Why does the word ‘correlation’ have two r’s?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

The Latin prefix for “with” was con-, but like other Latin prefixes, its final consonant changed to match the following consonant. So com-pare, col-late, cor-rupt. The prefix in- does the same: im-port, il-literate, ir-relevant.

Now, another variant of con- was co-, before h and vowels: co-herent, co-agulate. English generalised this version of the prefix into a new version of the prefix, which did not care what letter followed it (so long as you use a hyphen). So if the notion of co-dependency had been invented 200 years ago, it would have been condependency, because the co- prefix had not become generic yet.

So it’s spelled cor-related rather than co-related, simply because it is an older word.

Spelling: Why can’t we officially remove silent letters from English words and otherwise make English more consistent?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-23 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: English, Writing Systems

It’s not just that the words came from languages where the silent letters used to be pronounced. It’s also that silent letters were reintroduced by pedants, to remind people of the languages they came from, though they had long since passed out of pronunciation.

Latin debitum went to French and Middle English dette (via *debte). French to this day has no problem spelling it dette. But when in the Renaissance English scribes worked out that dette came from debitum, they put a silent –b– in as a reminder—even though the –b– hadn’t been pronounced for hundreds of years.

Yes, phlegm is spelled like that because it comes from Greek phlegma. But the thing is, both Middle English, and Middle French that the word came via, were more phonetically spelled. And in fact the story of phlegm is much like the story of debt:

phlegm – Wiktionary

From Old French fleume, Middle French flemme (French flegme), and their source, Latin phlegma, from Ancient Greek φλέγμα ‎(phlégma, “flame; inflammation; clammy humor in the body”), from φλέγειν ‎(phlégein, “to burn”).

So the word starts out in Latin as phlegma (complete with p pronounced as /pʰ/.) Along the way, it changes pronunciation to:

  • flegma (Imperial Latin)
  • flegme (Proto-French)
  • fleume (Old French)
  • flemme (Middle French)
  • fleme (Middle English)
  • flem (Late Middle English)

Each phonetic change on its own makes sense as a simplification, and Middle English had no problem spelling the word consistent with those simplifications. (Although silent e‘s and double letters aren’t quite phonetic spelling, they are still useful for differentiating long and short vowels; so flemme or flemm would be a consistent way of spelling it.)

Then in the Renaissance some pedant realised that flemme came from phlegma. As a result, French put back in a silent –g-, and English also put in the Greek ph-.

The change of phlegma to flemme is not random, and the respelling of flemme as phlegm is not random either. But to boast that the randomness is proof of how organic English is, and how it doesn’t have an Académie, is misguided. Respelling flemme as phlegm is exactly the kind of shit an Académie would pull…

Note that the –gm– to –mm– happens in French, and is accompanied by the dropping of final –e. Other Greek words ending in –gma were borrowed later, and directly from Latin or Greek; they have no problem keeping the –gma. Stigma, dogma, magma.

(Vernacular Greek, on the other hand, did simplify –gma. The formal pronunciation of phlegm in Modern Greek is fleɣma; but my grandmother always said flema—by the same process that came up with Modern English and French /flem/.)

What was the characteristics of the Greek dialects that were once spoken in western Anatolia?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

I assume OP is asking about the West Anatolian dialects of Modern Greek, not Ancient Greek.

1. Not studied enough.

2. Not old. Pontic and Cappadocian are relic dialects, cut off from the rest of Greek for a millenium, and they are both archaic in phonology and morphology, and influenced by Turkish to a great extent. (Syntax in Pontic, which also picked up animacy from Caucasian languages; much more influence in Cappadocian, ranging even to vowel harmony.)

Western Anatolian dialects OTOH look a lot like mainstream Greek, and we know that Western Anatolian was islamised quickly; we assume they were resettled from Greece from the 16th century on.

3. Bithynian (NW Anatolia), from memory, is like Thracian (which I’m not counting as West Anatolian), though we know some Bithynian villages were settled from Epirus.

4. There were two villages on the Sea of Marmara settled from Tsakonia, though their Tsakonian was influenced by Thracian/Bithynian. Where are the Tsakonian villages in Turkey?

5. The dialect of Halicarnassus/Bordum (SW Anatolia) is pretty close to the Dodecanese.

6. The dialect of Smyrna/Izmir and its hinterland is not well studied at all, but seems to have been close to the Cyclades.

7. The only West Anatolian dialect that seems to have been old, and a relic from earlier times, was that of Livisi (Kayakoy village near Fethiye). It’s like Dodecanesian and Cypriot, but odd.

8. If Konya counts as Western Anatolia, then you can count the dialect of Silli as an old dialect as well; it’s a bit like Cappadocian.

What is the etymology of the name suffix “maus” seen in the name “Oenomaus”/Oenamaus” where the prefix “oeno” stands for “wine”?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

The book reviewed here: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.07.58  proposes μέμαα, μέμονα “lust for”, “be eager”, “rage”. (The verb is related to mēnis, the rage of Achilles.) So, “striving for wine”. The book is about poetic etymologies, so it’s not clear to me this would be a linguistically correct derivation; but looks like it’s right, because you can always trust German scholarship:

In Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie. Band 3,1, Leipzig 1902 http://www.archive.org/stream/au… , “striving for wine” is given, but rejected. From what my poor German tells me, everyone accepts that –maos is from μέμαα , but they reject that oino– is about wine, suggesting that it was insteaed ϝινο- “strong”, οἰν-οψ “dark”, or οἰωνός “bird of prey”.

The derivation from μέμαα threw me, but it’s an old enough verb for it to make sense. I can’t find any other words ending in –maos.

Evolutionary changes often hold improvements out of natural selection. Does the memetic evolution of languages hold any improvements, and if so, in what sense?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-19 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Very, very good question, and I don’t know if I will answer it satisfactorily.

