Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 327 other subscribersJuly 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
If all indo european languages come from one language, does that mean that it used to be one people who spoke that language?
Probably, but not necessarily. As the astute Joachim Pense put it (answering this question, rather than the OP’s question):
No. Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction that has a scope of many centuries and a large area. The reconstruction is not able to get to a finer resolution.
In fact, the idea has been put out there (by Trubetzkoy) that Indo-European may not have been a single language at all, but a Sprachbund of languages. The reconstruction assumes that it was a single language, but the reconstruction does that for methodological reasons: it’s not like we actually know.
Even if Indo-European was a single people, languages are not genetically transmitted. There’s a lot of genetic diversity in people who speak Indo-European languages now; there may have been some diversity back then too—especially if Indo-European was always a language that spread from place to place, whether culturally or militarily.
Has Komnenos/Komnena survived as a Greek surname in modern Greece?
The question about this is always whether it’s a survival or a revival.
The Greeks of Cargèse for example convinced themselves that their main clan (the Stephanopoli) were descendants of the Comneni, and got the paperwork from the King of France to prove it. As a result, almost everyone from the village is now surnamed Stephanopoli de Comnène. (And they didn’t pronounce it /komniˈnos/ either, when they spoke Greek, but /komˈnenos/. Which shows you it wasn’t a survival, it was them reading Comnène out loud.)
From Komnenos, I see that Konstantinos Varzos did the Comnenan geneaologies in 1984 (1500 pp, linked from the article), and found the last descendant of the royal line died in 1719. And even he may have been lying about it.
So, did the surname survive? Sure. Did the family, as a patronymically passed down surname of the erstwhile Byzantine dynasty? Not as obvious.
Was Newspeak inspired by Esperanto?
Yup.
You could argue (as both the English and Esperanto Wikipedias do) that the main inspiration for Newspeak was Basic English, which Orwell had been a fan of before rejecting. The minimal vocabulary premiss of Basic English (revisited in xkcd: Up Goer Five) is something Orwell derides in Newspeak.
But minimal vocabulary was also a selling point of Esperanto (though one that has been watered down in practice). And the morphology of Newspeak is pretty clearly an allusion of Esperanto and not Basic English. Behind doubleplusungood, you can see Orwell wincing about Esperantists’ praise for compounds like malbonega.
There is excellent circumstantial evidence behind this, which is recounted in the Esperanto Wikipedia article. (See also What is Esperanto? And why did it irritate George Orwell? and George Orwell et l’espéranto)
Orwell himself certainly knew about Esperanto. He went to Paris in 1927 to improve his command of French and to visit his aunt Kate Limouzin, who was the partner of the founder of SAT, Eugene Lanti. Esperanto was the main language used in the house, and for Lanti, as Orwell found out, Esperanto was not just a language but also an ideology. Lanti demonstrated to Orwell (if he hadn’t already realised it) the connection between politics and language. Orwell suffered, because he did not speak Esperanto.
Orwell in Burma, just before going to Paris. I gather those kinds of moustache were all the rage at the time.
And Eugène Lanti wasn’t just some random Esperantist.
Eŭgeno Lanti. Ne nur hazarda esperantisto.
His nom de plume L’anti “The anti-guy” was befitting a socialist opponent of Stalinism, who launched his own anti-nationalist ideology within Esperanto (Anationalism), and who ran the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda. SAT between the wars was the socialist alternative to the “bourgeois” Universal Esperanto Association, and its membership was huge.
Now. You’re 24 and Down and Out in Paris and London, crashing in your aunt’s place, and relying on her handouts. Your aunt is shacked up with a nutjob socialist who keeps preaching about Esperanto. You came to Paris to learn French, and all you hear the livelong day is Esperanto this and Esperanto that, and Esperanto proletarian victory this, and Esperanto against nationalism that—and all of it IN goddamn Esperanto.
Twenty years later, wouldn’t you want to take just a little revenge?
Why do you love linguistics?
