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Category: Other Languages
Why did Old Armenian change -ա to -այ (-a to -aj)?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D6%84%D5%A1%D5%B0%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%A1%D5%B5#Old_Armenian I know nothing about Armenian, Old or New, apart from vosp, ’cause I like lentil soup. I stared for half an hour at: A Grammatical Sketch of Classical Armenian, Damme, Dirk Van – a Short Classical Armenian Grammar Grammaire armenienne : M. Lauer and A. Carriere . I think I have the answer. Old […]
Can you follow root words and follow the immigration routes?
Famously, yes in the case of Romani: http://am.uis.no/getfile.php/Ark… Through the common vocabulary of all the Romani dialects, we can trace their migration from India, through Iran, Georgia and Armenia, to Greece/Anatolia, to Romania. After Romania there is a dispersal throughout Europe: there is no further common vocabulary between Romani dialects. (from: Romani people, though this […]
What would have world lost (apart from some more password combinations) if it had not used capital letters?
Not a whole lot. Consider: Only very few scripts even have a case distinction: Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian. Georgian and Cherokee are picking up case now, but that’s not because they need to, that’s because they’re being culturally influenced from hegemonic scripts. Languages vary wildly in what they choose to capitalise. German capitalises nouns; most […]
Which is the origin of Aromanians?
Ah yes. There isn’t enough of a bulls-eye on my back in Quora already. There are two schools of thought on the origin of Aromanians, as discussed in Wikipedia: A1. The Aromanians are descendants of Greeks (or at least, Greek-speakers) who were Latinised during Roman rule. A2. Slight variant on this: the Aromanians are descendants […]
How many placenames have been Turkicised in Turkey?
If by Turkicised, OP, you simply mean “made to adhere to Turkish phonotactics, and often Vowel Harmony”, the answer is indeed most if not all. To add to Pierrick Jaouen’s examples, stin Poli (to the City) > İstanbul, is Nikea (to Nicaea) > İznik, Oinoë (mediaeval Greek /ynoi/) > Ünye, Ikonion > Konya, Kaisareia > […]
Why are there relatively few personal names shared between Indo-European languages?
Brian is of course correct that naming simply isn’t as stable as, say, the Swadesh-100 list of core vocabulary, or for that matter syntax (VSO, SOV, SVO). Things change much more quickly now than they used to, so you could object to Brian’s example. In English, the most popular names change radically every couple of […]
Should Persian (Farsi) officially switch to the Latin script?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingilish Choice of script is always about ideology. Always. It’s not about linguistic rationality. In fact, when the missionaries or linguists come to town and start devising orthographies for previously unwritten languages, one of the language communities’ frequent concerns is that their orthography should look different from the tribe down the road. Latin swept the […]
What linguistic studies have been done on the words spoken when “speaking in tongues”?
Christine Kenneally (born in Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian-American journalist who writes on science, language and culture. Trained as a linguist, she has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Slate, New Scientist, and Australia’s Monthly, among other publications. Christine Kenneally is someone I resent the hell out of, because she went to […]
What is one random thing you like about Albania?
The way familiar words (Greek or Turkish) look in Albanian. xham. suxhuk. trëndafill. And the word you just gave me: sufllaqe. Answered 2016-07-02 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-one-random-thing-you-like-about-Albania/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What are the earliest documented texts in Albanian?
This came out of an exchange I had with Kelvin Zifla, over at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why do I experience a profound feeling when I read and understand old writings of my mother language? It involves correcting Wikipedia, though I’m not bothering to just yet. There are three definite oldest attested texts in Albanian. […]