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Category: Other Languages
How does Hungarian sound to someone who doesn’t speak it at all?
One of my favourite pastimes when I was younger was to channel-surf to SBS (the multi-cultural broadcaster), and try and guess the language being spoken in the movie I’d landed halfway through. The rule of thumb I’d worked out is, if they sound Turkish and look Swedish, they’re Hungarian. Answered 2016-04-12 · Upvoted by Jácint […]
Why does Basque sound like Spanish despite Spanish being linguistically closer to French, Persian and Hindi?
The Greek spoken in Southern Italy sounds like it’s spoken by the Mario brothers. The Greek spoken in the Ukraine sounds soaked in vodka. And when I’m not in Greece, my dentals become alveolar: I sound like a caricature of “Uncle Nick from America”. Basques live in Spain. The grammar has remained impervious to contact, […]
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 […]
Why are the current Serbo-Croatian languages still based on the same standard dialect as opposed to the local dialects they still coexist with?
Inertia. The standards are already there, and presumably will have already made massive inroads against the local dialects. It’s very difficult to change your standard language if you already have one, and build a new standard. It’s much easier to just rebadge your existing standard with some tweaks. So it’s easier to keep standard Croatian […]
History: Which cultures or societies went from being literate to illiterate? As in a script becoming extinct or some other reason.
This is a mythological rather than factual answer, but: The Hmong people were illiterate, but they lived at the crossroads of a bunch of literate cultures—the Chinese, the Thai, the Vietnamese, the Laotians. The Hmong noticed. And they figured that they must not always have been the downtrodden illiterates that they were: surely they too […]
How did names like Anatoly and Arcady become names in Russia?
Partial answer: from St Anatolius: Anatolius of Laodicea and Anatolius of Constantinople. Saints’ names are the default source of given names in Orthodoxy. The question then becomes, why this saint’s cult was so much stronger in Russia than in Greece—I’ve never heard of a Greek called Anatolios, and the Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit has only […]
Historical Linguistics: In simple terms, what are the laryngeal consonants h₁, h₂, h₃? What do they have to do with the word “name” in various languages? What do they have to do with Proto-Indo-European?
This is self-indulgent of me, but this is how I presented the laryngeal theory to my poor Historical Linguistics students in 2002. Saussure (1879): let’s look at Ablaut in proto–Indo-European: e:o:Ø Greek patéra, eupátora, patrós [father.ACC, of.good.father, father.GEN] eR:oR:R̩ where R is a resonant (jwrlmn): R=w: Greek eleusomai, eiléːloutʰa, éːlutʰon [I.will.come, I.have.come, I.came] […]
Has emergence of case system ever been observed?
Though it doesn’t look like Indo-European case, serial verb constructions have ended up turning into case markers. An instance is Chinese ba, which is primarily the verb “take”, but which has started to act like an accusative marker: “I take spear look” > “I ACC spear look”, I pick up the spear to look at […]
What are languages you can understand even though you never learned them?
I have high school French, self taught Latin, and Esperanto. I’ve never studied Italian, but between working in an Italian languages department, exposure to classical music, and some guesswork, I’ve actually had basic Italian conversations while in Italy. Answered 2016-03-03 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-are-languages-you-can-understand-even-though-you-never-learned-them/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Does Monaco have its own language, or local dialect?
Yup. Close to the dialect of Genoa, which Monaco sits next to: Monégasque dialect. There’s been some promotion of Monegasque recently, but Monaco isn’t in the right part of the world for promoting small languages. The Duchy of Savoy (in the same general area, and homeland of Franco-Provençal/Arpitan) made French its official language three years […]