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Do you feel some people speak your native language better than you, that some people speak it worse than you, or that native speakers are equal?
Linguists and lay people answer this question differently, but that’s because they have different focuses on what language competence means.
A linguist thinks of language as a rule system—a grammar, and a lexicon. As far as a linguist is concerned, the grammar is the common property of the entire language community: if you are a native speaker of the language, then by definition you know all the rules of the language.
A linguist knows that the vocabulary of a language is open-ended, and no one can know all of it; but they also know that vocabulary varies by register, and that to be competent in the lexicon of the language is to use the appropriate words for the appropriate register. If people don’t look at you funny when you speak in a given social context, then you have all the vocabulary you need.
So to a linguist, because of the way they think about language, all native speakers command the language equally well.
The reason a lay person does not hold that view is that lay people introduce value judgements in how they think about linguistic registers (because they use language in a social context), and they prioritise some registers over others as worth commanding. In particular, lay people are concerned about how well people command the prestigious variants and dialects of a language.
Those variants and dialects are not native to all speakers of the language at large, and many speakers have to learn them explicitly, as “non-native” users. That’s why it is meaningful to say that some people know them better than others.
Lay people also appreciate good command of style. They appreciate adept rhetoric and subtle usage of words. These are skills which some people will exhibit more talent or training in than others.
Linguistics does have the tools with which to understand the display of that skill. But linguistics has been reluctant to prioritise this as an aspect of linguistic competence. Mostly, because the evaluation of these rhetorical skills is culture-bound, and subjective, and communicative competence is less so. (Although not as much less so as they prefer to think: culture certainly plays a role in communicative competence too.)
The evaluation of how skillful your rhetoric is is the kind of evaluation that linguists are more comfortable leaving to literature studies.
Why doesn’t Google offer an English-Ancient Greek translation when there is an English-Latin translation?
Google translation does not work by rules and grammars. Machine translation gave up on that decades ago. Pity, because I spent well over a decade coding morphological rules for Greek, and it was a lot of fun.
Machine translation works on statistics. To gather the statistics, you need a large amount of bilingual texts.
Now, there is an order of magnitude more ancient Greek than ancient Latin texts, much of it translated. And there are a substantial number of mediaeval Greek texts as well.
But even if the interest was there in ancient Greek machine translation, the material would not be.
- Optical character recognition for the squiggles of polytonic Greek is not great, and would degrade the quality of any bilingual corpus substantially, unless someone had typed the text in. (Both Perseus and the TLG have; Google did talk to the TLG once while I was working there, but it was about teaching materials, not machine translation.)
- The classical corpus is probably not big enough to be useful for statistical machine translation; and there is a lot more bilingual text for mediaeval Latin available than for mediaeval Greek.
- Unlike Latin, the classical Greek corpus is multidialectal, which would compromise any statistics even more.
So machine translating ancient Greek would be a lot more hassle than for Latin. And because of the cultural history of Western Europe, there is much less demand for it than there would be for Latin.
Compare the number of translation requests for tattoos on this site, in Latin and in ancient Greek.
What do Greeks think about the film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”?
It depends on where the Greeks are.
Greeks in the diaspora loved it. It is a movie that pokes caricatured fun at the antiquated notions that the first generation of migrants had, and how they did not assimilate and retained a rural worldview. That kind of caricature is a commonplace of second-generation members of diaspora when they get into comedy; it’s hardly unique to the Greek diaspora. (Compare for example the comedy done by the Indian and Pakistani diaspora in the UK.) Greeks in the US, Canada, and Australia were in on the joke, and they lapped it up.
Greeks in Greece and Cyprus… dunno, and I’d be interested to hear. What’s critical is that the worldview caricatured in the movie is a worldview that has long died out in Greece itself: the first generation of migrants remained in a 1950s rural timewarp. Greeks in Greece are likely to feel extremely detached from it: it’s not their modern-day reality, and its not their country. There’s that underlying truth at work, painful for anyone in the diaspora: those who left and those who stayed behind are no longer the same people.
For what it’s worth, the Greek title of the movie was Γάμος αλά Ελληνικά, “Wedding, Greek-Style”. It was a title reminiscent of the madcap comedies of the Greek comedy film industry of the ’50s and ’60s, and that was not a coincidence.
The most interesting reaction, which I monitored at the time, was that of emigre Greeks. I’m using the distinction between migrant and emigre Greeks on purpose: by the latter, I mean the much smaller, much better educated, affluent and urbane wave of Greek professionals who have moved to work in Western Europe and America over the last 20 or 30 years, as opposed to the peasants who moved to become factory fodder and small-businesspeople in the early to mid 20th century.
The two waves have very little in common, and don’t particularly associate. The clash has been most prominent in Canada, where the “emigres” are earlier, political dissidents from the ’70s, and in much greater numbers. The ’50s migrants and the ’70s migrants have formed separate community clubs: they can’t be in the same room with each other. There’s a wave of Greeks coming to Australia now, where Greeks are into their third generation (they are most of the waiters in Greektown, where I live). I’m not paying attention, but I’m sure there’s some cultural friction here too.
