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Why don’t current-day Yugoslavians speak a Latin-based language but Romanians do?
They did:
- Dalmatian language – Wikipedia
- Istro-Romanian language – Wikipedia
- Aromanian language – Wikipedia
- Megleno-Romanian language – Wikipedia
What happened is quite simple: Slavic tribes moved into the area quite rapidly, between 500 and 800. Slavonic displaced Romance languages in most areas they moved into, with a few enclaves surviving.
The real question is not why don’t Yugoslavians speak Romance, but why Romanians do over such a wide area. Origin of the Romanians – Wikipedia shows that there is not a consensus around it, and of course the question is clouded by politics.
- Either there was a continguous compact Latin-speaking population in Romania, which resisted Slavonic assimilation (Theory of Daco-Roman continuity);
- or Romania was resettled by Latin-speaking populations (Aromanians) from enclaves south of the Danube (Immigrationist or Admigrationist theory). The Aromanians are highland shepherds, so they were not in regular contact with Slavs settling the lowlands.
In Christian historical movies, why aren’t the Romans speaking in Greek instead of Latin?
Because lots of Westerners know Latin (or at least know about Latin), relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek, and Latin is the language Westerners associate with the Roman Empire. Having Greek spoken in a movie would really just confuse people, who’d expect the Romans in Palestine to be speaking Latin.
That, and the logistics of getting actors to speak Greek (and which Greek?), precisely because relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek. Even the Passion of the Christ ended up going with Church Latin instead of Classical Latin…
How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?
I’m not contradicting Warren M Tang (see Warren M Tang’s answer to How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?), but let me try a different formulation.
- A functionalist explains language structures by appealing to the communicative function of those structures. (They do linguistics by metaphors.)
- A cognitivist explains language structures by appealing to general psychological processes of cognition. (They do linguistics by diagrams.)
- A structuralist explains language structures as a coherent system of signs. (They do linguistics by tables.)
These approaches are not mutually exclusive in principle—though they tend to be in execution.
Where’s Chomsky fit in all of this? He wishes he was a cognitivist; he’s actually a structuralist.
Do you think there is a mother language for all the other languages?
Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are there so many languages in the world?
Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities.
Myself, I suspect there was monogenesis, but that’s a hunch; and the serious work on the origins of language is subsequent to my training as a linguist, so I’m not across it.
But even if there were a single origin of language, any trace of it is long since effaced, under the waves of language change after language change, millennium after millennium. In our mental and scholarly modelling of how languages have come to be, the single mother language doesn’t make any difference: there could have been one, there could have been a hundred, we’ll never know. So it doesn’t matter to me.
When was the first time that Chinese was translated into any Indo-European language, e.g. Latin, Greek, etc.?
There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled.
Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the 17th century.
But you did not say European, you said Indo-European. The obvious place to look is India. There was clearly translation in the other direction of the Buddhist scriptures, to the extent of the Chinese theorising about translation practice: Chinese translation theory. But the earliest indication I’ve found of the reverse direction is in the 7th century AD:
The most important figure of the first peak of translation in China was the famous monk of the Tang dynasty—Xuan Zang (600-664), who was the main character in A Journey to the West. […]
Xuan Zang was also the first Chinese translator who translated out of Chinese. He translated some of Lao Zi’s (the father of Taoism) works into Sanskrit. He also attempted to translate some other classical Chinese literature for the people of India.
The next indication of translation activity into Indo-European I find is 14th century, under the Pax Mongolica, by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani: (see here). “Among Rashideddin’s other works are four volumes of translations from Chinese into Persian, works that he could not have produced by himself, as well as works on agriculture and medicine that incorporate either translations from Chinese or extensive information on Chinese practice derived from Chinese sources.”
What do Greeks think of the song of Çelo Mezanit?
Greeks don’t know the song. Most Greeks barely know about Chameria. And nationalist Greeks who know how the song has become a rallying point for Çam identity may well react with hostility. God knows I read a couple of shitfights on YouTube.
But given the translation and someone who’s not nationalist (e.g. Dimitris Almyrantis: Dimitris Almyrantis’ answer to What do Greeks think of the song of Çelo Mezanit?), you’ll get the recognition of something culturally familiar.
