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Could emojis ever replace written language? Why or why not?
If you want emojis to be not just a bunch of nouns, but the basis of a full written language, with verbs and prepositions and pronouns—then you’re going to need to supplement emojis with some sort of grammatical sign system. They will end up looking a lot more like Blissymbols.
Was the Byzantine Empire in the Greek medieval state?
Yes and no, but in a different way from Andrew Baird’s answer.
The lingua franca and administrative language was Greek. The Empire called itself Roman, but its scholars knew a lot about Ancient Greek and very little about Rome. The core of the Empire was Asia Minor, much of which was Greek-speaking until the Turkish invasions, and Greece.
But at least until the Fourth Crusade, the Empire was bigger than Asia Minor and Greece, and its ethnicities matched—whatever language they may have used in writing and the church. A large number of its emperors and officials were ethnic Armenians, and had the surnames to match (Category:Armenian Byzantine emperors, e.g. John I Tzimiskes). The scholar John Tzetzes was proud of his Georgian heritage. John Koukouzelis, who reformed Byzantine chant, was most likely Bulgarian.
I have a cousin with an Arvanitika surname, Tzathas. When she went to uni, her prof commented how her surname sounded “Byzantine”. And it would indeed sound Byzantine, since that was when half the surnames of famous people weren’t Hellenic.
Byzantines resented Westerners calling them the Greek Empire instead of the Roman Empire—not only because it denied them continuity with the Roman Empire, but also because Byzantium wasn’t confined to Greece. Of course, Byzantines, and their successor state the Ottomans, were profoundly indifferent to ethnicity anyway, which is why the non-Hellenic background of Byzantines was not paid much attention. What mattered was religion; which is why the Ottoman Rum Millet and the Modern Greek use of Romioi (Names of the Greeks ) primarily referred not to ethnic Greek, but to Orthodox Christians.
How did the future tense appear in Latin?
The future -b-, and for that matter the imperfect -b-, come from the Indo-European verb for “be”, bhu: The Latin Language. So amabo originally meant “I am to love”, and amabam “I was to love”. The process of words turning into grammatical affixes is called Grammaticalization. And one of the characteristics of grammaticalisation is that it happens over and over, in the same language: French aimerai involves the same process as amabo, but with the verb for “have” rather than “be”.
What makes Modern Greek an interesting language to learn, from a purely linguistic point of view?
- The consequences of diglossia, which persist even if diglossia itself does not—including the trainwreck of Modern Greek phonology from all the spelling pronunciations from Ancient Greek, the lexical and morphological doublets, and the all-round linguistic insecurity.
- The survival of archaisms in Indo-European, including the middle voice (semantically), the vocative, and the three genders
- As Joachim said, the survivals and reorientations from Ancient Greek. I’ve often been curious what Modern Greek looks like to classicists; the best answer I’ve heard is “drunk”.
- The dialectal diversity (though Greek is hardly unique in that.)
What are the origins of the inhabitants of Mani in Greece – are they Spartan?
Agree with George Bekas, and one should always be wary of claims of genetic purity. But we do know anecdotally that:
- Its major town Gythium was a Spartan port
- They were very late converts to Christianity (10th century: Nikon the Metanoeite)
- Mani was a no-go area for certainly the Ottomans, and likely earlier invaders—so it’s certainly possible that they have more Ancient Greek DNA (ugh) than their neighbours. We do know that there were Slavic settlements to the north of Mani (Melingoi, Ezeritai), and that Slavonic was still spoken in the area in the 15th century (John Cananus)
- They speak an archaic dialect of Modern Greek [Maniots]—although not one with notable Doric lineage (unlike the Tsakonian language)
- They have contempt for the inhabitants of the neighbouring lowlands, calling them Vlachs. A couple of rich ironies about this:
- 1. Elsewhere in Greece, Vlachs refers originally to Aromanians, and in colloquial usage, is equivalent to hillbilly—referring to highlanders, not lowlanders.
- 2. When the Maniots settled in Corsica (Cargèse), Vlachs is what they called the surrounding Corsicans. Who at least did speak a Romance language.
Are speakers of present-day Volapük generally able to read texts in the original Schleyerian Volapük?
I don’t know the answer, but I will point out something the OP is aware of, but others may not. Like many artificial languages, Volapük underwent significant reform in 1931. I don’t know to what extent Volapük Nulik and Volapük Rigik are mutually intelligible, but if they aren’t, that’s just yet another instance of artificial language reform—and not that interesting to students of artificial languages. It’s the unplanned shifts in artificial languages, I’d argue, that are unexpected and interesting.