Here is an utterly left-field video I saw today, in the context of my day job (because my CTO is awesome). It’s knowledge management consultancy stuff, but I think it goes some of the way to explaining why I love linguistics:
- Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense – Analyze – Respond and we can apply good practice.
- Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe – Sense – Respond and we can sense emergent practice.
Language, like most interesting human phenomena, is a Complex system:
- Things aren’t utterly random, as in Chaotic systems. It is possible to make sense of what is going on.
- Things aren’t just “one plus one equals two, why are you even asking me?”, as in Simple systems. You need expertise and discernment to make sense of what is going on.
- Of course, ill-informed laypeople think language is Simple. That’s the whole Mencken aphorism: “life is full of simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.”
- Because language is Complex, you’ll never solve everything, because the interplay is too complex. But you can keep poking away at it with a succession of hypotheses, and getting a better handle on it. And because it is Complex, you’re never going to run out of things to discover.
- Language is not Complicated, such that an Expert can come up with the complete solution. However, the hypotheses you come up with in the Complex slice are the business of experts, herding together and debating. And they’re fun, because they exercise your expertise. As long as you remember that they are, ultimately, just models.
So I love linguistics because it is a mental challenge (not Simple), and it is inexhaustible (not Complicated), yet it is still tractable (not Chaotic), and it is amenable to the scientific method (Complex).
Of course, that makes linguistics the same as the social sciences, which are Complex for the same reason: humans are involved, so a lot of causal factors are colliding at once. That doesn’t say why I love linguistics and not sociology. I guess that was simply because I was interested in language learning and linguistic patterns. But that’s what kept me interested.
Do you get why I loathe Chomsky now? His approach makes a point of discarding everything in language that makes it Complex. When you reduce language from a Complex to a Complicated system, you’ve reduced it to maths.
Maths is truly a beautiful thing. But language isn’t maths.
(Neither is neurology, which is what Chomsky thinks he’s doing.)
Answered 2016-08-16 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
What are the precise meanings of the Greek words hyperēphanos and hyperphroneō?
Well, I’ve gone to LSJ. The definitions I find there are:
ὑπερφρονέω
- Group I
- to be over-proud, have high thoughts (Aeschylus)
- to be proud in or of something (Herodotus)
- overlook, look down upon, despise (Aeschylus)
- (passive) to be despised (Thucydides)
- think slightly of (Eurypides)
- Group II
- surpass in knowledge (Aeschines); excel in wisdom (Hippocrates)
ὑπερήφανος
- overweening, arrogant (Hesiod)
- bear oneself proudly; living sumptuously, prodigally or insolently, brutally
- magnificent, splendid (Plato)
- sublime (Damascius)
As you can see, hyperphroneō “above-think” can mean both “be more knowledgeable than” or “think that you’re above”; but from those definitions, that seems to have been about generic pride, rather than overestimating one’s abilities.
In the English language, why is remuneration pronounced renumeration?
People do mispronounce remuneration as renumeration all the time, contra some people’s denial of it here.
God knows I’ve done it, and I should know better.
Why do people do it? Because:
- The stems muner– and numer– are confusable through the oldest confusion in the historical linguistics book: Metathesis (linguistics).
- People are familiar with the numer– stem, from numerical.
- A mention of numerical in a word for how much money you get is entirely plausible, since you get an amount of money.
- People are unfamiliar with the muner– stem, for “gift”. It doesn’t show up anywhere else in English, the way numer– does.
- The stem is buried away in muni-ficent “gift-making”, without the –er-. Did you make the correlation?
Did Greeks in the Ottoman age feel Greek or Roman? Why was Greek identity chosen and not Roman when fighting for independence?
Go to Names of the Greeks: much good information there.
On the eve of the Greek War of Independence, the prevalent term for Greeks was Roman (Romioi). That was what the simple folk used, and they used it to refer to Greek Orthodox Christians (the Rum Millet), as the folk of the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire.
