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Category: English
Can broad Australian English be easily understood outside Australia?
My fellow respondents should be aware the question asks about Broad Australian (= ocker), not General Australian (= “neutral”). I would like to think I’m General not Broad (as would any would-be member of the middle classes). People in California did have occasional difficulty with my accent; e.g. my pronunciation of Apple Cider coming across […]
Is the correct word “indigenousness” or “indigeneity”?
Indigineity sounds Latinate, so it is being accepted in those contexts where a Latinate word makes sense. Particularly when the emphasis is not so much on an individual attribute, but on a more abstract construct. Cf. Maleness and Masculinity. For example, if you want to talk about the factors that correlate with student performance in […]
Why do the spellings of ancient Roman and Greek names differ in English than in other languages?
Partly, source morphology. Partly, mediation via Latin. Partly, particularity of English. Remember first that Classical names in English came in via Latin most of the time. Hence Plato rather than Platon, and Hercules for Heracles. Second, not all final -ns are the same. So there’s no contradiction about Latin keeping the final -n in Xenophon […]
Does Australia have regional accents, like in Canada or the USA?
As others have said, Australian regional variation is nowhere near as great as even the US, let alone Britain. (You mean Canada has regional accents?) The main variation in Australia historically has been class-based (Cultivated, General, Broad), with less well-studied variation between rural and urban, and with an interesting in-group variant among 2nd generation immigrants […]
What is the etymology of Limassol, the English version of the Cypriot city ‘Lemesos’?
I don’t know. I’ll build on Sid Kemp’s answer, and to use what online resources tell me. Nemesos is used by Sophronius of Jerusalem (7th century), Anna Komnene (11th century), and the Byzantine lists of bishops. Lemesos is used by Leontios Machairas (15th century), and the vernacular Byzantine chronicles (15th century). The Turkish forms are […]
Why are deixis and seismic pronounced like that?
I referred to my wrong answer in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it like to be able to fluently speak Klingon?. The oddity is also commented on in Pedro Alvarez’s answer to What English word is pronounced the most differently from the way it is spelled? Here’s the deal, from the appendix to Vox […]
Why does English not coin a word for New Zealanders’ nationality like making “New Zealand” as “Zeal,” (then) &/or adding to “Zeal” “i-s-h” or “i-a-n?”
Apart from the more reasonable answers from other respondents: English speakers can tell that the land in Zealand means land. (And they’re right.) They see that it’s Zealand not Zealland, so they’re not prompted to go from Zeal-(l)and to the backformation Zeal. Even if they were, zeal already means something in English. So instead, Zealand […]
Why is there a ‘d’ in the word fridge but not in the word refrigerator?
Allow me to write a more general answer. The phonotactics of a language, and the conventions of its spelling, can lead speakers to expect letters to be pronounced differently in different contexts—for example, at the start or at the end of a word. Truncation, in words like (re)frig(erator), takes a sound from the start or […]
How come that the term “Pharaoh” ends with H in English and with N in many other languages [(like: Faraon, Firaun (in different languages)]?
A most excellent question, Aziz! I don’t have the complete answer, but googling gets what seems to be most of it. The original form, per Pharaoh, ends in a vowel. Hieroglyphics pr-3, Late Egyptian par-ʕoʔ, Greek pharaō /pʰaraɔ́ː/, Hebrew פרעה (parʿōh), Latin pharaō. The Greek word pharaō is indeclinable, but it does have a variant […]
If yoghurt is a variant of yaourt, why is the g pronounced?
The <ğ> used to be pronounced, as a [ɣ]. It has dropped out in Modern Standard Turkish, though it survives in Turkish dialect, and in Greek loanwords from Turkish. So yoğurt used to be [joɣurt], which was transliterated as yoghurt. The /g/ is pronounced in that transliteration, because that’s the default thing to do in […]