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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 comes from Proto-Indo-European *seh₁(i)- (“to send, throw, drop, sow, deposit”).
сидеть, like sit, comes from Proto-Indo-European *sed-, via Proto-Germanic *sitjaną.
So your question, OP, is actually why are *seh₁-d and *sed– so similar. And the answer still is, sometimes, coincidence happens.
Is there a tendency for languages to gain or lose complex clusters over time?
I’m saying the same thing as JJ Hantsch, but with different emphasis.
Is there a tendency for languages to gain or lose complex clusters over time? Both, but with different causes. Languages lose complex clusters through various processes of phonotactic simplification. Languages gain complex clusters through dropping vowels [EDIT: or adding consonants for ease of pronunciation: Epenthesis].
The gaining of clusters is pretty random, because unaccented vowels can drop out anywhere. Northern Greek dropped all unstressed high vowels, and all of a sudden had to deal with clusters like piðo > pðo “I jump” or mikros > mkros “small”. (At least some variants have dealt with it by epenthesis: imkros. Because mkros NCCVC is an unusual cluster, at least with the NC not being homorganic.)
The simplifications are not fully predictable: for example, Tsakonian has pummelled Greek clusters into CV, with unusual shifts like st > tʰ and tr > tʃ. But yes, I think we can say there is a tendency towards CV in language; it’s just a gradual, random, piecemeal, and easily disrupted tendency—to the extent that it’s not much of a tendency.
Do syllable templates change, as in languages going from CCCVCCC to CV? They can; Tsakonian did. And they can go the other way too, as Northern Greek did.
That’s why dialectology is awesome btw. You get to see multiple outcomes from the single starting point.
Icelandic (language): What is flámæli?
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 prescription, so flámæli has kept going, which what the linked book is about.
The importance of flámæli, which is why I keep mentioning it here and misspelling it, is that language change can be reversed through prescription, but you need special circumstances; and Icelandic is as “special” as it gets (small community, universal literacy). And given that the e/ö merger shows up in Reykjavik teens 60 years later… I guess the success was only temporary.
Why is “then” deictic?
No reference needed further than the Wikipedia definition:
words and phrases, such as “me” or “here”, that cannot be fully understood without additional contextual information — in this case, the identity of the speaker (“me”) and the speaker’s location (“here”). Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to convey any meaning – for example, English pronouns – are deictic.
then is anaphoric, but it is also deictic: the time that it refers to depends on the time that the speaker is speaking. You could argue that its reference is fixed if it is a historical narrative: “Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Then he began the Roman civil war”—refers to 49 BC whether spoken in 2000 or 2050. But in “I will eat, and then I will go to bed”, the time of the then is quite different depending on when the phrase is spoken, because the clause it references itself has its time anchored on the speaker.
If the deictic centre is not fixed but egocentric, then the expression is deictic, even if it’s primarily anaphoric (as then is). The denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place.
What does your Greek handwriting look like?
Originally Answered:
Can I see a sample of your Greek handwriting?
I could say that I’m capable of writing neater than this, but I’d be lying. Twenty years ago: maybe.
Two texts. For modern monotonic, my favourite song lyric, stixoi.info: Του κάτω κόσμου τα πουλιά. For ancient polytonic, the beginning to the Discourses of Epictetus.
Does the study of language have an -ology word, or is it simply linguistics?
The study of language has an -ology word in Greek (unsurprisingly enough): γλωσσολογία /ɣlosoloɣia/, “language-ology”. Italian uses the more Attic version sometimes as well: glottologia.
Beyond those, yeah, linguistics.
What are some slang phrases to describe getting drunk in your language or country?
Greek: Someone drunk is, or becomes:
1. στουπί, meaning oakum, or tow:
- Oakum: “loose fibre obtained by untwisting old rope, used especially in caulking wooden ships.”
- Tow: the coarse and broken part of flax or hemp prepared for spinning.
It’s a traditional society concept, so the modern metaphorical meaning is the main one. Presumably the point is that, like oakum and caulking, you are soaking up a lot of liquid.
τάπα “barrel lid, barrel tap” has the same connotation.
2. τύφλα “blindness”. Fine distinction being made between the adjective τυφλός “blind” and the colloquial noun τύφλα; applied to people, it only means “drunk”, though there is also the expression δε βλέπεις την τύφλα σου “you can’t see your own blindness”, of someone ignorant. Same derivation as “blind drunk”.
3. σκνίπα “gnat”. So drunk as a gnat. Well, Australian English has “pissed as a newt”, so OK.
