Articulatory phonetics was indeed done before Palatography. And not just by the Ottomans: the Korean script Hangul originated in articulatory phonetics, and for that matter both the Sanskrit grammarians and the later Graeco-Roman grammarians had pretty much had it figured out. And they could just as my students in first year were able to learn […]
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 […]
Everyone else has said the ‘what’. As to the ‘why’: Formal Greek is resistant to Latin-based loans, and routinely translates them into Greek morphemes whenever it can. The resistance was always lesser in informal Greek, and in the last decade or so, the floodgates have opened up for technical terminology in English: Hellenic coinages often […]
— … By the twin gods, Autolycus! —What then, O Charaxus? —Hear you what a curious speech it is, that this strangely dressed individual utters? —It is indeed passing curious. —Some words sound like words of our common Hellenic tongue. —Indeed so, O Charaxus. —Yet there is a harsh deficit of diphthongs in his speech. […]
Rum < Roman is the traditional Ottoman designation for Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, inherited from the self-description of the Byzantine Empire, and it continues to be the Turkish designation for ethnic Greeks, living in Turkey and Cyprus. Urum is a variant of Rum, and is used as the self-designation of several Turkic speakers […]
Contemplating the follies of Quora, as I am wont to do, is an often dispiriting exercise. An Existentialist Parable, as I have called it. An exercise that can made one go all nihilistic. I’m already warning friends to intervene if they find me muttering “Tear it down, Elias!” To help them do so, I need […]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony Grice. Grice Grice Grice Grice Grice. Paul Grice did seminal work in the philosophy of language, on how we recover meaning from an interlocutor’s words. It is clear that we routinely understand more—or less—than what our interlocutor says. To make sense of this, Grice developed a notion of conversational implicature. This is what we […]
Nice question! I believe that they have, though this is kind of speculative. ASCII and charsets have cemented the notion of a fixed repertoire of characters available to a language or a context. Specialist printers beforehand did have a little wiggleroom in making up characters for specialist purposes–various iterations of sarcasm marks, one-off diacritics or […]
Thanks to the other respondents. Patron saints share with the Ancient Greek gods the notion of domain of influence. They also, significantly, share the notion of patronage: elements of folk religion such as Votive offerings (Greek tamata), and theological notions such as Intercession of saints, are tied up with that understanding of how the Heavens […]
There has been speculation that Indo-European borrowed its words for ‘six’ and ‘seven’ from Semitic, or that they reflect a common ancestral (Nostratic) element. Nostratic is not a mainstream theory, and there has also been significant scepticism about borrowing, especially if the Proto–Indo-European for ‘six’ is closer to *weḱs than *sweḱs. I’ll note that PIE […]