What is the most minimal language?
Artificial languages are where you’d look of course, and there are much simpler languages than Esperanto. Basic English was renowned for having a small vocab. My own favourite, with a comparably small vocab and a much tighter grammar, is Interglossa (as opposed to its revival Glosa).
Natural semantic metalanguage has an extremely small number of concepts, but is parasitic on natural language grammar, and is not meant for communication but for definitions. So it’s not quite the same thing.
In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?
Roman alphabet digraphs were invented with the digraphs Latin used to represent Greek aspirated letters: <ch th ph>. So <ch> was available very very early on to languages using the Roman alphabet, to represent new sounds.
Palatal sounds are notoriously unstable phonologically: once /k/ goes to [c] (as it did in late Latin), it can then move on to any of [tɕ, tʃ, ʃ, s].
As a back consonant, <c> could be used to convey anything velar or palatal, or even palatoalveolar, given the possible targets of phonetic change for a fronted /k/.
- So <ch> could end up being conscripted as something velar—like a velar fricative /x/, in German.
- Or it can be used to mean that the velar is velar and not palatalised, like <chi> in Italian.
- Or it can be used to mean something palatal instead of velar—like the palatal stop /c/ in Old French.
- Or it can be used to represent any phoneme that the unstable /c/ ends up sounding like, including the palatoalveolar /ʃ/ in Modern French, or /tʃ/ in English and Spanish.
Can you say anything using a vocabulary of 100 words?
The claim of Natural semantic metalanguage is that you can with around 60. It was a party trick of Australian linguistics undergrads to speak in NSM; it becomes very stilted very quickly, but in principle you can define a lot of notions with a limited vocabulary, as the asker alludes to. NSM is of course a definition language, rather than a communicative language, but that seems to be what OP is after.
Basic English tries with 850 words, and xkcd’s Up Goer Five English that Robert Collins mentions seems to be of the lineage of Basic English.
Why do Greek and Cyrillic have different collation order than Roman alphabet?
The collation of Greek and Roman are pretty similar, as Philip said, once you factor out archaisms, and the tendency to insert new letters at the end of the alphabet.
The original Roman alphabet matches to the original Greek alphabet pretty well:
A Α
B Β
C Γ
D Δ
E Ε
F Ϝ
G —
— Ζ
H Η
— Θ
I ~ J Ι
K Κ
L Λ
M Μ
N Ν
— Ξ
O Ο
P Π
Q Ϙ
R Ρ
S Σ
T Τ
U ~ V Υ
— Φ
— Χ
— Ψ
— Ω
X (Ξ)
Y (Υ)
Z (Ζ)
The Greek equivalents of F and Q fell out of use. J and V are variants of original I and U, and appended after them. W, when it developed, was a variant of V, and appended after it. Ζ, Θ, Ξ, Φ, Χ, Ψ, Ω were left out of the original Roman alphabet—although as it turns out, Χ in the western Greek alphabet corresponded to Ξ in the eastern, so it was in the right kind of place. X, Y, Z were imports from Greek, and stuck on the end.
The only real oddity is G and Ζ being in the same position. G was invented in the Roman alphabet as a variant of C; the theory is that it was slotted in where Greek Ζ used to be, precisely because Greek Z had dropped out after F. See G
Cyrillic patterns closely to Greek too, if you allow for variants of letters being inserted in place, and new letters being appended at the end.
See early Cyrillic alphabet:
А Α
БВ Β
Г Γ
Д Δ
Е Ε
ЖЅЗ Ζ
И Η
— Θ
І Ι
К Κ
Л Λ
М Μ
Н Ν
— Ξ
О Ο
П Π
Р Π
С Σ
Т Τ
Ѹ Υ
Ф Φ
Х Χ
— Ψ
Ѡ Ω
ЦЧШЩЪЫЬѢЮꙖѤѦѨѪѬѮѰѲѴҀ
Б was inserted as a variant of Β. Ж and Ѕ were inserted as variants of З = Ζ. Θ, Ξ, Ψ were left out as unnecessary to Slavic, though there were then re-appended at the end, to transliterate Greek: ѮѰѲ. In fact the very last letter appended, Ҁ, was appended for Greek numerals: ϟ, koppa (which earlier looked like Ϙ).