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In English, why does the letter “υ” from Greek loanwords appear in some words as letter “Y,” but as “U” in other words?
The rule really is y, not u, for Greek upsilon. That really *really* surprised me.
I went to the OED, and it didn’t tell me much:
Etymology: First formed as French glucose (Dumas 1838, in Compt. Rend. VII. 109); compare Greek γλυκύς sweet and -ose suffix.
The English Wikipedia didn’t tell me much more.
But you know, there are other Wikipedias, and they often say things the English Wikipedia doesn’t. And since the word was coined in French, I took a chance that it might have said what was on Dumas’ mind. My translations.
En 1838, un comité de l’Académie des sciences composé des chimistes et physiciens français Thénard, Gay-Lussac, Biot et Dumas, décide d’appeler le sucre se trouvant dans le raisin, dans l’amidon, et dans le miel du nom de glucose, en fournissant comme étymologie le grec τὸ γλεῦκος / gleukos, vin doux. Émile Littré ayant donné une autre étymologie, l’adjectif γλυκύς / glukus (« de saveur douce »), la racine habituelle est devenue glyc-(l’upsilon grec donnant un y), comme dans glycémie et glycogène.
“In 1838, a committee of the Academy of Sciences, composed of the French chemists and physicists Thénard, Gay-Lussac, Biot and Dumas, decided to call the sugar found in grapes, starch and honey with the name glucose, providing its etymology as the Greek gleukos ‘sweet new wine’. Émile Littré had provided an alternative etymology, the adjective glykys ‘sweet’, so the usual root in derivations is glyc-, as in glycaemia and glycogen.”
And the French Wikipedia adds a footnote with the actual 1838 article derivation:
Louis Jacques Thénard, Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac, Jean-Baptiste Biot et Jean-Baptiste Dumas, « Rapport sur un mémoire de M. Péligiot, intitulé: Recherches sur la nature et les propriétés chimiques des sucres », Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences, 2 juillet 1838, p. 106-113 (lire en ligne [archive]) :
« Il résulte des comparaisons faites par M. Péligot, que le sucre de raisin, celui d’amidon, celui de diabètes et celui de miel ont parfaitement la même composition et les mêmes propriétés, et constituent un seul corps que nous proposons d’appeler Glucose(γλευϰος, moût, vin doux). »
“From comparisons made by Mr Péligot, it turns out that the sugar in graps, starch, diabetics and honey have the identical composition and properties, and involve a single constituent which we propose to call glucose (γλεῦκος, ‘must, sweet wine’).”
The transliteration of Greek <ευ> as <u> is also irregular; it is conventionally <eu>, as in leucocyte or rheumatism. But there is a tendency to transliterate <ευ> as <u> in French: cf. leucocyte, but rhumatisme.
(Why yes, I have found an error in the OED. I’ve emailed them.)
Btw, noone told the Greeks the word is derived from gleukos; in Greek the word is γλυκόζη glykozē.
EDIT: Thanks, Chad Turner. Some Greek upsilons are spelled in English as <u>; notable instances are kudos and hubris. Per both Merriam-Webster’s Manual for Writers and Editors and The History of English Spelling (9781405190237): Christopher Upward, George Davidson (PDF draft chapter here: http://www.aston.ac.uk/EasysiteW…), the <u> is a 19th–20th century convention, subsequent to the obligatory latinisation of Greek loans. Notice that it’s Hellenising kudos, not Latinising cydus.
Could Koiné be roughly divided into 6 declension types?
I *think* I read this in
- Signes-Codoñer, J. 2005. The definitions of the Greek middle voice between Apollonius Dyscolus and Constantinus Lascaris. Historiographia Linguistica 32: 1-33.
The Ancient Greek authorities (actually Roman-era) came up with something like 60 declensions for Greek, because they were not trying to do internal reconstruction or look for regularities. (I don’t know much about the Sanskrit grammarians, but what little I know tells me they were centuries ahead of the Greeks.)
