We can’t exclude it. Tsakonian is an absurdly archaic variant of Greek, and that speaks to long-term isolation from the rest of the Greek speaking world. It would have to be longer-term isolation than Old Athenian, the cover-term for the enclaves of Greek (Athens, Aegina, Megara, Kyme) blocked off from the rest of the Greek-speaking […]
… You know, I’ll take the challenge. I have a PhD in linguistics and I know the IPA backwards, but my accent in foreign languages is horridly Greek. From Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does Genesis 1:1-3 sound like in your language? : Vocaroo | Voice message Don’t assume that polyglots always have a great […]
Tamara Vardo’s answer is most of the answer. I think there’s a psychological component as well, though this is getting into speculation. It’s convenient for implicature to have xor on a scale before and, and to require the less natural notion of inclusive or to be expressed as a combination of the two, rather than […]
Do you mean, why is something as ludicrously unlinguistic as Snowball the state of the art of stemming in English? And why do we stem words, instead of doing detailed analysis of affixes, when we parse words in Natural Language Processing of English? Because English lets us get away with it. There’s not a lot […]
Dialectal. To clarify, the question is about the nominative singular ending of first declension feminine nouns. Some of those nouns end in a short -ă, and they’re accented accordingly on the antepenult: thálassa “sea”. The remainder end in either a long -ā or a long -ē. The difference in Classical Greek is a matter of […]
I vaguely recall a story which hangs on the following premise: there’s a Greek word which can either mean lot or some type of food (omelette?). This one continues to have me stumped. Both the Homeric moros and the Classical moira “fate” are derived from the word for “share”, just as “lot” in English is. […]
I’d argue there is. Aorist means “indefinite”, and was intended to mean “indefinite (unmarked) as to aspect”, which the Greek Aorist tense was, contrasting with both the Imperfect and the Perfect tense. Tense naming conventions, however, are dependent on different grammatical traditions. Latin did not refer to aorists, and neither did Germanic grammars or Romance […]
Through immersion. Please read Daniel Ross’ answer and Jens Stengaard Larsen’s answer, which address the bulk of this. The language you’re reviving is likely not going to be identical to the original language, as Jens points out; and that’s ok. I have a friend involved in language revival; she’s helping indigenous Australians reclaim their languages, […]
The in-universe explanation (to treat Greek mythology like fantasy fiction, and that’s not that absurd really) is He was renamed Heracles [“glory of Hera”] in an unsuccessful attempt to mollify Hera. (Heracles – Wikipedia) Stepping behind the curtain, in his monograph on Greek religion (p. 322), Walter Burkert says the name might be a coincidence; […]
From OED, the dialectal survivals like Yorkshire thaa reflect unstressed variants of thou (which were short); thou is a long vowel that has gone through the Great English Vowel Shift—just as house has an /aʊ/ vowel, and is still pronounced huːs in Scots. The irregularity is you, and apparently the yow pronunciation was around in […]