Author: Nick Nicholas

Website:
http://www.opoudjis.net
About this author:
Data analyst, Greek linguist

It’s really amazing how Greek-speaking Muslims in Turkey and Turkish-speaking Christians in Greece got assimilated. How long did it take?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: History, Mediaeval Greek

tl;dr: Pre-modern communities took centuries to assimilate, either linguistically or religiously; some didn’t assimilate at all. Modern communities, under the pressure of state nationalism, assimilate within a generation. We don’t have good data on language in Turkey. We know that the religious assimilation of the existing population there seems to have taken something like three […]

Why is the “-ic” suffix used much less compared to “-an”,“-ese”,“-ish” suffixes?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

For starters, in the West, Greek affixes were used in scholarship, where it was felt they were more nuanced than what Latin had to offer. Suffixes to express ethnicity were felt to be a less rarefied domain, and English and Latin between them had it covered. For seconds, Greek differentiated between suffixes denoting ethnicity, and […]

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

By: | Post date: 2017-07-15 | Comments: No Comments
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 […]

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

By: | Post date: 2017-07-15 | Comments: No Comments
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 […]

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

By: | Post date: 2017-07-15 | Comments: No Comments
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 […]

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?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-15 | Comments: No Comments
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?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-15 | Comments: No Comments
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 […]

Why do people think I’m a snob because I always speak in standard English?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

This is Tony Mulqueen’s answer. I’m just being a little more abstract. There is a popular misconception that the primary purpose of language is to communicate. Language is a social phenomenon, practiced by social beings. And one of its primary functions is to demonstrate allegiance to the groups the speaker belongs to. If you speak […]

Where do the distinctive Greek names for chemical elements come from?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

http://www.ptable.com/?lang=el My thanks to Konstantinos Konstantinides, Joseph Boyle, and Jorvon M. Carter, who have answered most of this; this answer is based on their work. My agenda, more cynically, was “which country did Greek copy, and where did it decide to do its own thing.” Languages did decide to do their own thing occasionally; the […]

Which is correct, “Describe who you are” or “Describe whom you are”?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

I am going to refine Justin Franco‘s reasoning, while agreeing with his answer. Justin says that it’s “describe who you are”, because We wouldn’t answer “Who are you?” with “You are him.” We’d answer it with “You are he.” Oh really? the ruppes: Jesus, You are Him You are him by Margo You are him, […]

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