The Latin grammarians did do internal reconstruction and looked for regularities. They got the Latin declensions down to five.
When the Greeks rediscovered Latin grammars in the Renaissance, they did a double take. Then, they took another, embarrassed look at their own grammar.
They worked out that with some pushing, they could get it down to ten.
With a lot more linguistics and reconstruction, we now have Greek declensions down to three; and if you’re aware of proto-Greek, the three make a lot of sense.
You can come up with more vowels, splitting off the contracted first and second declensions, and differentiating the third declension with vowel stems, which don’t look close to the consonant stems. If you do that, I’d be getting closer to 10 than 6: I’d want to break up several third declensions that don’t look obviously similar. (See Appendix:Ancient Greek third declension.)
If it makes you happier to think of βασιλεύς, -εως and τέλος, -ους as a completely different declension from πτέρυξ, -γος, because you don’t want to go via proto-Greek and Attic sound rules, well, you can *shrug*. People don’t do that, because Koine grammar teaching derives from Classical Greek grammar teaching: they use the same declensions, and just treat those odd forms as subclasses.
Are the vowels “ι, υ, and α” long by nature within a particular word in Greek poetry?
My command of quantitative metre is non existent, but to my knowledge a particular instance of α, ι, υ in a particular word was almost always either long or short: it was a property of the phonology of the word, and not an artefact of the metre.
The quantity of α, ι, υ in word roots is given in larger Ancient Greek dictionaries such as LSJ or DGE. If you scroll through, you will see entries where there are exceptions (hence the “almost” above), where one poet once will have used a different quantity for one of those vowels in the stem. Linguists to my knowledge have not treated that as metrical licence, but as linguistic variation: if a poet used the “wrong” length for a vowel, the assumption is that some speakers really were pronouncing it like that.
Again: that’s my outsider linguist impression. Specialists in metre may know better.
What is the schwa in linguistics and where can I find it in Ancient Greek?
For what is a schwa, I refer you to What is the schwa in linguistics?, and Schwa – Wikipedia. It is the “neutral”, mid central vowel.
You’ll find the schwa in lots and lots of languages, including English (uh…. ; about; and in fact most unstressed vowels of English). You won’t find it in Ancient Greek.
Schwa used to be reconstructed in Proto-Indo-European though, as the phoneme behind the correspondence of i in Indic to a in Greek. For example, pitár ~ patēr was reconstructed as *pəter-. The distribution of the “schwa indogermanicum” was somewhat problematic, and it is now more economically reconstructed as a syllabic laryngeal (*p-h̥₂ter-); it’s plausible that in late Indo-European, the earlier syllabic laryngeal would have been pronounced as a schwa.
If Mandarin has a lot of homophones, how are the different meanings understood while speaking?
There’s no shortage of Chinese speakers here, and they’ll give better informed answers than me. But:
Mandarin Chinese is not Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese was a bit of a scholarly game, and writers relished the ambiguity of the homophones and the overall oracularity of it all. People in real life don’t, and Mandarin has dealt with homophony the way many languages do, by adding disambiguating words. Though people still have fun with Homophonic puns in Mandarin Chinese.
So the word for bat, fú 蝠, is homophonous with the word for good fortune, fú 福, and as a result bats commonly feature in Chinese art. But people who actually speak the language don’t call bats fú. They call them 蝙蝠 biānfú, combining two words for bat.
For another instance of ambiguity, look at Megan Cox’s answer to What are some homophones in Mandarin Chinese?. As Megan points out, there is homophony between bīng 冰 ‘ice’ and bìng 病 ‘illness, esp. mental illness’.
That’s not as homophonous as it gets; bīng 兵 (soldier) is a true homophone, and Wikipedia’s article on homophonic puns reports that in 1882, when there was fear of rebellions around Beijing, the sale of ice was banned as a result.
