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Why are “m” and “n” sounds often interchangeable and/or confused in the middle of words?
In the case you raise of count, this is simply Assimilation (phonology). It’s not that the m and the n are interchangeable, it’s that nt is easier to pronounce that mt, because both the n and the t are alveolar, so you do not have to move your tongue and lips between the two sounds; m and t on the other hand have different places of articulation.
A lot of sound change involves assimilation, since a lot of sound change is driven by ease of pronunciation; e.g. computare > compter > conter > count. The reverse change, Dissimilation, is rarer, and usually involves removing repetition of the identical sound, rather than making two different sounds less similar.
What do you think about ignoring other language’s diacritics, umlauts etc.?
I’ve just written an answer about Pāṇini. I know what a macron is, and I know what a retroflex nasal is. I also know that the Sanskrit grammarian is not to be confused with an Italian sandwich.
Nevertheless, in my answer I referred to him as Panini. And I do not feel guilty for doing so.
Diacritics for other languages are appropriate in scholarly writing, and when you are writing for a bilingual audience, which will wince to see them missing. In a more casual context, on the other hand, it does come across in English as pretentious.
There is also a long standing convention that we are not as fastidious about diacritics on proper names. Proper names are embedded in otherwise purely English text. There is a strong driver to nativise them orthographically, since they are effectively used as part of English. The same goes for loan words. I pronounce jalapeno with a velar fricative and palatal nasal, because I’m pretentious like that, but I would still hesitate to use a tilde.
Language is full of contradictory pressures, and this is yet another instance: assimilation versus fidelity, nativisation vs exoticisation. The pendulum swings, as a matter of fashion, but the drivers behind each are legitimate. Dropping the tilde in a loanword is not disrespect to Spanish: it demonstrates how thorough the influence of Spanish has been in English, to have produced a nativised loanword.
The Greek word genesis (γένεσις) has the root gen, but where does the suffix -esis come from?
Γένεσις /ɡénesis/ “Genesis, origin” consists of the verb root gen- “to originate”, and the ending -esis.
The -εσις ending of Greek genesis has two components. The –sis component is a nominalisation, indicating the result of a verb. Cf. ly-sis ‘solution’ < lyō ‘solve’; gennē-sis ‘birth’ < gennaō ‘give birth’; pep-sis ‘digestion’ < peptō ‘digest’; theōsis ‘becoming God’ < theoō ‘make a God’.
The vowel before the –sis, if any, depends on the conjugation of the verb.
- A normal thematic verb (with a thematic vowel connecting inflections to the verb stem) does not use a vowel: ly-sis; pep-sis < *pept-sis.
- A contracted thematic verb (verb stem already ends in a vowel) often lengthens the vowel: the-ō-sis < the-o-ō; genn-ē-sis, Doric genn-ā-sis < genn-a-ō.
- A contracted thematic verb in –eō may or may not lengthen the e; this usually correlates with whether the e is lengthened in the aorist passive. blasteō ‘to sprout’, aor.pass. eblastē-thēn, blastē-sis ‘sprouting’; haireō ‘to choose’, aor.pass. haire-thēn, haire-sis ‘choice’.
- An athematic verb (with no thematic vowel: an archaic class of verbs) has a short vowel before the ending. hi-stē-mi ‘stand’, Doric hi-stā-mi > sta-sis. di-dō-mi ‘give’ > do-sis. ti-thē-mi ‘put’ > thesis.
And here I get stuck, I’m afraid. I can’t work out why the vowel in genesis is an epsilon instead of a zero, *gen-sis > *gessis, or an a which corresponded to the Indo-European schwa, cf. teinō ‘stretch’ > tn-sis > ta-sis ‘tension’. I think somehow this is a pattern with second aorists, e-gen-omēn ‘I became’ > gene-sis ~ e-sch-omēn ‘I was had’ > sche-sis ‘relation’.
But in any case: the vowel is not part of the suffix, but a connector.
EDIT: the actual answer is Neeraj Mathur’s answer to The Greek word genesis (γένεσις) has the root gen, but where does the suffix -esis come from? I’m leaving this up because it takes you halfway there, and Neeraj resolves the -e- issue where I got stuck; and this is good information to know for less archaic verbs anyway.
Answered 2017-05-01 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
The Greek word εὐγενής ‘noble’ comes from εὖ ‘good’ + γεν- ‘breed’, but where does -ής come from?