The wonderful, magnificent, erudite people at SLANG.gr have put together the following list of words referring to inebriation. Some of those will be nonce ad hoc coinages like on Urban Dictionary, but the calibre of SLANG.gr is far higher:
αλοιφή, γκλάβα, γκολ, γόνατα, ζαμπόν, ζάντα,κάκα, κλασμένος, κόκαλο, κομμάτια, κομματιανός, κουδούνι, κουνουπίδι,κουρούμπελο, κώλος, λιάρδα, λιώμα, μανουάλι, μουνί, ντίρλα, πίτα, πλακάκι,σβερκώνω, σκνίπα, σταφίδα, στυλιάρι, στουπί, στρακόττο, τάπα, τούρνα, τούτζι,τσαλμπουράνι, τύφλα, φέσι, φέτα, φσέκι, χώμα.
I’ll mention the words I recognise:
αλοιφή “ointment”, γκλάβα “(informal) head (Slavic glava), γκολ “soccer goal”, γόνατα “knees”, ζαμπόν “ham”, ζάντα, κάκα, κλασμένος “farted”, κόκαλο “bone; (slang) frozen in place, of someone shocked”, κομμάτια “in pieces”, κομματιανός, κουδούνι “bell”, κουνουπίδι “cauliflower”, κουρούμπελο, κώλος “arse”, λιάρδα, λιώμα “molten, pummelled”, μανουάλι “candelabra”, μουνί “cunt; (metaphorically) a mess”, ντίρλα, πίτα “pita”, πλακάκι “tile”, σβερκώνω, σκνίπα “gnat”, σταφίδα “raise”, στυλιάρι, στουπί “oakum”, στρακόττο, τάπα “barrel lid”, τούρνα, τούτζι, τσαλμπουράνι, τύφλα “blindness”, φέσι “fez”, φέτα “feta; slice”, φσέκι, χώμα “dirt; (metaphorically) pummelled, cf. λιώμα)
EDIT: I’m not following all the links, but I like the goal one:
γκολ – SLANG.gr. “I’m goal”, the speculation is, is a corruption of earlier Greek slang είμαι γκον “I’m gone”, where gone is borrowed from English.
Do “quantity” and “quality” also rhyme in your language?
In Modern Greek, posótita and piótita; in Ancient Greek, posótɛːs and poiótɛːs. So… sure.
But look at what’s actually happening here. The two words are derived from the words for “how much” and “what kind” (in Latin, quant-um and qual-e), plus the affix for nominalising adjectives (Latin –itas). It’s literally “how-much-ness” and “what-kind-ness”. If the affix is a suffix, the words are bound to rhyme, or at least end in the same syllable. In fact, it’s English where they off-rhyme: the consonants after the accent are not identical.
As the other answers show, lots of languages calque the terms with native roots. Thus Albanian sasi and cilësi (I recognise cilë, at least); and Croatian purist kakvoća količina (I recognise kak).
How do I translate the Greek word filotimo?
An attempt at a grand unified theory of filotimo.
Eleftherios V. Tserkezis touches on all the key aspects.
It is a Greek’s sense of honour, to use the old fashioned wording; of being respected in society, of social capital. It is what one can take pride in as an engaged member of society.
But this particular sense of honour is not tied up with chastity (as timi is): it correlates with discharging one’s social obligations; one gains honour by doing one’s duty. By meeting the social contract.
And one’s duty consists, to a large extent, of positive politeness strategies: of being considerate (hence the touchiness) and (more importantly) being generous.
There isn’t a simple translation, but I guess “being righteous” in some variants of English comes close.
An a-filotimos person, someone without filotimo, is ungrateful and/or ungenerous. There is a clear sense that, by doing so, this person violates the social contract.
EDIT: and filotimieme, to filotimo oneself, is to volunteer something as expected by the social contract. “He didn’t filotimo himself to offer any help” = “He didn’t bother offering any help, as the social contract demands”. This encompasses financial contracts too: an employee who isn’t doing their job conscientiously is also not doing filotimo.
Why didn’t Turkey claim any Greeks island near their shores?
They did: Imbros and Tenedos. Like the other islands, they were substantially ethnic Greek, but they remained in Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne, presumably because of their strategic importance outside the Dardanelles.
Of the other Aegean islands near the shores of Turkey, the islands from Samos up were ceded to Greece by the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First Balkan War; the Dodecanese went to Italy instead, and were integrated into Greece in 1946.
Fine print in the treaty around the Dodecanese led to the Imia/Kardak sovereignty crisis in 1996. The West Wing made fun of the incident a few years later, situating it on the Greek/Albanian border. I was in Greece at the time, and it was not effing funny.
As for claiming, well, Turkey lost the Balkan War, hence losing most of the islands, and won the Turkish War of Independence, thus getting to claim two strategic islands. Right and wrong doesn’t enter into it, and nor does self-determination; but FWIW, the population of the islands was substantially ethnic Greek even before the population exchanges—although a Turkish minority has remained in place in the Dodecanese, which were not subject to the exchanges.