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Why does the Old Testament (in the English versions) use Greek names instead of Hebrew names?
Well, this won’t sound pleasant, but:
The normative version(s) of English, as with most European languages, are culturally influenced by Christianity more than other religions. (Jewish Englishes will in fact use Hebrew names, just as Yiddish does. But standard English unsurprisingly uses Christian forms.)
Christian knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures was mediated through the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the scripturs—either directly (Orthodox Christianity), or via the Vulgate (Catholic Christianity). Because of this, English (and most European languages) use Greek versions of the names: Moses (actually Mōysēs in Greek), Jerusalem (Greek Ierousalēm), Solomon (Greek Solomōn). The giveaway is that Greek had no sh sound.
If anything, Protestantism has reintroduced some Hebrew names in the King James Version (and the subsequent traditions), that had been Grecisised/Latinised in Catholicism. Compare the names of books in the Douay–Rheims Bible with those in the King James. Isaiah and Zephaniah are not Greek. Nor is Joshua—although the fact that the Greek for Joshua is Iēsous may have had something to do with that too.
How do Greeks distinguish Jesus from Joshua then? By calling the latter “Jesus, son of Naue”—Naue being the Septuagint version of Nun (biblical figure) .
What is a feminine diminutive?
A diminutive is “a word which has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment”: Diminutive . Well done there, Wikipedia.
So not so much an element of speech, but a modification of a word (typically a suffix), used to convey either that this is a smaller version of the thing, that the thing is cute, or that you like the thing/person.
So, a duck-ling is a small duck. A kitchen-ette is a small kitchen. A beast-ie is a cute beast. Annie-kins is Annie, who you like a lot.
When the cute/dear sense of the ending is dominant, you call it a hypocoristic . That is what is used by linguists to refer to English endings like –ie, which are much more about the cuteness than the smallness.
For the feminine sense, I refer you to Zhenrui Liao’s answer, for languages with grammatical gender. Languages without grammatical gender can still use a suffix just to refer to women. English could have gone that way (brun-ette, bachelor–ette), but hasn’t (kitchen-ette, leather-ette).
I can’t find it now, but someone on Quora has recently referred to the Australian English ending –ie as a feminine diminutive. Linguists call it a hypocoristic, because it’s much more about the cuteness than the smallness; and I’m not sure it’s even about the cuteness any more. (sickie for sick leave? mozzie for mosquito?)
What was the original word for “bear”?
What the OP may (or may not) be getting at is the fact that lots of Indo-European languages use descriptive words for bear, rather than the original Indo-European. This makes linguists surmise that there was a taboo about naming bears, so that euphemisms took the word’s place. Thus, the Germanic words for bear ultimately mean “brown”, and the Slavic words ultimately mean “honey-eater”.
As discussed in e.g. The Brown One, The Honey Eater, The Shaggy Coat, The Destroyer , the Indo-European word appears to have survived in Greek, Sanskrit, Latin and Celtic, and can be reconstructed as *h₂ŕ̥tḱos. The article suggests that *h₂ŕ̥tḱos itself may have been a euphemism, meaning “destroyer”.
Why is ‘selfie’ use suffix -ie instead of -y?
Selfie is an Australian coinage: No, a Drunken Australian Man Did Not Coin the Word Selfie. (The article disputes only that the particular guy came up with it, not that it was coined in Australia.) The Australian suffix used to coin cutesy abbreviations of words (hypocoristics) is conventionally spelled as –ie, not –y—even when it looks weird (so firie for firefighter).
Why do so many people use improper grammar on social media?
As a card-carrying linguist (even though they don’t pay me to be one), I am of course honour-bound to repudiate any claims of better or worse grammar. There is just more formal and less formal grammar, and you use the appropriate register and grammar in the appropriate circumstances. And “proper” grammar is quite improper in informal situations. Try speaking the Queen’s English on the factory floor. (Or in America.)
That said, what is going on is part of a more general devaluing of formality in Western society: it is seen (not unreasonably) as bound up with hierarchy and insincerity. Who wears a suit and tie to a classical concert any more? They did 30 years ago.
Formal grammar has its place, but social media is not it. Informal grammar, conversely, is seen as intimate, hip, and/or playful, which is an asset in social media. Which is why people on social media can go out of their way to ignore formal grammar rules.
They’re not ungrammatical, as far as linguistics is concerned: they’re not jumbling words in random order. They’re just following grammatical norms outside of formal written English. Abbreviations and creative spelling are where the more overt rule breaking lie.
Which language that uses the Latin alphabet has the most accents and diacritics in the world?
Counting distinct diacritics on the Wikipedia page Diacritic , and ignoring the distinction between diacritics that generate new letters and diacritics that don’t:
- Vietnamese has nine: horn, circumflex, breve, bar (đ), acute, grave, tilde, underdot, and hoi (mini-question mark)
- Livonian has six (macron, umlaut, ogonek, superdot, tilde, hacek), but wins points for multiply stacked diacritics, like Vietnamese: ā, ä, ǟ, ḑ, ē, ī, ļ, ņ, ō, ȯ, ȱ, õ, ȭ, ŗ, š, ț, ū, ž. Livonian however is either moribund, extinct, or under revival.