Anyway. I was subscribed to the HELLAS-L mailing list at the time, which was the mailing list for those emigres, in Greeklish: it was the main vehicle of Greek online until the Web became a mass presence in Greece and Cyprus.
Many of the emigres on the list were dripping with contempt for the film, and not a few of them demanded that it should have been called My Big Fat Greek-American Wedding. Because they wanted nothing to do with the hicks that film depicted. (I was gratified to see the main complainer being needled by someone else: “You’ve already been in the US for a decade; watch out you don’t get de-Hellenised yourself!”
The vehemence is because the film does not depict a reality the emigres have grown up with—but it does depict a reality they are adjacent to, living in America and Canada and Britain; so they couldn’t feel the same detachment I imagine Greeks in Greece would have experienced. It was more pressing for them to dissociate themselves from it.
Some of the threads on that mailing list are available here: Google Groups—provided you can read Greeklish.
Would “This enrolling first took place managed by Quirinius of Syria” be more accurate than “when Quirinius was governor”?
No.
The participle ἡγεμονεύοντος and its subject Κυρηνίου are in the genitive. That makes this a Genitive absolute, which corresponds to the Latin ablative absolute. Its job is to indicate the time or circumstance under which the main clause happened: it is a separate clause. English equivalents are Absolute constructions, such as The referee having finally arrived, the game began; All things considered, it’s not a bad idea. But in Latin and Greek, grammatical case is used to differentiate the two clauses (as well as the participle in the dependent clause).
So the main clause is “this enrolling first took place”. But the following participle means “under the circumstance of Quirinius managing Syria”. Greek wouldn’t use “of Syria” to describe a person, but “Syrian” or “from Syria”: the genitive for Syria is in fact the object of hegemoneuō “ruling, managing”. And it’s a separate clause, so the enrolling has nothing to do with the managing.
So: “With Quirinius managing Syria, this enrolling first took place.”
Which pretty much is the same thing as “When Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
Would a universal language be symbolic?
There have been a few proposals for symbolic universal language, most of them taking their inspiration from Chinese ideographic systems.
- Pasigraphy was at the start of the universal language movement: they were akin to universal thesauruses in symbolic form. Rather naive in retrospect.
- Blissymbols was probably the most thorough recent effort, and it has found some unexpected usage since for teaching communication to language-disabled children.
- iConji seems to be some sort of mix of Emoji and dingbats.
- And of course there’s Emoji themselves, which are increasingly being used in communication, though of either a more rebus-like or a less syntactic nature.
There are pros and cons to symbols as a universal language. Some symbols are arguably more iconic or indexical as signs than words, and less arbitrary, so they should be easier to learn. In theory. In practice, the minute you move away from concrete nouns, the signs symbolic languages use look pretty arbitrary; and even if they are conceived of as indexical, the metaphors may not be all that obvious. I’m not convinced the gains in iconicity would really be worth it.
What is the last letter in the Coptic alphabet?
On seeing this question, I thought, “Huh? Why is this not a question for Wikipedia?”
And then I looked at Wikipedia—English and German and French; and I realised that it’s not as trivial a question as you might think.
The last three letters of the Coptic alphabet listed on Wikipedia (all three languages) are Ϭ, Ϯ, Ⳁ.
The French and English article on Wikipedia starts with this image:
In this image, that last Ⳁ is missing.
The third last letter, tshēma Ϭ, is a straightforward letter, derived from Demotic Egyptian. It is transliterated as <q> or <tsh>, and pronounced as [kʲ] or [tʃ].
The second last letter, ti Ϯ, is also from Demotic. It is pronounced as [ti] in Sahidic, and [de] in Boharic.
Now, this will immediately throw most people. Coptic grammars calmly say that several letters are equivalents of two other letters: ⲑ is /th/, ⲝ is /ks/, and so forth. But /ti/ is different. If Coptic is an alphabet, then its letters are meant to be either consonants or vowels, but not both. [ti] is not something you find in an alphabet, it is something you find in a syllabary.
The Demotic script that the letter originates, though, was not an alphabet: it was an abjad (consonant-only) script, which meant that single letters often could end up standing for syllables. That ended up happening with ti. And all accounts of Coptic list ti as a normal letter. So a letter it is, even if it is not the kind of letter you expect in an alphabet.
The final letter, Ⳁ, does not have a name or a pronunciation. It is a numeral, with the value 900.
Coptic, like Greek, Hebrew, and (early) Cyrillic, used a different letter of the alphabet for each of 1–9, 10–90, and 100–900. That requires 27 letters. In the case of Greek, which had 24 letters, the numerals for 6, 90 and 900 were represented by archaic letters, that were not considered part of the alphabet normally: ϛ Ϟ Ϡ. Coptic had no shortage of letters, but it still was reluctant to assign numeric values to Demotic letters, as opposed to letters that came from Greek; so it added ⲋ for 6, reused the ϥ for 90 as the letter fai /f/, and came up with Ⳁ for 900.