Yes, language evolves, and yes, particular features of language are “naturally selected” because they count as an improvement.

The catch is that humans have conflicting criteria for what is desirable in human language. These seem to result in an equilibrium: languages do not evolve too far in one direction, because to do that would fulfil one criterion but break another.

For example, easiness is a criterion; and lots of phonological change is aimed to make language easier to pronounce. But if that trend went unchecked, it would continue until all human language consisted of “uh”, and it does not: there are several countervailing criteria, including communicativeness, vividness, distinctiveness, and iconicity.

And that’s because language is not used for just one purpose (to communicate), or with one goal (to be easy—and easy phonology is not the same as easy morphology).

English has had a slow, lumbering evolutionary process to make vowel length predictable, which April McMahon goes through in her textbook on language change: Understanding Language Change . Since vowel length is entirely predictable in Scots, you could argue that Scots is the evolutionary endpoint of English.

Yet even within English, there has been backsliding in this process. British privacy with a short /ɪ/ follows the long-term evolutionary trend, to make vowel length easier to learn. But in this instance, the trend runs afoul of iconicity, which says that if privacy comes from private, the two words should sound the same. Hence American and Australian privacy use the same long /aj/ as private.

What does the Portuguese language sound like to foreigners?…

By: | Post date: 2015-12-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

In my considered opinion, Portuguese sounds like a drowsy headcold.

I randomly surveyed a representative sample of objective language critics (my wife), and have the additional answer “tongue-twisted”.

Do languages other than Turkish have intensified adjectives? How are these intensified adjectives constructed? I am especially interested in the case of Japanese.

By: | Post date: 2015-12-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

To add to Achilleas Vortselas’ answer for Greek,

The prefix παν- “all” is another intensifier, which was also in use in Ancient Greek. So πάμμαυρος “all-black” (which is not ancient), παμμάταιος “all-vain” (which is).

Greek also has superlative adjectives (so μαυρότατος “blackest”).

And a colloquial (negative) intensifying prefix is in fact… καρα-, which is Turkish kara– in OP’s question. This is mostly used with nouns, e.g. καράβλαχος (not “black Wallachian”, but “damn hillbilly”), but it does extend to verbs (καρατσεκάρω “black + English check: “I’ll damn well check”), and occasionally adjectives:  Google has 673 instances of καραάσχετο, Internet Greek for “damned irrelevant” (i.e. “this is irrelevant to the thread, but…”)

What does the Lord’s Prayer really say in the original Greek?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-17 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

Like a lot of Ancient Greek verbs, aphiēmi has an impossibly broad range of meaning. Literally, it means “send from”. If you look at the range of meanings in LSJ (which is Classical Greek rather than Biblical Greek, but that helps us avoid the temptation of theologically influenced glosses), you’ll find:

I. send forth

II. send away

II.1.b. let go a person, release a person; and as a ditransitve, release a person from  something, acquit someone from something.

As others have said, releasing someone from a debt is the same thing as forgiving someone’s debt. (In fact, one of the instances of “release a person” given is from Polybius, “release them untaxed”, i.e. let them not pay their taxes.) But the concept involved is  forgiving a debt (or “trespass”), not  forgiving in general.

Why do some Latin borrowings of Greek words ending in -ων end in -o (like Apollo), while others end in -on (like Orion)?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-15 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

-o, -onis is the native Latin declension. –on, -onis is not native Latin, so it is a morphological import from Greek.

So if it drops the -n, the word or name has been felt to be common or salient enough to be nativised as Latin. If it does not drop the -n, it is felt to be a Greek loanword, and is being spoken, as it were, with a Greek accent.

Apollo was a well established god in the Roman pantheon; in fact Wikipedia indicates he was already in Etruscan, as Apulu. So his name was assimilated into Latin, and dropped the -n. Orion was not a well established figure in Roman mythology; so his name stayed looking more like Greek.

Same story with famous vs not so famous Greeks. Plato, Crito, Zeno, but Euphorion, Solon, Philemon. And yes, it’s a very arbitrary dividing line, and accordingly you will find names with both endings: Euphorio or Euphorion, http://latinlexicon.org/definiti…

Of course, this only applies to the Greek –ōn, -ōnos declension (Latin -o, -onis); if it’s a different declension, Latin will stick with –on; eg Xenophon, -ontis.

Why is the Parthenon of Athens not listed as one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world?

By: | Post date: 2015-12-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Culture

1. If the first list of the Seven Wonders was compiled by Herodotus (Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), then the Parthenon was under construction at the time he compiled it; and even if it had been built, it would have been too new to include. But that argument doesn’t work, because the Mausoleum was done after Herodotus.

2. The criteria for the Seven Wonders appear to have been Big Is Beautful, rather than rewarding perfect structures per se. And perfect temples were probably a dime a dozen back in the day. Per the wikipedia link above, the  original term was θεάματα, “spectacles, sights”, and the emphasis was on the spectacular. Antipater of Sidon’s list, which is quoted there, is also all about the spectacular:

I have gazed on the walls of impregnable Babylon along which chariots may race, and on the Zeus by the banks of the Alpheus, I have seen the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Helios, the great man-made mountains of the lofty pyramids, and the gigantic tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the sacred house of Artemis that towers to the clouds, the others were placed in the shade, for the sun himself has never looked upon its equal outside Olympus.

The Parthenon may be perfect, but it is not impregnable, gigantic, a man-made mountain, or towering to the clouds.

3. It has been argued by Anthony Kaldellis (Department of Classics)  that the Parthenon was not considered that big a deal in antiquity, and that its reputation as an amazing structure only emerged in Byzantine times, when it was a church. (Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.12.18 , https://www.lsa.umich.edu/UMICH/… )

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