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What terminology from “The Guardian” newspaper’s list of 35 misused word definitions do you often use wrong?
Ah, I see we have an instance of that special being we call in Greek the glōssamyntōr, the “language defender”.
Harold Evans, Fleet Street editor, eh? Of the Street that gave us Lynne Truss? And in turn the immortal book review of Lynne Truss, Bad Comma? (“An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.”)
I will make like John Gragson Esq., and comment on these and how I came to know of them.
- Affect/Effect: when I was in high school, I did Music Literature. And part of my study of the Baroque was a (diluted, as it turns out) introduction to the Doctrine of the affects. That consolidated in my mind that affect gets to be a noun, even if it is an archaic noun, distinct from effect.
- Alibi/Excuse. I’ve watched enough police procedurals to know what an alibi is, even if I didn’t know that alibi is Latin for “somewhere else”. Like John says, surely everyone knows this.
- Alternative/Choice. “If there are two choices, they are properly called “alternatives”. If there are more than two, they are choices.” Sod off.
- Anticipate/Expect. “To expect something is to think it may happen; to anticipate is to prepare for it, to act in advance.” I see it, but I don’t bother with it.
- Blatant/Flagrant. “It’s best to use “blatant” for offence that is glaringly obvious, without care, brazen. Best use “flagrant” to emphasise a serious breach of law or regulation.” Huh. Again, I see it, but I doubt I use flagrant at all. Then again, I’m not a lawyer.
- Chronic/Acute. I’m Greek, I know chronic is ongoing.
- Compose/Comprise. “Compose means “to form” or “constitute”. Comprise means “to contain, include, be made up of”. The US comprises 50 states; 50 states do not comprise the US.” Really? I know that compose isn’t about inclusion, but I’ve only said or heard is comprised of.
- Continual/Continuous. A pedant’s favourite, and my English teacher got to me with this one before I stopped being so fussy. I may have caught myself making the distinction once or twice.
- Crescendo/Climax. I get this one right too, having a music background.
- Decimate/Destroy. Oh come on. Noone uses decimate to mean “kill 1 in 10”. It is applied only to human casualties though.
- Disinterested/Uninterested. I learned disinterested in its original meaning, and the “uninterested” interpretation never made sense to me.
- Entomb/Trap. “The trapped miners may be alive; entombed miners are dead, ie in a tomb.” What, noone gets buried alive in your world, Evans?
- Flotsam/Jetsam. I read about the distinction when I was 6, and forgot all about it, because I neither throw things overboard, nor pick things up from the sea. Cute distinction if you care about property rights. Irrelevant to anyone else.
- Forego/Forgo. Um. I certainly understand the difference; I’m not confident I’ve always spelled it like I do.
- Gourmet/Gourmand. I’m not familiar with gourmand, so I’m off the hook.
- Inchoate/Incoherent. Inchoate things are often incoherent, but yes, I rather like inchoate, and I am aware of the distinction.
- Incumbent/*Former incumbent. “As a noun, the current holder of an office; a “former incumbent” is nonsense. But when you hold an office, it is incumbent (adjective) on you to perform your duties.” I don’t particularly see why “the former[ly] current holder of an office” is nonsense. It is incumbent on Evans to take a chill pill.
- Inflammable/Flammable. Yes, I know they’re synonyms. I just avoid using inflammable. Or being around anything inflammable.
- Insidious/Invidious. I was aware of the distinction without reflecting on the etymology, but once you do, it’s obvious: the Latin for ‘trap’ vs ‘evil’.
- Judicial/Judicious. I call lots of people judicious that have nothing to do with the legal system.
- Less/Fewer. You know, I’ve been corrected on this on Quora itself. To which all I will say is: Stannis Baratheon is noone’s idea of a good stylist.
- Litigate/Argue about it. “In January 2017, while telling ABC why Trump would not keep the off-and-on promise, Conway said: “We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care. They voted for him.” Wrong verb.” Not that I welcome the opportunity to defend Kelly Ann Conway, but Harold Evans has clearly never heard of figurative language.
- Luxuriant/Luxurious. I know this one, thanks to a million hair shampoo ads.
- Momentarily/For a moment. Only Poms use momentarily to mean “in a moment” anyway.
- Prescribe/Proscribe. Prescribe is what Harold Evans does. Proscribe is what I want to do to Harold Evans. Simples.
