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How long would it take linguists to decode a language like Lojban if no speakers or reference grammar existed, but several original texts did?
Great answer from Roman Huczok: see Roman Huczok’s answer.
Getting an undeciphered text with no Rosetta stone is, as Roman said, hard work, though not impossible. The question is after the peculiarities of Lojban which would make the decipherment harder—particularly given the whole exoticism that Lojban claims to, of encoding predicate logic as something quite alien to human language.
I’ll retort that the way actual humans use it, the predicate logic component is not that big a deal: you can still clearly see human verbs behind it. (The way Lojban predicates avoid raising by default is somewhat more odd.)
I’ll suggest the following as things that would trip up a would-be decipherer:
- The compounding morphology of Lojban—which is both its derivational morphology and its compounding proper—is eccentric: lots of three-letter reduced forms, which only occasionally remind you of their original five-letter predicates. The decipherer will easily tell that they are a distinct word class because of their phonotactics, but working out that they are compounds will take longer.
- The terminators—the spoken bracketing of Lojban—are not a human language thing, and the conditions of ambiguity which make them optional aren’t human either. A decipherer might work out that they coocurr with certain syntactic structures, but would be likelier to construe them as attitudinals (modal particles).
- Because of Lojban’s stick-them-in-a-blender approach to the core predicates, the tools of historical linguistics or inspection will be pretty useless in deciphering them. In fact, apart from le, la, lo, na, mi, I don’t think inspection would yield up anything.
- The use of numbered predicate places instead of prepositions—the tritransitive and quadritransitive predicates, the strategies for rearranging arguments, the relative paucity of actual prepositions—would throw a decipherer as well.
Why does the Greek “αγγε” transliterate to “ange” and not “agge” in English?
Ah, a Modern Greek perspective in the question details.
I answered the corresponding Ancient Greek question at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has the word συγγεής two γ? I know it comes from σύν + γεν, and that later the ν disappeared, but why putting two γ? And why has the ν disappeared at the certain point in history?
Tl;dr:
- The velar nasal /ŋ/ is not identical to the alveolar/dental nasal /n/. It is, if you like, a cross between a /ɡ/ and an /n/.
- English, Latin, and many other languages have chosen to write it as an <n> before a <g>.
- Ancient Greek instead chose to write it as a <g> before a a velar: <gk, gch, gg>.
- Which is not absurd, given that the sound is a cross between a /ɡ/ and an /n/.
- Ancient Greek had geminated voiceless stops; /kk/, /pp/, /tt/. It did not have geminated voiced stops; any words with /dd/ or /bb/ are not native Greek words. So there was never any risk of orthographical <gg> being interpreted as [ɡɡ] instead of [ŋɡ].
- Modern Greek uses Ancient Greek historical orthography, so it was not going to respell the sound if it survived unchanged from antiquity. It still spells it as a <g> in front of a velar.
- So yes, it would indeed be strange to write Angelopoulos as <Angelopoulos>, Ανγελόπουλος. Standard Greek Orthography never has (though I think Soviet Greek orthography, which was phonetic, did).
In addition:
- Modern Greek pronounces <gk> and <gg> (historical [ŋk], [ŋɡ]) identically as [ŋɡ]. Just as it universally pronounces <nt> as [nd] and <mp> as [mb].
- Many Modern Greek dialects, and increasingly Standard Modern Greek, pronounce <gk>, <gg> (historical [ŋk], [ŋɡ]) as just [ɡ], dropping the initial nasal—just as they have done with orthographical <nt>, <mp>. So the usual pronunciation of the name Angelopoulos is actually [aɟelopulos] anyway (palatalised g). One more reason why it would not occur to anyone to write it with an <n>.
Why had Middle English dropped the leading e- in words borrowed from Old French that began with es-[plosive]-?
I’ll start by giving the passage on this change from Elementary Middle English grammar : James Wright, as a change specific to French loans.
§231. Initial e– disappeared before s + tenuis as Spaine, spȳen, staat beside estaat, stüdien, scāpen beside escāpen, squirel (O.Fr. escurel). Initial vowels also often disappeared before other consonants, as menden beside amenden, prentȳs beside aprentȳs, pistīl beside epistīl. Initial prefixes often disappeared, as steinen beside desteinen ‘to stain’, sport beside disport, saumple beside ensaumple.