-ής, -ές is a suffix used to form adjectives. The entry on -ής, -ές in Smyth’s Grammar §858, reads (Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges):
5. ες (nom. –ής, –ές): primitive: ψευδ-ής false (ψεύδ-ω deceive), σαφ-ής clear, πρην-ής prone, ὑγι-ής healthy. Very common in compounds, as ἀ-σφαλ-ής unharmed, secure (ἀ-priv. + σφαλ- in σφάλλω trip).
So the compound adjective εὐ-γεν-ής ‘good + breed’-ής for ‘noble’ is analogous to ἁ-σφαλ-ής ‘un-tripping’-ής for ‘secureʼ.
Why is Wikipedia in Ancient Greek and Simple French still rejected in spite of both having a strong support base?
The Wikimedia Language committee clamped down on “dead” languages and artificial languages quite ferociously, after an initial laissez-faire period. Because initially you could set up a Wikipedia in any language you liked, Latin, Old English, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic got in. Because the Wikimedia Language Committee clamped down, Ancient Greek got rejected even though the proposal for it was far advanced.
Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Ancient Greek
This discussion was created before the implementation of the Language proposal policy, and it is incompatible with the policy. Please open a new proposal in the format this page has been converted to (see the instructions). Do not copy discussion wholesale, although you are free to link to it or summarise it (feel free to copy your own comments over). — {admin} Pathoschild 20:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Same goes for Ido and Volapük and Lojban, which got in before (Esperanto would be hard to argue against), and Toki Pona or Klingon, which didn’t make it. Klingon being a pop culture conlang, it attracted disproporionate negative attention, including Wales personally wielding the axe against it:
History of the Klingon Wikipedia
In August 2005, Jimbo Wales made a decision to lock the Klingon Wiki permanently. While Jimbo has never publicly stated his exact rationale for closing the wiki, the maturation of Wikipedia and its sister projects as a whole into a vital worldwide resource meant that there was little incentive to keep a niche language that was not intended to be seriously used. Other constructed languages such as the Toki Pona language were closed at about the same time (although the Toki Pona Wikipedia, like the Klingon Wikipedia, was ultimately hosted at Wikia due to the presence of a strong community).
In fact, the Klingon letter r was removed from the Wikipedia logo in 2010, replaced by a Ge’ez character.
Old logo; Klingon <r> top right.
New logo
Why do most modern Persian books and sites use the Naskh font instead of the traditional Nastaʿlīq font?
Khateeb, I have no idea, but I can surmise based on:
If your technology is handwriting, it doesn’t particularly matter whether your writing is vertical or horizontal, or a mix of both.
If you’re writing online in 2017, and you want to use a vertical script like Mongolian… well, read Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why doesn’t Mongolia use the Uighur script again and leave out Cyrillic?
And Nastaliq goes both vertical and horizontal. If you read the Wikipedia page, metallic, traditional typesetting of Nastaliq has been a non-starter for that reason. Digital typesetting in theory should be easier, but of course in practice it is a hassle, especially if you can just use Naskh as an alternative.
Wikipedia says that the InPage custom Desktop Publishing software, which exists to do Nastaliq, is extensively used now for Urdu. For publishing, maybe; the Medium blog above shows how little penetration Nastaliq has had among laypeople online, and how grateful they were that Microsoft started supporting Nastaliq at all in 2011.
Khateeb, you’ll have to tell me how widely Nastaliq is seen in Urdu. You asked though about Persian. If I interpret Wikipedia correctly, while Nastaliq originated in Persia, its use in Persian is limited to poetry; Pashto uses both Naskh and Nastaliq, and Kashmiri, Punjabi and Urdu—and Ottoman Turkish—used Nastaliq. For whatever reason, it seems that Nastaliq flourished as an everyday script, rather than a calligraphy-only script, only east of Persia. Possibly because Persia neighbours Naskh territory (Arabic), and Urdu neighbours Persian, not Arabic.
So, if I had to guess why Persian sticks with Naskh: combination of technical difficulties, and not a strong enough identification with Nastaliq to bother surmounting the technical difficulties (unlike Urdu).
Which programming paradigm is the most similar to human speech?
Well, let’s think this through.
I count three programming paradigms from when I was studying computer science 25 years ago: functional, logical, and procedural. They correspond to three types of semantics: denotational, axiomatic, and operational. The first two are pristine and beautiful articulations of mathematics and logic, respectively. The last involves modelling the internal state of a von Neumann machine, and is so ugly, it’s embarrassing to express it in mathematical notation at all.
