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Category: Other Languages
How is rhyme used in different languages?
Sporadically in Classical Greek and Latin, as a rhetorical technique for both prose and poetry, rather than a basis of verse: Homeoteleuton. Systematically in Arabic and Chinese, but I don’t know much about them. In Europe, rhyme emerges as a structural feature of verse (as opposed to an occasional device) in the Late Middle Ages. […]
How many Indigenous Australian languages are there? How similar are they?
At the time of European invasion *cough* settlement, the guesstimate is 200. The guesstimate is based on poor data, since many were wiped out so quickly, and on Lexicostatistics — because we don’t have enough data to make a good linguistic assessment of what counts as a different language otherwise. We could of course ask […]
Why don’t we all use the IPA?
Nice idea, but of course even spelling reform is near impossible, let along script reform—unless you’re Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and your country is post-Ottoman Turkey. And even when your language community adopts a script from scratch, practicality means the script will look a lot closer to the local majority or prestige language’s script. And the […]
In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?
Roman alphabet digraphs were invented with the digraphs Latin used to represent Greek aspirated letters: <ch th ph>. So <ch> was available very very early on to languages using the Roman alphabet, to represent new sounds. Palatal sounds are notoriously unstable phonologically: once /k/ goes to [c] (as it did in late Latin), it can […]
Why do Greek and Cyrillic have different collation order than Roman alphabet?
The collation of Greek and Roman are pretty similar, as Philip said, once you factor out archaisms, and the tendency to insert new letters at the end of the alphabet. The original Roman alphabet matches to the original Greek alphabet pretty well: A ΑB ΒC ΓD ΔE ΕF ϜG —— ΖH Η— ΘI ~ J […]
Would Hebrew be better revived if linguists did it?
Language revivals almost never restore the language to what it was. Because the initiatives say they are “revivals” and not “reinventions”, they don’t particularly highlight the fact: but yes, there are much more Yiddish grammar and German calques and Ashkenazi phonology in Modern Hebrew than linguistically there should be—to the extent that Ghil’ad Zuckermann considers […]
Will languages other than English eventually die out?
I’m not as sanguine as other respondents on this. If history and human and society go on as they have done, then yes, there are centripetal and centrifugal pressures on language: communities want to be understandable within each other, but communities also want to sound distinct from each other. The community you identify with in […]
The status of Urum
I’ve already posted about the seesaw in the Soviet Union of the ’30s between Demotic and the indigenous variants of Greek, Pontic and Mariupolitan. As I’ve also mentioned, Greek is not the only language spoken by the ethnic group around Mariupol. A minority instead speak the Turkic language Urum. A group identifying itself as Greek […]
What is the longest word of Sanskrit?
In the post on the longest words of Greek, I mentioned the fact that Sanskrit, as reported in the Guinness Book of Records, has produced a word over twice as long as Aristophanes’ monsterpiece. If any non-agglutinative language was going to best Greek in that regard, it would of course be Sanskrit: a language of […]
Maronite Arabic in Cyprus
Cyprus, though quirks of history, has been more sanguine about linguistic diversity than Greece has been. I remember my Cypriot father’s shrugged “yeah, there were some Armenians too, and a village of Maronites“, vs my Cretan mother’s astonished retelling of her first encounter with her sister’s new (Arvanite) in-laws: “And all of a sudden… they […]