Now, as OP points out, Latin > French and Latin > Italian went the other way.
The insertion of an initial e- before a cluster makes a word easier to pronounce; Latin statūs > Old French estat (Modern état) > English estate (state). Lots of languages do this; Turkish is another good example; French station > Turkish istasyon.
So why would English go the other way?
Notice that this change happened to French loans; it isn’t something that happened generically in the language, to Old English words. And ease of pronunciation is not an absolute in a language; after all, plenty of languages do have words starting with st-. Like Latin.
Or Old English.
If a change systematically happens to French words, it might not be motivated by making them easier to pronounce. It might be motivated by making them look more familiar—which can mean making them better aligned to the native phonotactics of the language.
So: did Old English have lots of words starting with an unaccented esc-, esp-, est-? From what I’m seeing at An Anglo-Saxon dictionary : based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth , no: just a couple of words starting with accented est-. As opposed to lots and lots of words starting with sc-, sp-, st-. And of course native stress was on the first syllable: an unstressed initial esc-, esp-, est– would have sounded doubly alien to Old English.
The rule was not regular and overwhelming: we’ve gone back to escape from scape, and we’ve kept apprentice. But—without knowing this for a fact—I think that’s what’s happened.
In ancient Greek, how is the root determined in τὸ τεῖχος?
Humphry Smith’s answer is right, but let me spell it out a bit more.
We come up with stem suffixes in proto-Greek, to explain the diversity of case endings of classes of nouns—a diversity between dialects of Greek, as well as trying to make intuitive sense of where they came from. The nouns in your details, neuter teîch-os, masculine triē´r-ēs, proper name Themistokl-ēˆs, are all explained by proto-Greek stems ending in –es-.
Why do we do that? Because if you look at the cases other than the nominative, they’re pretty similar. We account for that by saying they’re actually underlyingly the same.
A few things to keep in mind whenever we’re reconstructing proto-Greek:
- First: Attic contracts vowels (mooshes them together); Epic Greek tends not to contract them, and proto-Greek is more obvious if we move back from Homer rather than Attic. So (interleaving the masculine noun triērēs where it’s different):
Attic:
teîch-os
triē´r-ēs
teích-ous
teích-ei
teích-ē
triē´r-eis
teich-ōˆn
teích-esi
Epic:
teîch-os
triē´r-ēs
teích-e-os
teích-e-ï
teích-e-a
triē´r-e-es
teich-é-ōn
teích-e-ssi
See that -e- in the Epic? You can’t see it as clearly in the Attic. That’s part of the reason why it’s an -es- noun.
Oh, and Themistocles? The uncontracted form is Themistoklé-ēs. The only difference between Themistoklé-ēs and triē´r-ēs is that Attic contracts the last two vowels.
- Second: Proto-Greek -s- between vowels is deleted. (In Latin, its equivalent turns into -r-.)
So our Epic paradigm now becomes:
teîch-os, triē´r-ēs
teích-es-os
teích-es-ï
teích-es-a
triē´r-es-es
teich-és-ōn
teích-es-ssi
And that’s where the -es- stem comes from.
The catch is that horrid nominative singular, teîch-os, triē´r-ēs.
- Third: When you’re reconstructing nominals, always leave the nominative singular till last. They tend to be… different.
The masculine nom. sg can be understood by compensatory lengthening. As you’ll know from other third declension nouns, the nom. sg. masc ending here should be -s. The stem is -es. So Proto-Greek nom. sg ‘trireme’ would have been triē´r-es-s. When the first s drops out, the vowel before it lengthens to compensate: triē´r-es-s > triē´r-ē-s.
That leaves the neuter singular -os. In fact, cracking open my copy of Sihler: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin §296, the nominative singular is as old as Proto-Indo-European: it’s –os all the way back.
Now, whenever you see o in Proto-Indo-European, you immediately think of the ablaut alternation of ø/e/o. Sihler notes (§297) that “Scholars have long maintained that the nom./acc. form -os, albeit of securely PIE date, is secondary; presumably the zero grade nom./acc. of the the type krewH̥2-s [Greek krea-s] is a relic of a more original state of affairs.” What he’s saying is that the -o-s looks suspicious, and it may be a ø/e/o alternation; the word for ‘meat’, which has nothing rather than e or o in front of the -s, was the original way of doing those neuters.
