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Category: Other Languages
Why do I experience a profound feeling when I read and understand old writings of my mother language?
Oh. This is a fascinating question, Kelvin. And Faleminderit to you, shoku! I don’t get that feeling with Ancient Greek. I don’t get that feeling with Old, Middle, or Early Modern English. I do get a slight feeling of something with Early Modern Greek. Allow me to speculate. A lot of it is missing what […]
Icelandic (language): What is flámæli?
https://www.quora.com/profile/Nick-Nicholas-5 What Lyonel said. I’m away from my references 🙁 , but see North American Icelandic. The story is that Icelanders noticed the merger in the 1920s, stigmatised it as “fisherman’s language”, and got rid of it successfully (although the link says that the e/ö merger is still around). In North America, of course, no […]
Why is Russian word “сидеть” (“sidet'” which means “to sit”) so similar with English word “Sydney”?
As others have said: sometimes, coincidence happens. Sydney was named for Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney, and Sidney (surname) derives from Old English sīdan īege, “at the wide island”, i.e. Water-meadow. Old English sid means “wide, extensive, broad”, and is the ancestor of Modern English side. Wiktionary tells me it comes from Germanic *sīdaz, which […]
What is a Hebrew word and a Greek word meaning “fragrance” or “perfume” GENERALLY?
I assume you are asking about Ancient Greek. IGNORE all the Greeks that are about to say ἄρωμα arōma. The ancient meaning of that word, per the Liddell–Scott dictionary, is aromatic herb or spice; not fragrance. Going through Liddell–Scott, I find, in descending order of fit to what you want: εὐοσμία euosmia, “fragrance, perfume”. Literally, […]
How difficult will Albanian be to learn if I already speak Modern Greek?
Yes, the vocabulary is completely different—except for the large number of Greek loanwords in Albanian, which is substantial, and the rather smaller number of Albanian loanwords in Greek. OTOH: Balkan sprachbund. The syntax and inflections are remarkably similar: you can often translate Albanian into Greek and vice versa, word for word. I’m reminded of what […]
How has it happened and Kemal Ataturk did not adopt Greek Alphabet, although in the Ottoman empire the Greek (and Cyrillic) were spoken?
There was use of Greek script to write Turkish: Karamanli Turkish. Illustrated in https://www.quora.com/How-has-it… But without some concerted linguistic work, Greek script was not much better suited to Turkish than Arabic script was. No differentiation between <ı> and <u> for example: both ου. No systematic differentiation of <c> and <ç>, just as Greek (at the […]
Why is it possible for the Cyrillic script to be adopted in so many languages?
What made Roman script suited for adoption? The fact it was adopted a lot. Latin on its own is not particularly suited for a lot of phonemes, but it was the only game in town in Western and Central Europe, and that meant there was a long, long tradition of workarounds—both digraphs and diacritics. So […]
For what reason is the Czech ř hard to pronounce for most foreigners?
It’s a genuinely difficult phoneme to articulate. Back in the 80s, when the Guinness Book of Records was more than a picture book, it was listed as the most difficult to acquire—kids are supposed not to pick it up until they’re 7, and our own Zeibura S. Kathau says they have cram schools for it. […]
How does Turkish sound to non-Turkish speakers?
https://youtu.be/iJZxmfhcSn0 Originally Answered: What does Turkish sound like to foreigners? Like French with a /ɯ/ in it. I was about to say “and without the annoying mumbling”; but, having been to Istanbul: Like French with a /ɯ/ in it. I do actually like the sound of it. (Although as a Greek I’m not allowed to […]
What is the etymology of the Russian word vishnya (cherry)? There seems to be a connection to the Turkish word.
The answers given here have opened up a secondary conundrum. It’s uncontroversial that Turkish got the word from Bulgarian. The controversy is whether the Slavic word came from Greek, the Greek word came from Slavic, or the similarity is a coincidence. The Greek word could easily have come from Bulgarian; and if it’s a Slavic-wide […]