The Westernising elite was starting to revive the notion of Hellenes, as heirs of the glories of Ancient Greece, rather than the shame of Ottoman rule—and Byzantium (not much more popular in the West than the Ottomans). From the Wikipedia article, the independence fighters themselves bought into the notion that they were fighting to become Hellenes: the Wikipedia article mentions that
General Makrygiannis tells of a priest who performed his duty in front of the “Romans” (civilians) but secretly spied on the “Hellenes” (fighters)
Makrygiannis—a barely literate peasant, but a gifted storyteller in his Memoirs—embraced his Hellenic identity; and once the Modern Greek State was established, the Hellenic identity was what Greeks were supposed to aspire to, and their Roman identity denigrated. The most touching instance of Makrygiannis’ embrace of a Hellenic identity was his account of how he came to own two ancient statues:
I had two fine statues, a woman and a prince, intact—you could see the veins on them, that’s how perfect they were. Some soldiers had taken them and they were going to sell them to some Europeans, for a thousand thalers. I went over, I took the soldiers aside, and spoke to them. “These statues, even if they give you ten thousand thalers, don’t you stoop to letting them be taken out of our country. These are what we fought for. (I took 350 thalers out and handed it to them.) And when I reconcile with the Governor [Ioannis Kapodistrias], I’ll hand them over to him, and he’ll give you whatever you ask for, so they can stay in our country.” And I’d hidden the statues away. Then, with my report, I offered them to the King [Otto of Greece], so they might be of use to the country.
But in those same memoirs, Makrygiannis recounts that, on the very eve of the War, a Greek excitedly said, “What do you think? We’ll go to bed in Turkey, and wake up in Greece!” But he didn’t call Greece Hellas. He called it Romeiko, the Roman State.
There was a third word, Graikos, that is, of course, just Greek. Modern intellectuals have occasionally used it to differentiate Greek Orthodox Christians (including Slavs, Arvanites and Vlachs) from ethnic Greeks. But it was not used that often.
Is it possible to write English in Greek script? Would it look better?
This could go one of two ways, neither pretty.
You could phonetically transcribe English into Greek, Ancient or Modern, using the phonetics of the Greek alphabet unchanged. As Konstantinos Konstantinides says, that would sound horrible, because it really would be English with Greek vowels and consonants.
In fact, when Greeklish ( Greek in ASCII) was a going concern online, a popular party trick was to drop in some English, transliterated into Greek, but in Roman characters. That should give you a flavor of the ugliness.
Ιφ γιου φάιντ δις βέρι χάρντ του ριντ, δεν γιου γουΐλλ αντερστάντ δατ περχάψ τρανζλίτερεϊτεντ Ίγκλις ιν Γκρικ κάρακτερζ ιζ νοτ α λάικλι άουτκαμ.
If giou fai”nt dis beri xarnt tou rint, den giou gouill anterstant dat perxay tranzliterei”tent Igklis in Gkrik karakterz iz not a lai”kli aoutkam.
Looks a bit like Tok Pisin, only with velar fricatives. An Attic transliteration would not fare much better.
Ἰφ ἰοὺ φαίνδ δὶς οὐέρι ἃρδ τοὺ ρίδ, δὲν ἰοὺ οὐὶλλ ἀνδερστάνδ δὰτ περὰψ τρανσλίτερητεδ Ἴγκλις ἰν Γρὶκ κήρακτερς ἰς νὸτ ἀ λαίκλι αὔτκαμ.
The other alternative would be to use the Roman alphabet as a transcription, one to one, as José A. Ugalde σuggests. There is precedent for this; in fact, the Greeklish I use does this (which is why I had <y> for psi and <d> for delta above). But it would be even sillier.
Some of you will have seen this before too, in the 90s: it would be merely English text typed in Symbol font.
Ιφ υοθ φινδ τηισ ωερι ηαρδ το ρεαδ, τηεν υοθ ςιλλ θνδερστανδ τηατ περηαπσ τρανσλιτερατεδ Ενγλιση ιν Γρεεκ ψηαραψτερσ ισ νοτ α λικελυ οθτψομε.