Did Caesar say “I could kill you faster than I could threaten to kill you?”
At a first stab (so to speak):
After this speech to Metellus, Caesar walked towards the door of the treasury, and when the keys were not to be found, he sent for smiths and ordered them to break in the door. Metellus once more opposed him, and was commended by some for so doing; but Caesar, raising his voice, threatened to kill him if he did not cease his troublesome interference. “And thou surely knowest, young man,” said he, “that it is more unpleasant for me to say this than to do it.”
ταῦτα πρὸς τὸν Μέτελλον εἰπών, ἐβάδιζε πρὸς τὰς θύρας τοῦ ταμιείου. μὴ φαινομένων δὲ τῶν κλειδῶν, χαλκεῖς μεταπεμψάμενος ἐκκόπτειν ἐκέλευεν. αὖθις δ’ ἐνισταμένου τοῦ Μετέλλου καί τινων ἐπαινούντων, διατεινάμενος ἠπείλησεν ἀποκτενεῖν αὐτόν, εἰ μὴ παύσαιτο παρενοχλῶν· „καὶ τοῦτ’“ ἔφη „μειράκιον οὐκ ἀγνοεῖς ὅτι μοι δυσκολώτερον ἦν εἰπεῖν ἢ πρᾶξαι“.
The Greek literally says: “and little boy, you are not unaware that it would be harder for me to say it than to do it.”
The quote is attributed to an “official at the Roman Treasury” (I could kill you faster than I could threaten to kill you.) Plutarch says: “When the tribune Metellus tried to prevent Caesar’s taking money from the reserve funds of the state, and cited certain laws, Caesar said that arms and laws had not the same season.” I guess that makes Metellus an official at the Roman Treasury.
Can I say? Apparently Carlin is a podcaster who tries to make historical figures sound sexy and badass, but I don’t think he’s improved on the original.
Since Cyamites is probably an epithet for Hades, could the scythe/sickle be the meaning of the digamma missing from his name?
As OP clarified elsewhere, the prevalent account for the name Hades is that it originally had a digamma in it, and meant Unseen: Hades – Wikipedia. Ἀϝίδης A-wídēs > Ἀΐδης Ā-ï´dēs > ᾌδης Ā´idēs. The archaic wid– stem for ‘see’ is the same as the stem vid– in Latin, and wit in English. (The terms for know and see were interchangable in Indo-European; in fact the Ancient Greek for ‘know’ is the perfect tense of the verb for ‘see’.)
It is also true that the Digamma ϝ, which represented the letter /w/ in Archaic Greek, eventually came to look like a ϛ in the Middle Ages, when it was only used to represent the number 6.
That’s all there is to OP’s claim. The rest… no:
- The digamma only started looking anything like a sickle in cursive writing in late antiquity—certainly after Christ.
- Even if Bean-Man (Cyamites) was Hades, and not just a local hero, his worship in Athens would have long predated the digamma looking like a sickle; he is mentioned in Pausanias.
- The digamma looked like an F from the time it was taken from Phoenecian, up until the time it was abandoned as a letter in the various dialects. (The numerical form had moved into a different glyph, that looked like a square C; that’s where the sickle shape comes from.) Bean-Man was celebrated in Athens, and Athens lost its /w/ before writing in Attic is attested.
So not only is it implausible that Bean-Man is somehow an allusion to the missing sickle-letter in Hades’ name; the time frames for Bean-Man, the sickle letter, and the pronunciation of /w/ in Hades are off by centuries.
How different do dialects of the same language feel to you?
I was brought up in Crete. I read Cretan Renaissance literature as an adult, and was taken aback at the notion that the kinds of conceit you might find in Shakespeare (common Italian antecedents) were being expressed in the language my grandmother used to yell at her chickens.
Greece is a country run on the French model of centralisation. The State did not regard Greek dialect with the hostility it regarded minority languages, but it certainly did not encourage them as competitors to Standard Greek. And dialect speakers internalised that prejudice. When I tried to speak more dialectally while visiting the home country, my aunt scolded me, a scholar, talking like a villager.
Why yes, aunt. A scholar in Greek dialectology.
