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Category: Other Languages
What does a French speaker from the Val D’Aosta region of Italy sound like?
Ah, French in the Val d’Aosta. I don’t have a phonetic answer for OP. I do however have a sociolinguistic answer that I’m delighted to share, because I co-supervised an MA thesis on this subject. The facts are all from Genevieve Foddy (née Czarnecki). The snark is all mine. The indigenous language of the Val […]
Did Hebrew affect all languages in the world? If so, is it the only language that affected all languages?
… The only wide-ranging influence of Hebrew I can think of is In the variants of languages that are spoken by Jews: Yiddish, Ladino, Judaeo-Greek, Judaeo-Persian, Judaeo-Arabic… for all I know, Judaeo-Chinese. In the church register of languages impacted by Christianity. And not a lot of words there. Amen, Satan and Sabbath are probably the […]
What are major languages which declined/extinct during Turkification of Anatolia?
All the answers posted are very good, and a more substantial contribution than I will make. I agree that in all likelihood, by the time the Seljuks came to town, the indigenous Anatolian languages were long gone, and it was all about the retreat of Greek and Armenian. But I was A2A’d. So I’ll talk […]
Are there any Placeholder names we can use to represent different kinds of person?
Placeholder name List of placeholder names by language The typical use in English of placeholder names for persons is to emphasise their random selection, or their representativeness. Hence the rich assortment of List of terms related to an average person, including J. Random Hacker for computing, Tommy Atkins for the British Army, or The man […]
Is Serbo-Croatian a language?
A2A, because apparently I have a great big “kick me” sign on me. (Only joking, Snežana Đorić (Снежана Ђорић)… … or am I?) Look, my personal opinion, as a taxonomist of the world (a Lumper and not a splitter) , is to look at what used to be one language, turned into four over a […]
There are similarities in different words in languages. But the word for “2” is very similar in most of languages. Why this number is so special?
To build on Matthew McVeagh’s answer and comment: Go to the renowned Zompist Numbers List. Two and Three, *duwō and *treyes, are reasonably similar across Indo-European. One gets conflated with Single/Same, *oynos / *sem, and ends up looking different. Four and Five have a *kw, which went different ways in different languages, and get affected […]
Does one accentuate French capital letters?
From this forum: France Forum Canadian French routinely accents capital letters, and Microsoft Word obliges them. The Academie Française says you should accent capital letters. France French usually nowadays don’t accent capital letters. Which means the Quebecois, once again, are being more royalist than the king… Answered 2016-09-11 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Does-one-accentuate-French-capital-letters/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Why was a Greek city with the name Mαρωνεια written Marogna in Latin and not Maronia?
As far as I can tell, you are referring to Maroneia in Thrace, and the rendering Marogna appears in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854) Maroneia is reckoned among the towns of Macedon. The modern name is Marogna, and it has been the seat of an archbishopric. Cramer (1828) also gives the name […]
What are some similarities and common things that Greek has with Arabic?
Commonalities between Greek and Arabic? They belong to different language families—Indo-European vs Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Phoenecian); noone has proven a more distant relation between the two. The alphabet of both derives from Phoenecian; hence the similarity in letter names to this day. That also extends to Hebrew: […]
What is the origin of the expression “Va te faire voir chez les Grecs”?
No disagreement: it’s a reference to Ancient Greek pederasty. Being a classical reference, it would have a classicist, learnèd origin: it’s not a turn of phrase some random peasant on the Loire came up with. Aller se faire voir chez les grecs says that the expression is no early than the start of the 20th […]