Has there ever been an attempt to “purify” English by removing Latin/French words and reintroucing the old Germanic words (like many languages did)?
Thanks to Loren Peter Lugosch for posting the Wikipedia link. The most serious recent attempt to purify English was William Barnes.
He called for the purification of English by removal of Greek, Latin and foreign influences so that it might be better understood by those without a classical education. For example, the word “photograph” (from Greek light+writing) would become “sun-print” (from Saxon). Other terms include “wortlore” (botany), “welkinfire” (meteor) and “nipperlings” (forceps).
Enjoy Barnes’ grammar of English, written in purified English:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4…
It’s very reminiscent of the linguistic and grammar works written in Demotic Greek by Ioannis Psycharis and his school.
The other attempts in the past two centuries were either thought experiments, jokes, or in Orwell’s case calls for Plain English.
I find the “that would be horrible” protests here unconvincing. English-speakers are only saying that because English didn’t travel down that path; and English didn’t travel down that path by accident, not by design. (Mike Richmond’s answer captures why.) Is Icelandic (or Modern Greek or German or Chinese) less of a language, because they did choose to travel down that path more than English did? Really?
Why is “40” spelled “forty” and not “fourty”?
Thank you OED:
four < *fowr < Middle English fower < feower < Old English feower
forty since 15th century; fourty Middle English up to 17th century < Middle English fourti (and, in parentheses, forti) < feouwerti < Old English feowertig .So the forti spelling was apparently occasional in Middle English, but not regular.
This took some hunting, and OED wasn’t as much help as I’d hoped. I ended up going to Jespersen A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, §4.69
The regular development was fowər > fowr > foːr > fɔːr.
Jespersen notes, though, that vowels are shortened a lot of the time when they are in the first part of a compound, or preceding a consonant cluster. That’s why five goes to fifty with a short vowel—already in the Ormulum (12th century). You can see that with an original long o in nose > nostril, holy > holiday. You can also see that with an original diphthong ow: know > knowledge, Gloucester /glowsester > gl ɔstə/, rowlock [rɔlək], and, Jespersen says, forty from four.
Now, not so fast. The spelling tells Jespersen that fowərti went to fɔrti with a short o, just like know went to knowledge with a short o. But I pronounce the vowels in four and forty the same, long. What’s happened?
One of the following three things, and possibly all three:
- forty is spelled according to the original Early Modern English pronunciation, and used to be pronounced /fɔrti/ accordingly. It is pronounced /fɔːɹti/ now by analogy with four.
- forty is pronounced /fɔːɹti/ in my dialect, because that’s what r’s do; so my dialect has gotten rid of any distinction between [fɔːɹti] and [fɔɹti]. Americans?
- EDIT: I read English-language vowel changes before historic /r/ the hoarse/horse merger correctly, mourning and morning are pronounced differently in South Carolina, Alabama, and in Scots. If there is a historical survival of short o forty, it will be found in those dialects.
- Likeliest: fourty (with a long vowel) and forty (with a short vowel) were both around in Early Modern English as different pronunciations—as the Mediaeval spelling forti hints at. The short vowel version was acting like fifty, in shortening the ow before the –ty. The long vowel version kept the historical form, whether because of analogy with four, or because the diphthong in fowrty was a late development.
The fourty spelling dies out quickly in the 1600s, and I am convinced by the guess in Why is ‘forty’ spelled without a ‘u’ in Canadian/British English? : the King James Bible happened to choose forty instead of fourty, at a time of orthographic whimsy and/or phonetic instability. And that was that.
What I think is less likely is that four and fourty were pronounced identically in Early Middle English, and the King James switched spelling to forty just because. Things like that do happen, English being English; but because forti was a mediaeval spelling, I think there was an underlying pronunciation difference.
Obligatory disclaimer: this is all a guess.