But even with that near homophony of bīng and bìng, Megan as a learner of Chinese may have been confused, yelling 你有病吗？ “Have you got a mental illness?” at the convenience store when she thought she was asking for ice. But the shop owner worked out what was going on, and he wouldn’t have been confused if she was fluent in Chinese. Ice as a noun is not bīng 冰 , but bīngkuài 冰块 ‘ice piece, ice cube’. So it would never be ambiguous with the noun bìng 病 ‘illness’.
How do you translate “It is what it is” into Latin?
A non-trivial one. The meaning needs to be captured, and the meaning is that “it is no more than what it already is; we are stuck with it.” Which means I’d rather render the second is as ‘become’, ‘end up’.
Est sicut factum est “it is as it has become” is a start.
Ut fit sic sit “as it becomes, so let it be” is catchier, though perhaps it goes in a different direction (“if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”).
Est id, quidquid fit “Whatever it is becoming, it’s that” is maybe a bit closer.
If Alexander was Greek, why was he famous as Macedonian Alexander?
Because to the Greeks, the people who spoke about him the most, and whose historical accounts influenced the West’s understanding of Alexander the most, saying he was Greek wouldn’t mean anything: they were Greek themselves, after all. But saying he was from Macedon meant a lot to Greeks: Macedon had a marginal presence in Classical antiquity, then all of a sudden conquered the world. (That’s not taking a side on how Greek the Ancient Macedonians were, btw.) And Macedon was the state he was the king of, not Greece.
If you want some parallels, try George W Bush: to Americans, and indeed to the Anglosphere, the fact that he was (or rather, proclaimed himself to be) Texan was noteworthy; the fact that he was American was taken as given. And Franz-Joseph was the emperor of Austria–Hungary; we don’t refer to him as Austrian.
I was hoping to find instances of the people he conquered calling him Alexander the Greek, but it doesn’t look like it. Hebrew per Wikipedia (אלכסנדר הגדול – ויקיפדיה) uses Alexander the Great אלכסנדר הגדול or Alexander of Macedon אלכסנדר מוקדון. Ditto Arabic per Wikipedia (الإسكندر الأكبر – ويكيبيديا، الموسوعة الحرة): Alexander the Great (الإسكندر الأكبر، والإسكندر الكبير) or Alexander of Macedon (الإسكندر المقدوني), or Alexander the Two-Horned (الإسكندر ذو القرنين)—though per Alexander the Great in the Quran – Wikipedia, the earliest identification of the Two-Horned One of the Quran with Alexander, in the 9th century, referred to him as Greek:
Dhu al-Qarnain is Alexander the Greek, the king of Persia and Greece, or the king of the east and the west, for because of this he was called Dhul-Qarnayn [meaning, ‘the two-horned one’]
Is there a language designed for use by both human and artificial intelligence?
The artificial language Lojban was not expressly designed to be used by machines; it (or rather its antecedent Loglan) was designed as a test of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, its overt basis in predicate logic being sufficiently alien that its inventor thought it would serve the purpose.
Lojban is something of a kitchen sink language in its design, but its design has several aspects which are appealing to at least some AI enthusiasts:
- It has spoken syntactic brackets, and it can be parsed syntactically by an LALR parser (defined in Yacc); so its syntax as formally specified is unambiguous.
- It is also morphologically unambiguous, at the cost of some restrictive phonotactics. (I’m seeing that loanword phonotactics are less restrictive than they were in my day.) So a stream of phonemes can be broken up into morphemes only one way.
- It was a well-elaborated list of 1300-odd basic predicates, with their arguments fully specified. It has prepositions supporting a full case grammar, and (unofficially) conventions for deriving compound predicate arguments from their components. (I was involved in the latter.) This does not quite make its semantics as unambiguous as they’d like, but it certainly puts it on a very formal footing.
