I’ve just written an answer about Pāṇini. I know what a macron is, and I know what a retroflex nasal is. I also know that the Sanskrit grammarian is not to be confused with an Italian sandwich. Nevertheless, in my answer I referred to him as Panini. And I do not feel guilty for doing […]
Γένεσις /ɡénesis/ “Genesis, origin” consists of the verb root gen- “to originate”, and the ending -esis. The -εσις ending of Greek genesis has two components. The –sis component is a nominalisation, indicating the result of a verb. Cf. ly-sis ‘solution’ < lyō ‘solve’; gennē-sis ‘birth’ < gennaō ‘give birth’; pep-sis ‘digestion’ < peptō ‘digest’; theōsis […]
-ής, -ές is a suffix used to form adjectives. The entry on -ής, -ές in Smyth’s Grammar §858, reads (Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges): 5. ες (nom. –ής, –ές): primitive: ψευδ-ής false (ψεύδ-ω deceive), σαφ-ής clear, πρην-ής prone, ὑγι-ής healthy. Very common in compounds, as ἀ-σφαλ-ής unharmed, secure (ἀ-priv. + σφαλ- in […]
Because Greek didn’t have an ŋ letter, although they knew that the sound existed. Phonetically, the final -n in prefixes was often assimilated phonetically to the following letter: syn ‘with’ + pathos ‘passion’ > sym-patheia ‘sympathy, compassion’ syn ‘with’ + labē ‘taking’ > syl-labē ‘syllable: sounds “taken together”’ syn ‘with’ + rhaphē ‘sewing’ > syr-raphē […]
The Wikimedia Language committee clamped down on “dead” languages and artificial languages quite ferociously, after an initial laissez-faire period. Because initially you could set up a Wikipedia in any language you liked, Latin, Old English, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic got in. Because the Wikimedia Language Committee clamped down, Ancient Greek got rejected even though […]
Well, let’s think this through. I count three programming paradigms from when I was studying computer science 25 years ago: functional, logical, and procedural. They correspond to three types of semantics: denotational, axiomatic, and operational. The first two are pristine and beautiful articulations of mathematics and logic, respectively. The last involves modelling the internal state […]
Ptolemy, at least, expressed them somewhat clumsily, by adding reciprocals. There were dedicated symbols for half: [math]unicode{x10175}, unicode{x10176}[/math], two thirds: [math]unicode{x10177}[/math], and three quarters: [math]unicode{x10178}.[/math] Outside of those, fractions were expressed by using double prime for reciprocals, ″. So Ptolemy used ιβ″ = 1/12 a lot for geographical coordinates; and he would also use expressions […]
So you seek to translate: Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinausUnter den großen Himmel treten. “I would like to step out of my heart,And go walking beneath the enormous sky.” I’ll start by putting in the missing accent marks 🙂 ἐκ τῆς καρδίας βούλομαι ἐκβαίνεινὑπὸ τῷ μεγάλῳ οὐρανῷ βαδίζειν I am so, so not going […]
Complimentary, but not deep. The interwebs widely quote Chomsky saying in Kolkata, in a 10-minute speech in 2001, “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”: An event in Kolkata. Chomsky in fact already said that in the preface of Aspects in 1965: “a generative grammar, in essentially the contemporary sense of […]
Khateeb, I have no idea, but I can surmise based on: The Death of the Urdu Script – ali eteraz – Medium Nastaʿlīq script – Wikipedia If your technology is handwriting, it doesn’t particularly matter whether your writing is vertical or horizontal, or a mix of both. If you’re writing online in 2017, and you […]