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trice
- A doctor has suggested me Combiflam trice a day for five days for a liquid problem discharge in my breast. Is it fine?
- What are some amazing pictures one has to see trice to understand?
- If the value of each letter in the alphabet series is made trice of its serial number then L-H+O=?
… No, trice is not a mispelling of thrice (or twice, hard to tell).
Ali Cengiz’s answer to How do I say thank you in Turkish?
teşekkür ederim /teʃe’kjuːr ederəm/.
(easier way for English speakers; “two sugar a dream” sounds understandable when read in a trice.)
It turns a city into a graveyard in the wink of an eye, and makes a peasant wench a princess in a trice.
James Tapper’s answer to Why did Nigel Farage quit as the leader of UKIP?
Reading someone’s argument and picking holes in it can be done in a trice.
And of course,
Michael Masiello’s answer to What are books that were written before the Internet?
The internet has been around for a trice of time. People have been reading and writing since the dawn of history.
a brief space of time : instant —used chiefly in the phrase in a trice
< Middle English trise, literally, pull, from trisen
cf. trice : to haul up or in and lash or secure (something, such as a sail) with a small rope
The Magister’s usage prompted this:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-b…
Robert Shaus: Only person I’ve seen use the word, trice. Great.
Michael Masiello: Well, Shakespeare did, too. But not on Quora. He missed out on Quora.
In your country, what are high-prestige and low-prestige languages for L2 speakers?
Thirty years ago, the most popular languages to learn at school in Australia were those that have inherited prestige from Britain: French, with German a somewhat distant second.
They are being overtaken now by Spanish and Chinese and Japanese, but they remain entrenched, particularly in elite schools. The French lecturers I use to hang out with would surreptitiously roll their eyes about the sense of entitlement of their students.
The languages moving up, Spanish and Chinese and Japanese and Indonesian, are not prestigious in the same way: they are seen I think as utilitarian rather than cultured choices. Then again, I’m biased. But I’m pretty sure no one would be looked down on for choosing one of those languages. They are regarded as eminently practical.
The languages that will be taken less seriously, as with other answers here, are community languages, spoken by large migrant communities. Greek, Arabic, Vietnamese. They are usually learnt by Heritage speakers, and are regarded as easy marks to add to your high school exams. If you’re not from the ethnic group, people will be genuinely puzzled about why you are learning it. And because the Heritage speakers all around you in the classroom already know at least bits and pieces, you are going to find the class quite frustrating.
Interestingly, Italian is both a cultural Prestige language and a community language, which has worked in its favour.
How does the linguistic concept of “time depth” compare to the intuition of “language age”?
Not very well.
Linguists have an understanding of some languages being more conservative in certain aspects than others. Informed by history, they also have a notion of how far back two languages branched apart.
Linguists are quite reluctant to make the further claim that one language is overall more archaic than another, compared to their common source. Often however this is demonstrably true. I have edited a paper, for example, which used state automata to derive Cantonese and Mandarin phonology from Middle Chinese, and computed a quite reasonable metric showing that Cantonese is more archaic than Mandarin.
So much for linguists’ notion of time depth. Lay notions of “old languages” are not derived from meticulous comparison of state automata, of course. Much of the time, they are not derived from linguistic information at all, but from cultural narratives (myths) and ethnic prejudices.
In the best case, laypeople have been exposed to an older language or stage of the same language, through religion or education. If they are paying attention and are multilingual, they can form an impression of which language (or dialect) that they are familiar with sounds more like the archaic language. And their intuitions will be reasonable.
Not infallible though.
In the 1560s, the German scholar Martin Crusius decided he’d learn modern Greek, and corresponded with a large number of scholars in Greece to do so. Theodosios Zygomalas was his main source of information. When Zygomalas outlined the dialects of modern Greek to Crusius, he wrote that the most tragically corrupt dialect of all was Athenian. A lamentable Falling Away from what had been.
The Athenian dialect of Modern Greek was an enclave surrounded by Albanian speakers since the Black Death. Phonetically, it was in fact more archaic than “standard” Greek, particularily in its pronunciation of upsilon. But of course, Zygomalas did not know that. All he knew was, Athenian dialect sounded funny, and historically it was not supposed to. Ergo, it was more corrupt.