Syntactic and morphological ambiguity are not the big challenge of natural language processing; stats tends to take care of that. Semantics is always sloppier, but I’m not sure that the new generation stats-mongerers are that fussed about formal semantics either. But yes, Lojban has been attractive to several AI people for that reason. Ben Goertzel, who is on here, has been vocal about this; see e.g. Aspects of Artificial General Intelligence.
If the Iliad is ‘Iliadic’, and the Odyssey is ‘Odyssean’, what is the Aeneid?
Two ways of solving this: via Greek and via Latin.
Greek first. I don’t care if the Aeneid is in Latin.
- Iliad: Nominative Iliás, Genitive Iliádos, so the stem is Iliad-. (The nominative in proto-Greek would be *Iliad-s.) Hence, Iliad-ic.
- Odyssey: Nominative Odússeia, Genitive Odusseías, so the stem is Odussei-. First declension, –ikos didn’t attach to those, Latin does its own thing, mumble mumble stuff I don’t actually know, which leads to Odysse(i)-an.
- In Greek, the Aeneid is Aineiás, by analogy with Iliás. So if Aeneid were an originally Greek word, its adjective would be Aene(i)ad-ic.
- In Latin, for whatever reason, the Aeneid is Nominative Aenei-s, Genitive Aenei-dis (treating the word as Latin) or Aenei-dos (treating the word as Greek. So the stem is Aeneid-, not Aenead– in Latin (therefore Aeneid in English), and if we treat Aeneid as a Latin word, the adjective is Aeneid-ic.
Google: 239 hits for Aeneidic, 146 for Aeneadic, both of which look to be used by reputable sources.
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?
Because Greek didn’t have an ŋ letter, although they knew that the sound existed.
Phonetically, the final -n in prefixes was often assimilated phonetically to the following letter:
- syn ‘with’ + pathos ‘passion’ > sym-patheia ‘sympathy, compassion’
- syn ‘with’ + labē ‘taking’ > syl-labē ‘syllable: sounds “taken together”’
- syn ‘with’ + rhaphē ‘sewing’ > syr-raphē ‘sewing together’
Now if you put syn- in front of a velar, and the -n- undergoes assimilation to a velar just as it did to a bilabial or a liquid, then you would expect the n to go to an ŋ:
- syn ‘with’ + kopē ‘cutting’ > syŋ-kopē ‘syncope, cutting off’
- syn ‘with’ + grapheus ‘writer’ > syŋ-grapheus ‘author’
- syn ‘with’ + khysis ‘pouring’ > syŋ-khysis ‘confusion’
Those forms show up in Greek alright, but they’re written with a gamma where you’d expect the ŋ: <sygkopē>, <syggrapheus>, <sygkhysis>.
But we do have evidence that the gamma in that position stood for an ŋ after all.
- In Latin, that first <g> was transliterated as an <n>: sygkopē = syncope.
- There was no ŋ letter in Greek, so you would expect ŋ to be written down as a letter that sounded like ŋ—either <n> (same manner of articulation, not same place) or <g> (same place of articulation, not same manner).
- The Greeks themselves said that that first <g> had a different sound, which they called agma; a fragment of Marcus Terentius Varro says that a grammarian called Ion had suggested agma should have been the 25th letter of the Greek alphabet. AGMA, A FORGOTTEN GREEK LETTER
ut Ion scribit, quinta uicesima est littera, quam uocant agma, cuius forma nulla est et uox communis est Graecis et Latinis, ut his uerbis: aggulus, aggens, agguilla, iggerunt. in eius modi Graeci et Accius noster bina G scribunt, alii N et G, quod in hoc ueritatem uidere facile non est. similiter agceps, agcora.
As Ion writes, there is a 25th letter, which is called ‘agma’, which has no shape, but a phonetic value that is the same in Greek and Latin, as in the following words: aggulus, aggens, agguilla, iggerunt. In words of this type, the Greeks and our Accius write a geminate GG, while others write NG, because it is difficult to recognize the real sound in the former; similarly agceps, agcora.