- Lithuanian has four basic diacritics (caron, ogonek, macron, superdot); dictionaries also use acute, grave, tilde for pitch accent. So seven, though in practice only four.
- No others in the list have more than six.
So for commonplace Roman alphabets, Vietnamese still wins. Other scripts do better: Hebrew have 13 Niqqud, though of course vowel pointing is not a regular part of Hebrew orthography.
Minority languages with orthographies devised by modern linguists may have more diacritics. Though I suspect they don’t.
If phonetic alphabets count, then the IPA has at least 43 diacritics (depending on how you count them), and other phonetic alphabets are probably even more profligate.
What is Tutankhamun’s greek name?
King Tut is famous now, but his memory had been quite effectively erased by his successors.
Manetho wrote a Greek history of Egypt listing pharaohs, whose names only kinda sorta line up with the names we find in Egyptian documents. The pharaoh he lists corresponding to King Tut is Rathotis. See the paper Manetho’s Eighteenth Dynasty by Gary Greenberg for more. Marianne Luban in The Identity of Manetho’s Rathotis proposes that Rathotis comes from the Egyptian for “swollen foot” (Oedipus).
In Modern Greek, King Tut is transliterated as Τουταγχαμών.
In ancient Greece, in place of “Sire” or “Your Grace,” how were people of stature addressed? Is there a gender neutral term?
The relevant monograph is: Greek Forms of Address: From Herodotus to Lucian (Oxford Classical Monographs) (9780198150541): Eleanor Dickey. See review at Bryn Mawr Classical Review 97.11.09
The male defaults were anax/basileu (king), despota (lord, master), and kyrie (ditto). If you were talking to a king in antiquity, I think you just called them “king”: the familiar circumlocutions of majesties and excellencies are later inventions. LSJ says kyrie is late, and despota is what slaves used. Doing a search on the TLG, up to 2nd century BC, and skipping the Septuagint (which uses kyrie a lot), I find 96 instances of despota, and 9 of kyrie.
Kyrie “Lord” is of course the usual title for Christ in Greek (hence Kyrie eleison, “Lord have mercy”), as well as the usual rendering of Lord in the Septuagint—though despota turns up in Greek hymnography as well. My recollection is that despota was usual for Byzantine emperors.
For feminines, the best default I can think of is despoina, feminine of despota. It is a common title for the Virgin Mary later on.The feminine of kyrios, kyria, also appears to be post-classical.
Abstractions like “majesty” and “excellency” are late, like I said, and certainly in Modern Greek they are not used to address anyone. (Η αυτού μεγαλειότης “his majesty”, but μεγαλειότατε “most majestic one!”.) Which means that, since Greek has always had grammatical gender, there have never been any gender neutral terms.
If hysterisis is “to lag” then what is “to lead” in greek?
The verb ‘to lead” is hegeōmai, but that’s not quite what you’re asking.
hysterisis is a noun, derived from the verb hysterizō “to come after, to come late” (e.g. to lag), which in turn comes from the adjective hysteros “latter, last”. Your question sounds like it’s asking “what’s the opposite of hysteresis?” The opposite noun would have to come from a verb derived from proteros “earlier” or prōtos “earliest, first”.
The verb exists: prōteuō “to be first, hold first place”. The corresponding noun, prōteusis, has been used at least once, in a monastery legal deed from 1012, although its meaning in context is “precedence, foremost position” (that is, holding first place).
How did the “Swastika”, which is said to be the symbol of the Aryan race, get its place in Hinduism?
As always, good outline in Wikipedia: Swastika
To summarise:
- Lots of ancient civilisations used the swastika as a symbol, because it’s an easy shape to draw.
- Because lots of ancient Indo-European civilisations used it (including Indians, Greeks, Celts, and Armenians), German archaeologists assumed it was a symbol of the original Indo-European people.
- OTOH the Chinese and the Navajo used it too, so that was not that good a guess.
- Because Indo-European may have spread through conquest, Germans assumed the original Indo-European people must have been kick-ass warriors, that they would be proud to call their ancestors.
- There might have been conquest, and there might have been cultural diffusion; who knows.
- The only name that looks like it might possibly have been a name for the original Indo-European people is Arya, shared between Indians and Persians. Hence, Aryans.
- Notwithstanding the general swarthiness of Indians and Persians, if the original Indo-European people were such kick-ass warriors. Germans concluded that they must have been blond, blue-eyed Germans.
- I shit you not.
- So if you want to extol the racial primacy of Germans, you will rally around the symbol that your glorious ancestors must have used—and by historical accident, that the Jews were one of the few peoples not to have made much use of.
So. Hinduism (and Buddhism, and Paganism, and the Navajo) came first. Then came guesswork about Indo-Europeans. Then came German racialist nationalism.