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Is there a word which can be used to describe a pair of names which are different gendered variants of the same name?
It’s a fascinating question, and I don’t know that there is an existing word.
Partly, that’s sexism, and partly, that’s the bias of historical linguistics in explaining derivation: Martina is the “feminine variant” or “feminisation” of Martin, and it doesn’t occur to people to describe the relationship of Martin back to Martina. In the rare instances where a masculine name is derived from a feminine (Catarino < Caterina is the only one that occurs to me), I still think noone has bothered to describe the pair Caterina, Catarino as anything.
Zeibura S. Kathau, I miss having the kinds of pub conversations you’re having.
I like Uri Segal’s zeugonym, and Audrey Ackerman’s didymonym. (Haven’t seen you in my feed in a while, Audrey, but that’s because I’ve muted Game of Thrones 🙂
Heterophylonym “other gender” is the pedantic answer, but it’s too long. Heteronym is already taken; how about phylonym “gender name”? (Phylon is both “tribe”, hence phylum, and “gender”.) There seems to be only very little usage of phylonym in the sense of “phylum”.
Genos has a similar ambiguity between “generation” and “gender”, and to my surprise genonym is already defined to mean a generational name: An Alphabetical Guide to the Language of Name Studies.
How would you describe your first or almost-native language to someone who doesn’t speak it?
Thx4A2A.
I’ve already answered a related question from a linguist’s perspective: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What makes Modern Greek an interesting language to learn, from a purely linguistic point of view?. But this question really should be about a lay description.
(But I can’t resist telling Ilir Mezini: it’s Albanian, missing half the letters, and with even more Greek words in it. 😉
Modern Greek is a historical battleground, caught between its ancient heritage, and its more recent, variegated past. Lots of texture and hidden battles in there, of which only some have been resolved, and many have been resolved only recently.
It’s a staccato, rapid fire, impassioned language—although you should listen to some regional accents; Cretan and Cypriot are pleasantly sing-song, in different ways.
And of course I will use the Cretan Muslim village of Al-Hamidiyah in Syria to illustrate. Contrast the intonation of the journo, straight outta Athens, with the locals’:
As Indo-European languages go, it has rather more grammar than you’re used to, including some entrenched randomness in the verb system (sigmatic vs asigmatic aorists), random genders, and an accusative and genitive.
Compared to Classical Greek, it is drastically simplified, and the simplifications mostly are rather sensible. Although a classicist I once asked did say it looked like a drunk Ancient Greek.
If you speak a Balkan language, as I alluded above, a lot of its syntax, idioms, and morphology will look rather familiar.
If a language dies does a culture die also?
Language is one of the primary vehicles of culture, and expressions of cultural distinctiveness. But it is not the only one.
When a language dies, the language community has been linguistically assimilated into another community (assuming the community hasn’t been genocided). That is typically associated with cultural assimilation. But not always.
As a counterexample to both: Irish culture, which is not dependent on the (now tenuous and mostly emblematic) survival of the Irish language. Yeats was no less Irish for writing in English. But Ireland is an island country, and can sustain a distinct culture more readily than, say, Sorbian.
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 > Kayseri. And so on.
Not all towns have kept their old names of course. Rhaedestus was originally Rodosçuk in Turkish; it turned into Tekfurdağı “Byzantine Lord’s mountain” and then Tekirdağ after the 18th century. Some town names have been translated, though the two examples I thought of turn out to have been translated from Turkish into Greek, rather than vice versa: Κιρκλαρελί (contra what is said in Kırklareli: “Forty Churches” is not a Byzantine name) and Gümüşhane (the Pontic Greek name is Kanin, Argyropolis is learnèd).
The biggest Turkish city with a new Turkish name replacing an old Greek name (List of cities in Turkey) is Eskişehir (Byzantine Dorylaeum).
Which was the most southern border city of Byzantine Empire, before Arab conquest?
