. There is a book on the influx of Bollywood tunes into Greek music: Ινδοπρεπών αποκάλυψη. Manuel Tasoulas & Eleni Ambatzi. 1998. Ινδοπρεπών αποκάλυψη [Revelation of the Indian-styled]. Athens; Περιβολάκι, Ατραπός. Bollywood productions were very popular in Greece in the 1960s; my mother remembers watching them as […]
Is it mathematically possible to create a language where terms describing complex ideas can be made up starting from simpler ideas, with simple logical reasoning in real time, so that knowing vocabulary is not necessary?
I’m sceptical to what extent mathematics enters into any reasoning about human language (and Lojbanists actually highlight that language is not reducible to truth-conditional logic). But much of what you’re saying is the bet behind Natural semantic metalanguage, which tries to define every concept ever in a language that looks like English, but that has […]
How do you say ‘the thing about the eagle’ in ancient Greek?
I have been edified by the margent: I have found out that the Iliad means ‘The thing about the lion’ and I was just wondering how one would say, ‘The thing about the eagle’. No. No it doesn’t, and you need to slap whoever told you that in the face. Iliad means ‘The thing about […]