Does Ⳁ actually count as a letter? The precedent of Greek says no. Alphabet copte — Wikipédia refers to it as a “abbreviating ligature”, which would say no. Coptic numerals only are in common use in the later Boiharic dialect; the earlier Sahidic dialect did not use them, so that is a vote against as well. And the two Sahidic grammars I’ve had a look at, Johanna Brankaer’s and Bentley Layton’s, do not give Ⳁ as a letter. Layton doesn’t even mention Ⳁ until his discussion of numerals.
Wikipedia and Unicode list Ⳁ as a letter of the Coptic alphabet, because they have to list it somewhere; but in the normal Coptic understanding of “alphabet”, Ⳁ isn’t part of it. The atypical ti Ϯ is it.
Was Homer being transcribed when written vowels were invented for the Greek alphabet?
Nestor’s Cup is one of the earliest inscriptions in Greek, and it’s got a metrical inscription that may allude to the Iliad:
So it’s feasible that Homer started being transcribed as soon as vowels were introduced—which pretty much was as soon as the alphabet was adopted in Greek. (We have no evidence of Greek using Phoenecian letters without vowels, and vowels were as much as anything a misconstrual of how Phoenician worked.)
The Iliad seems to have been written at roughly the time the alphabet was introduced, and writing is mentioned in passing in the Iliad: The “Fatal Letter” in the Iliad: Introduction of Written Language to the Greeks (Circa 750 BCE). But it’s likelier that Homer really was first written down when the Greeks said that Homer was first written down, two centuries later in Athens; oral transmission would have kept it around till then, and from what little we know, there was a lot of textual variation about, outside of the version that was written down.
If you already have an undergrad degree (not in linguistics), what is the best way to pursue a linguistics degree/graduate degree?
The way I did it, which may not work everywhere, is:
- Take as many breadth subjects in linguistics as you can, while doing your degree in another faculty.
- Demonstrate through charm and wit and intellect that you would be an asset to the linguistics department.
- If at all possible, do a cross disciplinary postgraduate degree that somehow bridges the gap between the two faculties. In my case, it was a masters in cognitive science.
- Of course, back in my day, interdisciplinary degrees were fashionable; not sure they are still.
- Failing that, see if you can work out an accelerated or diploma course to bridge the gap.
- The more brilliant you show yourself to be, and the more slack your University administration is, the less hoops you will have to jump through to bridge the gap.
- Again: university administrations are not as slack as they used to be .
- All this presupposes that money is no object. If you’re in the States, my best advice would be to get a membership to a university library… 😐
What exactly is the origin of the “ain’t no” kind of speech/dialect?
Ain’t is found throughout the English-speaking world across regions and classes, and is among the most pervasive nonstandard terms in English. It is one of two negation features (the other being the double negative) that are known to appear in all nonstandard English dialects.
Take ain’t instead of am/are not, add the double negative, and you’ve got ain’t no. Neither are features of Standard English; both, alone or in combination, are features of pretty much all nonstandard English.
Of the two, amn’t, aren’t > an’t > ain’t happened in the 17th and 18th century—certainly in time for it to travel everywhere English is spoken; ain’t is first attested in writing in 1749 per Wikipedia. The Double negative was present in Middle English, and in wide use in the 17th century. (“Up to the 18th century, double negatives were used to emphasise negation.”)
From what I’m seeing in Wikipedia, both ain’t and the double negative were attacked at the same time by prescription. But they were English-wide phenomena; their association with African American English is simply because African American English was somewhat less subject to prescription than white variants of the language.
Regarding Australian states and territories, say you have a certain word in your state. Have you come across different words in other states that mean the same thing?
Australians desperately hang on to the small lexical differences between States, as you’ll see here, because otherwise Australian English is ludicrously homogeneous geographically. Variation in Australian English – Wikipedia
The names for different sizes of beer glasses (Australian English vocabulary – Wikipedia) is kind of the counterpart to the renowned Eskimo words for snow. (Yes, the jokes do write themselves.) And there is bizarre State-based variation, just as there was beer parochialism in the days before craft beer.
There used to be a similar diversity of words for uncouth and unsophisticated people (yes, again the jokes do write themselves); but they have all been replaced now by Bogan, which has now also come to be reclaimed as a positive.
Where Australia specialises words about beer glasses, Greece specialises words about souvlaki. A döner kebab is a gyros in the South; in the north it’s a sanduits.
The other shibboleth of Northern vs Southern Greek vocabulary is the word for ‘on the ground’. Northern Greek uses the word kato ‘down’ for ‘on the ground’ as well; Southern Greek has retained khamo, khamu for the latter—earning them the moniker khamudzides ‘Down-On-The-Grounders’ from northerners.
See this post on a recent book about the slang differences between the two, written by Haralambos Metaxas, who is also a contributor to the Greek equivalent of Urban Dictionary, slang.gr