By default, I would say denotational semantics comes closest to how formal linguists think of linguistic semantics. It uses statements about the world to formulate a model of the world. And that’s what humans do, in making assertive speech acts.
The catch is, the reason we interact with computers through programming languages is not assertive: we are not (yet) having a debate with the computer about moral philosophy or fiscal policy, for example. It is directive: we are trying to get the computer to do things for us.
The most straightforward way of directing an action is by issuing directive speech acts. We couch our commands to other people as questions and statements out of politeness, but we don’t really do that with a computer. And even when we are doing functional or logical programming, we are not truly authoring mathematical or logical proofs. We are using the mechanisms of those proofs, to get the computer to do something. What we choose to express in those paradigms is still driven by that goal.
(I did a semester project writing a parser in Prolog. My most important learning? Logic programming is still programming.)
So while functional programming is probably closest to how we think of natural language in general, procedural programming is closest to how we think of language in the context of human-computer interaction.
What were Noam Chomsky’s views on Panini’s Ashtadhyayi?
Complimentary, but not deep.
The interwebs widely quote Chomsky saying in Kolkata, in a 10-minute speech in 2001, “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”: An event in Kolkata. Chomsky in fact already said that in the preface of Aspects in 1965: “a generative grammar, in essentially the contemporary sense of this term” . And the final line of The Sound Pattern of English is an allusion to the final sutra of Panini, “ā → ā”.
But as Kiparsky and Staal noted in 1969, Panini’s model of generativity has very different constructs between the two levels: they are derivations, not rewritings. An anecdote on Chomsky’s linguistic theory suggests that Chomsky ended up going back to an approach more like Panini’s with Minimalism in 1991—and might have saved himself 26 years if he’d read Panini more closely when he was citing him in Aspects.
But of course, Chomsky wasn’t learning from Panini, or honing his craft against the Indian master. Chomsky came up with transformations on his own, and merely found it convenient occasionally to allude to Panini as an antecedent. Panini and Chomsky were not undertaking the same research programme, after all.
How did the Greeks represent fractions?
Ptolemy, at least, expressed them somewhat clumsily, by adding reciprocals. There were dedicated symbols for half: [math]unicode{x10175}, unicode{x10176}[/math], two thirds: [math]unicode{x10177}[/math], and three quarters: [math]unicode{x10178}.[/math] Outside of those, fractions were expressed by using double prime for reciprocals, ″.
So Ptolemy used ιβ″ = 1/12 a lot for geographical coordinates; and he would also use expressions like γ″ιβ″ = 1/3 + 1/12 = 5/12 or [math]unicode{x10175}[/math]ιβ″ = 1/2+1/12 = 7/12.
EDIT: For those without font support for Ancient Greek Numerals:
How can this Rilke translation be improved?
So you seek to translate:
Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinaus
Unter den großen Himmel treten.
“I would like to step out of my heart,
And go walking beneath the enormous sky.”
I’ll start by putting in the missing accent marks 🙂
ἐκ τῆς καρδίας βούλομαι ἐκβαίνειν
ὑπὸ τῷ μεγάλῳ οὐρανῷ βαδίζειν
I am so, so not going to have anything to say about metre: never got the hang of it.
The Greek matches the English, but not the German. Notice that the Greek repeats ek– : “step out, out of my heart”; the German repeats the aus: “out of my heart, away”, but the verb isn’t there at all: it’s literally “I would out of my heart, away, beneath the great heaven to tread”. So I’d get rid of ἐκβαίνειν: the Greek should be as taut as the German.
The other problem is that ἐκ τῆς καρδίας sounds like “from my heart” (which in German would be von Herzen); in fact Aristophanes uses it in that meaning in Clouds 86 ἀλλ’ εἴπερ ἐκ τῆς καρδίας μ’ ὄντως φιλεῖς “but if you truly love me from your heart”.
Homeric/Poetic Greek is not something I’m in any way comfortable, but maybe ἑκάς ‘far away from’?
And for the ‘great heaven’, I’m thinking ‘broad’—cf. the Orthodox icon caption of the Virgin Mary as πλατυτέρα τῶν οὐρανῶν.
τῆς καρδίας ἑκάς βούλομαι
ὑπὸ τῷ πλατεῖ οὐρανῷ ἐκβαδίζειν
“away from the heart I wish
under the broad heaven to step out”
Someone else do the metre.