- Refugee/Migrant. Come on. Why is this even in this list.
- Refute/Deny. Yes yes, refute is something that you prove, deny is something you can just say.
- Regalia/Regal. Regalia is something I know most about from Frank Zappa. And regalia is not just what a king has: words do broaden. You’ll be saying paraphernalia can only describe dowries, next. (Look it up.)
- Replica/Reproduction. “A replica is one recreated by the original creator, so there is no such thing as “a virtual replica”.” Didn’t know, didn’t care. I think this one’s gone.
- Sceptic/Denier. Outside of climate change, scepticism retains its meaning, particularly as sceptical. Within climate change, it’s dead.
- Transpire. My apologies to the Magister and Andrew Marvell both, but yeah, this one was lost in 1700.
- Viable/Feasible. Noone says a foetus is feasible. Plenty of people can say plans are viable, because figurative language. You should try it some time, Evans.
- Viral. Evans seems to object to viral going viral. He must be great at parties.
- Virtually. “Incorrectly used to mean “nearly all”; eg: “Virtually all the chocolates were eaten.” “Virtually” is useful for an imprecise description that is more or less right, close enough, as good as. “He’s virtually the manager.”” Oh, you’re funny, Harold.
Harold Evans. Editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981; 88 years old and retired, now dedicating his time to writing. Writing lists like these. God help us all.
What got you into linguistics and languages?
A high school Latin grammar. One of the many school textbooks my uncles and aunts left behind in my granddad’s shed, which I read in primary school.
I was fascinated by the declension tables and the familiar lexicon, and I taught myself enough Latin to stumble my way through Cornelius Nepos. (“His simple style of writing has made him, in the UK at least, a standard choice for passages of unseen translation in Latin exams, from prep school, even up to degree level.”)
Then, I was inspired to create my own conlang. Which featured declension tables heavily.
Then, I started going through the Teach Yourself language books in my local library.
Then, when I was finishing my engineering degree in University, I met a girl at a party who was doing historical linguistics. And I sat in on her lectures.
And that was it.
EDIT: God bless the Greek government for digitising all their past textbooks. I was looking for Achilleas Tzartzanos’ classic Syntax of Modern Greek; I’d forgotten that the Latin Grammar I’d found in the shed was also his:
Γραμματική της λατινικής γλώσσης
Thanks, Achilleas!
Updated 2017-06-07 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK. and
, Ph.D. Cultural/Linguistic Anthropology, University of Arizona
Did ancient Greek scholars ever adapt Roman numerals?
Greeks did not adopt Roman numerals, like, ever. (“Roman Numerals? We taught those beef eaters everything they know!”) Where the West uses Roman numerals, Greek continues to use Greek numerals; see examples in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is it possible to shorten the ordinal numbers in modern Greek? I’m honestly not aware of any tradition of using Roman numerals in Greek, outside of as a third level of numbering (like how English goes from 1, 2, 3 to a, b, c to i, ii, iii: Greek numerals are already equivalent to a, b, c, so Greek needs an alternative.)
Milesian numerals continued in use right through Byzantium; the transition was made direct from Milesian numerals to Arabic numerals, in the Renaissance. Late Byzantine scholars (e.g. Theodore Meliteniotes) were aware of Arabic numerals, and described them, but went on using Milesian numerals. Which made their astronomical texts rather painful to read…
Manuel Glyzonios’ Arithmetic (Λογαριαστική), published in 1568 in Venice, certainly used Arabic numbers, and the Glitzouni was how Greeks learned arithmetic for the next few centuries. (A PDF used to be online at Ελληνομνήμων, a repository of texts at Athens Uni about the history of STEM in Modern Greece. Long disappeared of course.) O Εμμανουήλ Γλυζώνιος και η Λογαριαστική του,πιο γνωστή ως Γλυτζούνι cites it as saying:
Γίγνωσκε ότι η λεγόμενη νούλα, ήντινα βάζομεν έμπροσθεν εις το 1 και λογίζεται 10, αυτό το λέγουσιν ελληνικά ουδέν και δια τούτο πληροί μόνον την θέσιν ψηφίου…..
You should know that the so-called nulla, which we put after 1 and count it as 10, is called in Hellenic [= Ancient Greek] nil (ouden), and for that reason it only takes up the position of a number.
