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Category: English
Why does The New Yorker use a diaeresis for some double vowels?
You can use a diacritic only when it’s necessary to prevent confusion, or you can use a diacritic consistently, whenever the pronunciation goes one way rather than the other. In the former case, you reduce the number of diacritics in the language. In the latter case, you reduce the amount of pronunciation ambiguity. English has […]
Why is the Greek letter phi translated into English as “ph” and not “f”?
Because when Latin started transliterating Greek, φ was still pronounced as /pʰ/: a p followed by an h. The shift of /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/ occurred later (the first evidence for it, Koine Greek phonology notes, is from Pompeii.) Answered 2016-07-22 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Why-is-the-Greek-letter-phi-translated-into-English-as-ph-and-not-“f”/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Does the word Medical have any relation with the Medes people?
At first, I thought “oh come on!” Then I thought “hey, I should check.” Now I think “probably not, but it was worth checking”. medical comes ultimately from Latin mederi “to heal, give medical attention to, cure”: Online Etymology Dictionary. In turn, this ultimately derives from the Indo-European stem *med– (Pokorny’s dictionary), “to measure; to […]
BS in English Linguistic and literature are different courses?
Not A2A. Michael Masiello, who is awesome in every way, is right in the question he answered, but wrong in the question I think OP intended. Linguistics and literature are indeed quite different fields of study. In fact, they have become more separate. Linguistics was invented to help literature study (rhetoric); and literature scholars draw […]
Could the names for the rivers Potomac, Thames, have any etymological connection with Greek potamos (=river)?
As for Greek potamos, I’ve checked in Dictionnaire-Etymologique-Grec : Chantraine (It’s online?! Download while you can!!!) Its likeliest source is as a noun derived from e-pet-on “to fall” (so, waterfall, torrent); but the meaning means that rivers always fall, which doesn’t sound right. The alternative derivation given, proposed by Wackernagel, is a relation to German […]
Why do some Australians have accents similar to the English while others sound more like Crocodile Dundee?
I’m sure I’ve already answered this more fully elsewhere on Quora, but: The distinction in Australian accents has historically been much more about class than region; the three distinctions identified 50 years ago were Cultivated Australian, General Australian, and Broad Australian. Cultivated Australian was pretty much the same as British Received Pronunciation, except that its […]
How did USA end up with quite a few distinct dialects and Australia end up with more or less one, given their similar colonial pasts?
Speaking Our Language by Bruce Moore, Oxford University Press 2008, explained the homogeneity of Australian English as follows—as I summarised it in History of Australian English on my Hellenisteukontos blog: Moore puts forward the formation of an Australian English as a dialect koine in Sydney, within two generations of settlement, and then diffusing out of […]
What does Hortalotarsus mean in Latin or Greek?
No explanation offered in the original paper On Hortalotarsus skirtopodus, a new saurischian fossil from Barkly East, Cape Colony, though the author does indicate it was all about the distinctive Tarsus (skeleton) (back of the foot). Nothing in Massospondylus, the accepted family name for the dinosaur. The Spanish Wikipedia on Hortalotarsus offers “tarsus of a […]
Are Greek and Latin roots the only atomic words we know so far from which we can build all the compounded words?
I think what you mean, OP, is: are Graeco-Latin stems the only stems from which compound words can be formed in English. The answer is of course no: there are plenty of compounds in English based on indigenous Germanic words, and there were all the way back to Old English. Statecraft. Breastfeed. Windmill. There was […]
Does the study of language have an -ology word, or is it simply linguistics?
The study of language has an -ology word in Greek (unsurprisingly enough): γλωσσολογία /ɣlosoloɣia/, “language-ology”. Italian uses the more Attic version sometimes as well: glottologia. Beyond those, yeah, linguistics. Answered 2016-06-14 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Does-the-study-of-language-have-an-ology-word-or-is-it-simply-linguistics/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]