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What’s your favorite word etymology?
This is NSFW. Kinda.
The Greek word for a porn film is tsonta.
The word comes from the Venetian word zonta, which is cognate with Italian giunta and English joint.
The original meaning of tsonta was the same as Louisianan lagniappe: it’s an extra helping, an extra portion of the merchandise you’re buying, that the vendor throws in for free.
The cultural loading of the etymology is just startling. Have you guessed why porn was called tsonta?
And why you can infer from it that Greek movie audiences in the 50s were predominantly, if not exclusively male?
What does Felidae mean? How was the term coined?
Felidae is the Family (biology) that cats and great cats belong to. All animal families are formed with the suffix –idae. In this case, –idae is suffixed to the Latin word felis, meaning cat.
The –idae suffix is a Latin plural counterpart to Greek –idai (singular –idēs), meaning offspring. In the plural, the –idai suffix was used to denote tribes or groupings of people with a common ancestor; e.g. the Heracleidae, the descendants of Hercules. It was also generalised to names of dynasties, and not just Greek ones either: the Fatimid Caliphate is so called as a Hellenisation of al-Fātimiyyūn “offspring of Fatimah”.
So by analogy with Heraclids, “the tribe of Hercules”, and Fatimids “the tribe of Fatimah”, you get felids, the tribe of cats.
Is there any language that uses the Greek Alphabet other than Greek?
Currently, no.
Historically, Greek has been used routinely to write other languages, including the Bactrian language (hence Sho (letter) ), Karamanli Turkish, and Albanian.
Is there a term for borrowings from a language’s own proto-language?
There’s lots of these—Modern Greek from Ancient Greek, Russian from Old Church Slavonic—but I’m not aware of a generic term. In Greek. for example, these are referred to as learnèd loans (λόγιο δάνειο)—but a learned loan in English is a loan from Latin, not Old English. (In fact we do have a term for learned loans in English: inkhorn terms.)
Such borrowings are often the result of linguistic purism, which seeks to use “native” lexical resources instead of foreign terms. But purism isn’t the only motivation for them, so I wouldn’t call them purisms…
How was the term “utopia” coined, and by whom?
The Sir Thomas More answer is correct.
However, the 14th century Byzantine theologian Neophytus Prodromenus independently coined the term in his treatise Against the Latins [Catholics]. In his text, it was a variant of ἀτοπία “un-placed-ness”, which was the Greek word for absurdity, fallacy.
Who coined the term ‘polity’?
1530-40; < Latin polītīa < Greek polīteía citizenship, government, form of government, commonwealth, equivalent to polī́te-, variant stem of polī́tēs citizen
1530s, from Middle French politie (early 15c.) or directly from Late Latin polita “organized government” (see policy (n.1)).
Policy and Police ultimately derive from the same Greek word, but more directly reflect the Latin/French sense of “public order”.
Politeia is a term that gets a lot of use in Classical Greek philosophy, both Plato (it’s the term translated as The Republic) and Aristotle (in his Constitution of the Athenians , the first comprehensive survey of political systems).
The 1530s import of the term directly from Greek/Latin, rather than via French (the tell-tale –c-) points for me to Renaissance rediscovery of the Classics….
… and looking up the OED 1st edition, I’m wrong: the 1530s instance has the same meaning as the French, “public order”. (I wonder if the French politie was a re-Latinisation? OED says it dates from 1419.)
Definition of polity (Aha! So OED content *is* free online…)
1538 STARKEY England 1.ii.51 Pepul, rude, wythout polyty, can not vse that same [riches] to theyr owne commodyte
That’s this guy: Thomas Starkey . The text is A supplicacyon for the beggers : Fish, Simon, d. 1531 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive (mislabelled)
The modern meaning “2. a. A particular form of political organization, a form of government.”, which corresponds directly to the Ancient Greek sense, seems to be first attested in:
1597 Hooker Eccl. Pol. v. lxxix. §3 We preferre..the Spartan before the Athenian Politie. – See more at: http://findwords.info/term/polit…
Looks pretty clearly like an allusion to Aristotle. That’s Richard Hooker , in his book entitled—would you believe it: Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (which still refers to the “policy” sense). The quote is here: Online Library of Liberty
if all men be taught of nature to wish and as much as in them lieth to procure the perpetuity of good things, if for that very cause we honour and admire their wisdom who having been founders of commonweals could devise how to make the benefit they left behind them durable, if especially in this respect we prefer Lycurgus before Solon and the Spartan before the Athenian polity, it must needs follow that as we do unto God very acceptable service in honouring him with our substance, so our service that way is then most acceptable when it tendeth to perpetuity.
What is the answer to a multiplication problem called? Who coined the term?
Product (mathematics) . The Greek for it is the participle γενόμενον, “what has become, what has come into existence”, which I would assume was calqued into Latin as “what is produced”. The LSJ dictionary lists the participle “what has become” for product as being used in Euclid ; but the verb “becomes” for “adds up to…” is already used in Plato.
LSJ reports that δύναμαι “to be capable” was used for “is the result of multiplying two numbers” in Pappus of Alexandria , 600 years after Euclid; so “product” was not the only possible way it could have been named.
Where is Minoa today?
Um. Per Minoa, there are several sites that have been known as Minoa, mostly in the Aegean. But in the sense Minoa is used on Quora, as a shorthand for “site of the Minoan civilisation”, that would be Crete.
In fact, since the Classical survival of non-Hellenic Eteocretan language was in easternmost Crete, where I hail from, I could well say Minoa today is Lasithi preferecture—though that presupposes that Eteocretan is the same as Minoan.
What island did the Minoans inhabit? is a similar question.
How do words like “mouse” get their plural form?
Vowel change was a strategy for forming plurals in Old English. The process is shared among Germanic languages, and is Germanic umlaut. Ultimately it comes from –iz being a plural suffix in Proto-Germanic: the plural of *mūs was *mūsiz, and the plural of *fōts was *fōtiz.
In time, *mūsiz went to mȳs in Old English (pronounced müs), because the following –i changed the vowel in mus by umlaut from /u/ to… <ü> (hence the name umlaut), before the whole –iz suffix dropped off. Middle English lost the /y/ sound, so mȳs became mīs, spelled mice.
Umlaut was one of the two strategies of forming plurals in Old English, and used to be much more common. (The plural of book used to be bēc, just like the plural of foot was fēt.) The other strategy was adding an –s to the noun, and that strategy prevailed in Middle English.
Will artificial languages help me with anything?
Will they improve my thinking, logic, though process or my communication skills or understanding?
All language learning does, and so do artificial languages. I’d argue that you get to some of the interesting aspects of language learning—such as different approaches to semantics—quicker than you would learning natural languages. OTOH, there are some aspects of natural languages—such as pragmatics, discourse strategies, cultural interplay—which will be either immature or non-existent in most artificial languages. (Though what little there was was one of the most fascinating things for me about artificial language communities.)
I found that trying to communicate in artificial languages helped me think about some aspects of language (semantics, discourse structure) without distraction from other aspects (fricking morphology, culture). Then again, I got a similar epiphany from playing around with Tok Pisin…
Lojban will teach you a fair bit about formal semantics and logic, btw. Like both Jim Grossmann and User said, it’ll teach you less than a PhD in Formal Semantics—though probably as much as an undergraduate course in it.