Dialects feel different because of their social connotations, of course, rather than anything linguistically inherent. I’m biased to prefer islander over mainland Greek dialects, because islander dialects are more familiar to me. (My parents are speakers of the two major instances of islander dialects, Cretan and Cypriot.)
But I’ve already told the anecdote here of my aunt from Thessaly: on the one hand, she commented how much more pleasant Cretan or Cypriot sounded to her, whereas her native dialect “stunk of the sheep pen”. On the other hand, a few days later, we had Cypriot TV on, and she turned to me and remarked how hard it was for her to take Cypriots seriously, the way they talked.
To me as a biased source, mainlander dialects sound rustic and quaint, and islander dialects sound rustic and heroic. To judge from vaudeville stereotypes of course, islander dialects sound just as quaint to Athenians.
Answered 2017-05-09 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
Will we ever decode Linear A or Cretan Hieroglyphs?
We can actually read Eteocretan language, because it’s in Greek characters; and we even have enough bilingual text that we know the Eteocretan for ‘cheese’. And we still can’t make head or tail of it.
A lot of Linear A and Linear B characters are shared, which means we can guess at the pronunciation of some of it; but that does not buy us much.
We would need a definite association with a pre-Hellenic language that we know in detail (just as we had with Linear B and Greek), or a bilingual text dating from the Minoan heyday. Myself, I’m not seeing it happening.
At least we now have a stable repertoire of signs in Cretan hieroglyphs—something we didn’t have when I was a lad.
And I’m still not convinced that the Phaistos Disc wasn’t a board game.
What does “not for nothing” mean?
Contra the other two answers here, “not for nothing, but” is indeed used, as Urban Dictionary defines it, as a hedge. It is in fact a verbal tic of Aaron Sorkin’s that drew attention through its overuse on The West Wing: Inside Aaron Sorkin’s Brain, Sorkinisms II: Not for Nothing. Most famously in the dialogue between Josh and Joe Quincy, where Quincy says “Not for nothing, but those you are trying to reach won’t understand that joke, and those who do you already have.” (And I still have trouble understanding what Sorkin meant by that.)
Not For Nothing: After two huff and puff answers about how this is not proper English, this definition is offered:
If I recall correctly, “not for nothing” is used when you’re about to say something
that the other person will probably disagree with. Typically, you’re offering advice
that’s prefaced with “Not for nothing..but etc, etc.”
As another poster commented, after Josh/Quincy was cited:
Yes I saw that too. Funny because Leo said “Not for nothing…” on last week’s late night West Wing re-run. I guess they’re going to have all the characters say it sooner or later.) Could it mean maybe: I’m not saying this with any ulterior motive (as in “not for anything), but.. Or I have nothing to gain in saying this but…
That’s the sense I have, but maybe not. And I didn’t understand Josh’s joke either.
See also What does “not for nothing” mean?, which differentiates the “not for nothing, but” Sorkin idiom from Jack London’s earlier usage (“Not for nothing had he been exposed to the pitiless struggles for life”), which other answerers seem to be presupposing.
I recently reread Jack London’s “White Fang” and noticed the phrase “not for nothing” therein. Where did that phrase originate?
Jack London’s example, as usage in What does “not for nothing” mean?, is:
“Not for nothing had he been exposed to the pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious environment of the Wild.”
Note that this is quite distinct from the contemporary American idiom “not for nothing, but…”, discussed in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does “not for nothing” mean?, and so overused by Aaron Sorkin in The West Wing.
In its literal reading, “not for no reason = for a very good reason”, it is understatement, litotes, of the kind you might expect of classicising or even classical authors. And indeed, Elyse Bruce’s Idiomation blog (Not For Nothing) traces it back through Robert Louis Stevenson, to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (ii.5):
An they have conspired together, I will not say you shall see a masque; but if you do, then it was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black-Monday last at six o’clock i’ the morning,falling out that year on Ash-Wednesday was four year, in the afternoon.
She further identifies that Plautus used an equivalent phrase in Aulularia iv.3:
It was not for nothing that the raven was just now croaking on my left hand.
But the Latin is Non temere est quod corvos cantat mihi nunc ab laeva manu: “it is not random that…” So Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which she got Plautus’ quote from, was substituting a Latin expression of litotes with a familiar English expression of litotes.