Answered 2017-04-06 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
Do words have intrinsic meaning? Does it make sense to argue over the definition of a word?
Do words have intrinsic meaning? No.
The meaning of words is negotiated constantly (and mostly unconsciously) within a community. That’s why meanings change. Meaning inheres not in the word but in the community, because language as a code inheres in the community. Where by code, I mean a mapping of forms to meanings, which enables you to be understood by other members of the community. And the community, over time, can and does change its collective mind about those mappings.
But language is also individual. Individuals learn the code that is out there in the community, and build their own internal representation of it. In fact, the community version of language is an abstraction, an aggregation over individual languages (idiolects), the real languages inside people’s skulls.
That abstraction is still important, though. If you start using words like Humpty Dumpty, to mean whatever you want, you go against the community norms of the language. Which means concretely that you go against the norms that most if not all members of the community have internalised.
Does it make sense to argue over the definition of a word? Yes.
The change of meaning in words is most of the time unconscious and gradual. But especially in literate and specialised societies, people become aware of meaning change. And people have a stake in defending the stability of a word’s meaning in a particular domain. If that domain has gatekeepers, is reasonably small and well codified (as is the case with jargons and specialist vocabularies), they’re likely to succeed.
And even if they don’t, meaning change is realised at an individual level, from one person to the next. Sometimes (particularly when you haven’t been paying attention), you will be ambushed by a meaning change. Like contemporary teen lit. (Sophia de Tricht: my surprisingly non-teen source of teen slang here.) Sometimes confusion will result, and a negotiation will happen.
And of course codified literate language is subject to prescriptive forces. In general usage, those forces have less power over word meaning than they do in specialist contexts. But people still do care what the dictionary definitions of words are, and they still argue over them. That’s now part of how the community negotiates the community understanding of words.
Is the culture on Corfu any different than in the rest of Greece considering it was never occupied by the Ottomans?
I’ve wanted to know the answer to this question bad enough, that I want to spend time in Corfu or Zante next time I’m in Greece.
Though as a friend has justly pointed out to me, there’s no way I’d grok the cultural differences between the Ionian Islands and the rest of Greece as a tourist within a couple of days at a resort hotel.
The music is Italianate: mandolins and barbershop quarters. There’s less Turkish in the dialect. But from the stories written by Konstantinos Theotokis | Greek author in the early 1900s, the peasantry was as patriarchal and closeminded in Corfu as they were in Thessaly or Crete. My suspicion is, not massively different. The peasantry were the peasantry, and whether the local overlord was a nobleman in the Libro d’Oro or the local ağa didn’t impact their daily life.
I hope someone else can tell more!
In “whosoever looks upon a woman to lust after her,” might that ‘to’ indicate a purpose clause?
To corroborate John Simpson’s answer to In “whosoever looks upon a woman to lust after her,” might that ‘to’ indicate a purpose clause?:
The Greek literally says Ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι πᾶς ὁ βλέπων γυναῖκα πρὸς τὸ ἐπιθυμῆσαι αὐτῆς, ἤδη ἐμοίχευσεν αὐτὴν ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὑτοῦ, “towards the desiring of her”. That “towards” is indeed purposive, and it’s also not particularly Classical in taking an infinitive (though Classical Greek did use it as a purposive preposition: πρὸς τί “to what end?”, literally “towards what?”)
Classical usage of the infinitive with πρός is more literal: πῶς ἔχεις πρὸς τὸ ἐθέλειν ἂν ἰέναι ἄκλητος ἐπὶ δεῖπνον; “what is your attitude towards going to dinner uninvited?” But in this context, it looks clearly purposive to me.
How did the world’s major countries all conform to using first and last names from an early era?
Surnames seems to have been invented independentishly in Europe at a similar time: they were reintroduced after the Roman three-way names fell out of use in the West. From Wikipedia, I see it’s a messy web of transmission. Wikipedia suggests (not very loudly) that the Modern Western notion of surnames was transmitted from Armenia to Byzantium (from the 7th century on) to the West, though I wonder whether the West came up with them independently. Ireland had them in the 10th century, and England in the 11th; they only became common in the West in the 14th century.
