https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_alphabet One might argue that the phonological inventory of Gothic is a spectacularly bad match for that of Modern English. But then again, so was the phonological inventory of Latin. I think you can, so long as you hold your nose and write vowels as a one to one match with Modern English; you’re not […]
Not that I actually know much about Homeric Greek, but the infinitive does work better than the imperative, because it makes it less personal and more gnomic: it is a statement to the world, not a command to the individual. Although in context, it is not a command anyway, but reported speech: Ever to Excel […]
Pidgins have limited vocabularies, because they are by their nature sparse languages, and pidgins sound like colonial language babytalk, because paternalism. And some of the more amusing Pidgin coinages, we can be reasonably sure, are the colonials poking fun at the natives yet again, rather than genuinely used circumlocutions. Such as, for example, the notorious […]
Lara Novakov and Konstantinos Konstantinides are both right. The dialects of the Ionian islands have had the longest exposure to Italian (from 1200 through to 1800), and has substantial Italian vocabulary. This performance of Petegola from Corfu (Mardi Gras skits) may exaggerate the intonation as vaudeville, but exaggerated vaudeville is probably the closest you’re going […]
Between them, Christopher Ray Miller’s answer and Brian Collins’ answer have most of it covered. There’s one more way to look at it though. French dropped /s/ at the start of consonant clusters, at the start and in the middle of words. So /sp/ > /p/, /sn/ > /n/, /st/ > /t/ etc: hospital > […]
It’s only correct that Orthodoxy kept the Greek alphabet alive; scripts in the Ottoman Empire were associated with creed. Thus, according to the creed of the Greek speaker, Greek was written in Greek script (Orthodox), Latin script (Catholic: the Franco-Levantines, including many works of the Cretan Renaissance, and in the Aegean sponsored by Jesuit schools), […]
I don’t know that you’ll find many cultures that think getting blotto is a wonderful thing, but Greek traditional culture is one of many that tut-tuts public drunkenness. The maxim my father used to warn me with was, να το πίνεις [το κρασί], να μη σε πίνει: “You should drink it [wine], you shouldn’t let […]
Pre-1453 and Post-1453 policy. Before 1453, Christians were given the status of Christians anywhere in Islamdom as dhimmis, and were subject to missionary activity, as described in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?. Even so, intense conversion of Christians to Islam in Anatolia only happened in […]
https://literarydevices.net/my-kingdom-for-a-horse/ So how *would* I render this in Klingon? A battle in Star Trek space opera involves spaceships. Mobility in Star Trek involves spaceships, shuttles, and transporter beams. A quick exit in Star Trek routinely involves the latter. Therefore, obviously, jolpat! jolpat! jolpat vIDIlmeH, wo’ vInobrup! A transporter system! A transporter system! In order to […]
Your insight is correct, Riccardo: declensions and genders are both classes of nominals. The difference in Indo-European is that gender, not declension, is what governs the agreement of non-nouns with nouns, while declension is how the morphology of nouns themselves works. So in Ancient Greek, gender only affects the ending of the noun in patches—a […]