Greek now calls zero mēden, which is a synonym of ouden.
What obstacles will I run into transitioning from Attic to Koine Greek?
Like Michael Masiello said, no real obstacles: things are simpler. There will be fewer Attic futures and Attic second declensions. In fact, they were historically called Attic not because they were alien to Doric (Doric loved the “Attic” future), but because they were alien to Koine. So λαός, σκανδαλίσω, not λεώς, σκανδαλιῶ. Some Latin loan words, but you will recognise them from English anyway: κουστωδία, κεντυρίων. Some particles are moving towards Modern Greek, so their usage may surprise you: ἵνα for example is closer to a subjunctive marker then just a purposive.
I’d just jump in. If you find it too easy, I’ll point you in the direction of Nonnus’ Homeric paraphrase of the Gospel of John. 🙂
Is it possible to shorten the ordinal numbers in modern Greek?
The traditional way of doing that is to use a Greek numeral; you could use them indiscriminately for ordinals, cardinals, and in antiquity even multiplicatives. So World War II, Henry VIII: Βʹ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Ηʹ, which are in fact read out loud as Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Όγδοος, with ordinals and not cardinals. (It is “Second World War”, never “World War Two”.) This is done for names and titles.
The ordinal numbers can have a superscript inflection ending, as is done in Romance languages. That does not happen with titles, but it is optional with non-titles: you can say α[math]^{ος}[/math], β[math]^{ος}[/math], γ[math]^{ος}[/math] πρωταθλητής for 1st, 2nd, 3rd champion. Alternatively, the suffix can be hyphenated: α-ος.
These days, you will also see Arabic rather than Greek numerals, always with the inflection, and the inflection can appear with no hyphen or superscript: 1[math]^{ος}[/math], 1ος. This is newer, and if Google is any indication, that’s the most common mechanism now. In the 80s, my primary school, Sitia Second, was named Βʹ Δημοτικό Σητείας (primary schools and high schools are numbered in each town); its blog now names it 2o ΔΗΜΟΤΙΚΟ ΣΧΟΛΕΙΟ ΣΗΤΕΙΑΣ. Patras Third High School, which is old and venerable, is listed on Wikipedia as Γ’ Γυμνάσιο Πατρών; but its Facebook page names it as 3ο ΓΥΜΝΑΣΙΟ ΠΑΤΡΩΝ.
Do Greeks have more in common with the Turks than they do with the French or Germans?
For much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Greek identity was a tug of war between a Romaic and a Hellenic construct, between an identification with Ancient Greece via Western Europe (or vice versa), and the folk culture informed by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.
The Hellenes have won, but that victory is fairly recent. I don’t believe it truly predates the European Union. And that victory has certainly not been as thorough-going as people like to think.
Turks have been the Other for Greeks too long for them to identify with the Turks. Especially when Greeks have so much invested in identifying as European.
All I can say is, there is a joy of recognition when I talk to Turks, that I don’t feel talking to Germans. That’s not just because of the commonalities in low rather than high culture. It’s also because those commonalities have been deprecated in official discourse. They have not been ignored, but they have been cast as something to be embarrassed about. So when I do encounter those commonalities, they are all the more resonant for me.
Are there any features, besides vocabulary, of human languages that only appeared relatively recently?
Written registers are a reasonably recent thing in human language, so the peculiarities of written language would qualify as innovations.
The catch is, the characteristics of written language I can think of are matters of degree, rather than categorical differences from spoken language. But they include things like syntactic complexity, anaphora referring back a long way, intolerance of ambiguity (because of the lack of access to immediate feedback), and notions of periodically structured sentences.
Answered 2017-06-06 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy. and
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
Are speakers of non-standard languages discouraged from using the web?
The bulk of material on the Web, like the bulk of written material in general, is in standardised forms of languages. If you know the standardised form of your language, or the official language of your country, you can access the Web as well. And if you’ve gone to school at all, then you know a standard language. That’s a big part of the reason you went to school in the first place.
But the web does not suppress non-standard languages. On the contrary, it actually gives them a space to flourish. There is no gatekeeping for publishing content on the web, the way there is for Print Media; and the web encourages informal expression, which is associated with non-standard languages. Reportedly, texting has also encouraged people to use dialect, for the same reason. There is certainly much more Cypriot Greek content online proportionately, than has ever appeared in print.