Now, other cultures independently came up with surnames, as distinct from patronymics; the Chinese did, and so did the Japanese nobility. But how did a Western notion become globalised?
… Do you really have to ask?
During the modern era, many cultures around the world adopted family names, particularly for administrative reasons, especially during the age of European expansion and particularly since 1600. Notable examples include the Netherlands (1811), Japan (1870s), Thailand (1920), and Turkey (1934). Nonetheless, their use is not universal: Icelanders, Tibetans, Burmese, Javanese, and many people groups in East Africa do not use family names.
Surnames were put forward not just because of European influence, but because the emergence of big bureaucracies with nationwide scope saw the benefit in the European convention of surnames: that explains Meiji Japan, for instance. And of course surnames were still transmitted as a cultural meme, and not just a bureaucratic convenience. As pointed out in Kutluk Ozguven’s answer to Why do some Greek surnames end with “oğlu” which means “son of” in Turkish?, Christians in Turkey had surnames a lot longer than Muslims did, because Greeks and Armenians invented surnames to begin with.
Are “humility” and “humiliate” related?
Yes. Using tools from Online Etymology Dictionary:
Humilis is Latin for humble. Humble is Old French humble < *humle < *humile < humilis.
Humility is from Latin humilitas “humbleness”, which comes from humilis.
Humiliate is to make someone feel like crap: you’re humbling them, you’re making them feel low (which is actually what humilis originally means: lowly). Humiliate is a back formation from humiliation, humiliatio in Latin, which is derived from the verb humiliare “to make humble”, which comes from humilis.
It turns out Middle English used to have a verb derived straight from humiliare: to humily “humble oneself”.
puerile
Not that recondite a word, but any soupçon from the Magister is welcome here:
https://necrologue.quora.com/201…
I just want to say, publicly, and despite the possibility of offending some friends, that I thought the fake death gag puerile and unhelpful.
1. Immature, especially in being silly or trivial; childish.
2. Archaic Belonging to childhood; juvenile.
Notice that the second definition is archaic. Literally, the word means “of a child”; in a legalistic sense, I suppose that encompasses teens. Not all that children do, though, is childish; and not all that adults do is mature.
And yes, some things that children do are childish.
Why do some Greek surnames end with “oğlu” which means “son of” in Turkish?
The proper answer is Kutluk Ozguven’s: Kutluk Ozguven’s answer to Why do some Greek surnames end with “oğlu” which means “son of” in Turkish?
Turkish Republic did not enforce surnames to its population before 1934. Turks had patronymous names like in Arabic countries or Iceland.
However Greeks and Armenians used family surnames of their choice. Unlike post-nationalist myths Greek Orthodox and Muslim populations were closer and more dependant to each other […]
Population exchange between Greece and Turkey was from 1923–1933. […]
Since Oglou was a sign of Turkish migration who were scorned upon in their arrival, many might have changed to more mainland Greek surmames.
Some didn’t bother.
Indeed: –oglou is a patronymic suffix specific to the descendants of refugees in Greece from Asia Minor; I’m not aware of any serious traditional usage within Greece in the 19th century. As Kutluk pointed out, Christians took up Turkish surnames in Turkey before Muslims did.
Often, that surname suffix was dropped by the arrivals in Greece, in favour of something more Hellenic. And nothing is more Hellenic than the Ancient Greek patronymic –ides. (Because of how memes happen, –ides also supplanted the Greek Pontic patronymic –ant[is], as in Ypsilanti[s].)
So if you see a surname ending in –ides, chances are the bearer is descended from Asia Minor. (Or Cypriot, where –ides also came into vogue. And these really are matters of vogue: in Crete –akis is universal as a surname suffix, and it was unknown before the 19th century.)
The surname Σαλπιγκτίδης Salpingtides, for example, is quite Hellenic, and rather challenging to romanise (you’ll usually see it as Salpigktidis in English.) It’s Ancient Greek for “bugler-son”—and it’s a transparent Hellenisation of Borazancıoğlu.
Some refugees refused to switch their surnames. The father of my coauthor George Baloglou was a refugee from Sille, near Konya. He kept his surname, which is Turkish for “honey-son”. Most of his extended family switched it to the Hellenised Melidis.