Since Andrew has blocked me, I have to add a correction here to Dimitris Sotiropoulos on https://www.quora.com/Which-was-…
Iotabe is identified tentatively with Tiran Island, 27°57′N 34°33′E
Syene is Aswan, 24°05′20″N 32°53′59″E
Berenice Troglodytica is 23°54′38″N 35°28′34″E
So Iotabe is not the southernmost point, unless Dimitris has evidence for an alternate identification of Iotabe as being south of Aswan.
Were the classical greek drama texts complete?
Given the addendum from OP: https://www.quora.com/Were-the-c… (which I’ve added to question details):
The bulk of Ancient Greek drama that has survived has survived as part of the postclassical school curriculum, and has been transmitted through manuscript. Even so, we know that bits of the text that the authors must have written (for the text to make sense) has been left off or garbled. Not a huge amount—a verse here, a couple of verses there; but enough that editors exercise their own ingenuity when reconstructing the complete text, and different editors’ of the dramatic texts will be different.
(Usually, it’s the editors, not the translators doing the conjecturing.)
Outside the manuscript tradition, we have significant chunks of Menander in papyrus, but classical dramatists indeed survive only in small fragments; and for the most part, these aren’t snatches of papyrus, but one or two verses quoted here and there by later authors—usually grammarians.
Are there any scientific publications with swear words in them?
Well, there’s the classic ENGLISH SENTENCES WITHOUT OVERT GRAMMATICAL SUBJECTS by Quang Phuc Dong of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (pseudonym of James D. McCawley, 1967), and several others in that vein. But that’s linguists writing about swearing, not swearing per se. (There’s was quite a trend of little “who, me?” bombs in linguistic examples in the late 60s and early 70s, prominently including John called Sam a republican, and then he insulted him from George Lakoff).
OP then asks:
Why censor people’s right to swear just because it is science?
Because it’s science. Scholarly papers are meant to at least pretend that they are arriving at rational conclusions through objective consideration of arguments. Swearing is avoided in scholarly papers, for the same reasons exclamation points are. Because it makes you look like you’re not a scholar, and can’t string together a convincing argument.
In Modern Greek, is there any difference between “I have said” and “I have been saying”?
έχω πει, the perfect tense, is only used in perfective contexts (completed actions); so you can’t use it for “I have been saying”. You will use the imperfect, έλεγα, for that. So Greek makes no distinction between “I was saying” and “I have been saying”.
The English “I have been saying” looks like it’s both perfect and imperfect; in fact, the tense is imperfect, and the use of the perfect in that combination has its secondary meaning, of “present relevance”. If anything, if you want to emphasise the present relevance in Greek, you will end up switching from the imperfect to the present tense, with an adverbial phrase to indicate that the action was continuous in the past. So:
Σου το έχω πει: I’ve told you
Σου το έλεγα: I was telling you; I have been telling you
Σου το έλεγα εδώ και μήνες: I was telling you for months
Σου του λέω εδώ και μήνες : I have been telling you for months (lit. I am telling you for months)
Why is the Greek letter phi translated into English as “ph” and not “f”?
Because when Latin started transliterating Greek, φ was still pronounced as /pʰ/: a p followed by an h. The shift of /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/ occurred later (the first evidence for it, Koine Greek phonology notes, is from Pompeii.)
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 decades; name fashions moved in a time scale of centuries in the 1500s. In Greece, where naming traditions were much more conservative until quite recently, names are specific to regions, and perpetuated from grandparent to grandchild. (Manuel is stereotypically Cretan, Athanasius is mainland.)
Christian names (not only from the Bible, but also names of saints) have of course also displaced other naming traditions to greater or lesser extents.
Well, writ large, you see change in naming tradition in the branches of Indo-European as well. Germanic, Greek and Indic share a naming tradition of compounds: Themistocles “glory of law”, Archimedes “counsel of leaders”. This is likely an Indo-European inheritance, and may or may not have been just for nobles. But there’s no trace of it in Latin.