To answer the question, I’m going to YouTube, ignoring the typical “Fuck you Greek pederast” “Fuck you Albanian cur” stuff, and translate the comments made in Greek to a different recording:
- Epirot and Albanian, it’s almost the one music.
- We cry and celebrate with the same songs. Whatever they may say, our blood is so mixed together, whether we like it or not.
- Finally a YouTube user with serious and truthful attitudes! Good health to you and your family, sir! Good luck!
- [I didn’t translate Prentas Dimtris’ comments, because I actually didn’t understand them; Greek as Foreign Language, I surmise]
I’m not trying to whitewash anything by quoting those. Just point out that if Greeks aren’t given the political context that the song has acquired, and just listen and read the lyrics, they’ll actually like it.
I did too, although I think I’ve heard ballads that got to the point more directly.
Have you ever created your own language?
Yup, around 10. Set in Liliput, because I’d just read Gulliver’s Travels, and accompanied by some map drawing. Inspired by the Latin textbooks I was poring over, and it had a hell of a lot of declension tables. And diacritics. El Glheþ Talossan-level diacritics. Coz they’re k00l.
It wasn’t full, because I don’t think I understood enough about language back then; vocabulary was never a problem though—there’s always more Latin where that came from. Never taught it to anyone. Don’t remember a thing about it.
What are the purposes of doing a research study on how dialects impact gender?
As Joe Devney said, depends on the study, but I have a fair guess.
That would be gender, presumably, as in grammatical gender, in those languages that have them. The wording would then presumably be something more like how does assignment of entities to particular genders vary from one dialect to another within the same language.
Dialects are linguistics’ natural laboratory: you have a common starting point for the dialects that’s quite well understood, even by laypeople—they can work out how the dialects relate to each other and to the common core of the language without much trouble. So the variation in how different dialects treat the same phenomenon can be mapped out straightforwardly. Because the dialects have diverged recently enough, those changes can usually be made sense of easily, compared to changes between different languages.
So the variation in gender assignment within a language, between different dialects, will have a common starting point—in Modern Greek dialect, say, Ancient Greek; and you can make sense of the variation between dialects, because there’s much less variation to trace than, say, the variation between French and Russian.
The purposes of such a research study would be the same as the purposes for any research study on how entities are assigned to gender; the results would just be much more tractable.
Is language production very important in order to be good at reading comprehension in classical or biblical languages?
It certainly is not regarded by most language teachers as important. Latin and Greek prose composition, which required students to produce original text (even if as a pastiche of Thucydides or Caesar) was huge a century ago, and I get the impression is extinct now. There are some ancient Greek text books that trying to teach the language like any modern language, immersively and with students conversing in the language before reading it. But they are in the minority.
Is the contemporary avoidance of production correct? My hunch is, you have a slightly better understanding of the nuances underlying syntactic or lexical choices in passages, if you yourself have had to go through them in language production.
But it is only a slight advantage, and most people learning classical languages now probably don’t need that level of nuanced understanding anyway. After all, they can always read one of the many translations around if that’s what they’re really after.
What is the Ancient Greek translation of ‘Stachys’, and what are the modern Greek translations of ‘Hydrobius’, ‘Kornephoros’, and ‘Protrygater’?
They’re all Ancient Greek, really, and they’re all Greek star names from Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are all the Greek star names?
- α Virginis: Stachys is “Ear of Wheat”. It’s Aratus’ name, and the established name Spica is its Latin translation.
- ζ Hydrae: Hydrobius (whatever the name’s provenance) is “living in water” (or in Hydra, I guess)
- β Herculis: Kornephoros is supposed to be “club bearer”. The ancient Greek is in fact korynēphoros; mangling of Ancient Greek appears to be routine in my list. Its alternative name, Rutilicus, is also “a corruption of the Latin word titillicus, meaning ‘armpit’.” (Beta Herculis – Wikipedia)
- ε Virginis: Protrygater is “fore-harvester” (referring to the wine harvest). Again, this is Aratus’ name and the established name, Latin Vindemiatrix meaning ‘the grape-harvestress’, is derived from it.