Why didn’t the Byzantine Empire have ethnic conflicts like the Ottoman Empire did?
Do read this in conjunction with:
Ethnicity was not important in the Medieval world. Common people did not have to communicate with the state. They were supposted to work and pay taxes. The best they could hope for was to be left alone.
In the 19th century that changed.
The flashpoints in the Early Byzantine Empire were religious and doctrinal, but those often ended up being closely correlated with ethnicity—particularly with dyophysitism vs monophysitism (to use each side’s pejoratives). The bulk of the peoples lost by the Empire to the Caliphate were not native speakers of Greek, after all.
After Chalcedonian Christianity, “heresies” remained a flashpoint, but you do also start seeing more clearly ethnic-based conflict. I don’t know what else to call the Uprising of Asen and Peter, for instance:
The Uprising of Asen and Peter (Bulgarian: Въстание на Асен и Петър) was a revolt of Bulgarians and Vlachs living in the theme of Paristrion of the Byzantine Empire, caused by a tax increase. It began on 26 October 1185, the feast day of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, and ended with the creation of the Second Bulgarian Empire, ruled by the Asen dynasty.
In fact, the victorious brothers raised a church to the same St Demetrius whose cult site was in Salonica; in other words, they asserted religious continuity with the Empire, but not political allegiance:
After their return, many of the protesters were unwilling to join the rebellion. The brothers Peter and Asen built the Church of St Demetrius of Thessaloniki in Tarnovo, dedicated to Saint Demetrius, who was traditionally considered a patron of the Byzantine city of Thessaloniki, and claimed that the Saint had ceased to favour the Byzantines: “God had decided to free the Bulgarians and the Vlach people and to lift the yoke that they had borne for so long”.
Why are unicode characters outside the BMP called astral?
Thank you for the A2A, Jelle Zijlstra, and why do I suspect that you’ve read my page Astral Planes?
There’s 17 * 65536 characters in Unicode. Each 65536 characters is called a Plane. The first plane, the BMP, is the plane that most characters you will ever encounter are in. Only two other planes are used (or indeed likely to be used), and they contain obsolete, archaic scripts or characters in scripts that won’t get used much at all, and that most people will rarely encounter.
Or, per Plane (Unicode) – Wikipedia
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (= [math]2^{16}[/math]) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16 decimal, which corresponds with the possible values 00–10 hexadecimal of the first two positions in six position format (hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly-used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called “supplementary planes”, or humorously “astral planes“.
Thank you Wikipedia.
Actually, you know what? I’ll cite me. Astral Planes
So as of Unicode 3.0.1 (August 2000), Unicode is organised into 16 planes, each of 64K; this gives over a million codepoints, which should be enough for all needs, past present and future. The Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), or Plane 0, is the first 64K, which is what was in use until 2000, and where just about everything useful will still reside. The other planes are termed Supplementary.
The supplementary planes are an innovation in how characters are internally represented—programmers have to assume a character can have a million possible values, not just 64K, which means they often have to change their existing code. Furthermore, they are not drastically common in use: most ‘real’ scripts (though not all) are ensconced in the BMP. […]
The informal name for the supplementary planes of Unicode is “astral planes”, since (especially in the late ’90s) their use seemed to be as remote as the theosophical “great beyond”. There has been objection to this jocular usage (see “string vs. char” and subsequent discussion on Unicode list); and as Planes 1 and 2 spread in use there will be less occasion to feel that the planes really are ‘astral’. But the jocular reference is harmless, and it serves as a reminder that we’re not quite there yet.
Astral plane is a joke on Astral plane: they’re “planes” of characters, but they were inaccessible and immaterial, you’d never get to them, your software would never get to them, and you’d never need to get to them: they were abstruse and obscure. The joke was coined on the Unicode mailing list.
The term is still in use; e.g. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/i… . And the term still means something: legacy products still fail to support them (such as… oh, the Quora text editor).
There’s a simple reason why those planes aren’t particularly astral any more. In amongst the Deseret and Nabataean and Egyptian hieroglyphs, there is one set of characters in the supplementary planes that sees a *lot* of usage now, and that users have come to expect all their platforms to support. Those characters weren’t in Unicode when I wrote my page in 2003, but they’re there in the Astral Planes now.
Those characters are, of course, Emoji.