Subscribe to Blog via Email
April 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Who invented the word “Mathematics”?
In its modern meaning of mathematics, the earliest citation Liddell–Scott give is the treatise of the same name by Archytas. (However, the German Wikipedia doubts that was the original title of his work.) The term comes into its own in its modern meaning in Aristotle, a generation later, who uses it extensively.
Plato was the exact same age as Archytas and his friend, but he only used the term to mean “fond of learning” (Timaeus 88c), or “scientific” (Sophist 219c). He does get close when he refers to the three mathemata (sciences) of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy (Laws 817e), but he isn’t quite there yet, and his term for mathematics is logismos, “calculation”.
Answered 2017-03-19 · Upvoted by
, Master Mathematics, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (1973)
Who has invented the word philosophia?
The word is all over the place in Plato and his contemporaries and it’s not in Homer. Philosophy – Wikipedia guesses that Pythagoras probably came up with it first.
The basis for that guess, from what I can tell, is that as cited in LSJ (s.v. φιλόσοφος), both Cicero (Tusc. 5.3.9) and Diogenes Laertes (prooem 12) report that Pythagoras called himself a philosophos “lover of wisdom”, and not just a sophos “wise man, scholar”. That implies to me that this terminology was an innovation by Pythagoras. Pythagoras was certainly early enough in the philosophical tradition for that to make sense.
What language games do linguists play?
More of a polyglot game, this, than a linguist game, but: switch the TV to a foreign language film halfway through, and try to work out what the language is. The fact that the language almost always sustains a local film industry does constrain the possible choices.
The rule of thumb I worked out quite early is, if they look Swedish and sound Turkish, they’re Hungarian.
What is the Greek equivalent of “Skin in the Game”?
Tough one, I agree. And it turns out OP was after Ancient Greek.
For Modern Greek, I agree with Yiannis Papadopoulos’ answer to What is the Greek equivalent of “Skin in the Game”? that “skin in the game” is about emotional investment, not “putting your ass on the line”. It’s easier for me to actually think of negative rather than positive statements.
- Positive: τον κόφτει “it cuts him”—using an archaic form of the verb “cut”, rather than the normal modern form κόβει.
- Negative: αμέτοχος “unengaged, unparticipating” (learnèd); δεν τον κόφτει “it doesn’t cut him”, πέρα βρέχει “it rains far away” (i.e. he’s indifferent), ζαμανφού “I don’t care” [archaic slang: this is of course just French je m’en fous, “I don’t give a fuck”]
Plato?
- τῆς δὲ ζημίας μεγίστη τὸ ὑπὸ πονηροτέρου ἄρχεσθαι, ἐὰν μὴ αὐτὸς ἐθέλῃ ἄρχειν (Republic 347c): But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.
What are some examples of word-play in constructed languages such as Esperanto and Lojban?
Esperanto neurotically tried to avoid lexical ambiguity, but didn’t get there for compounding, and between that and soundalikes, it’s doing ok. Raymond Schwartz was the main punmaster of the language.
Examples: the sundry aĝo “age” compounds in La Diversaj Aĝoj de l’ Homo, or the groanworthy “tumble dry” of Molière in El “Verdkata Testamento” (1926); Ero (lava rulo; The Miser is L’avarulo).
Lojban really is designed to avoid lexical ambiguity, including at compounding, and I don’t remember much play there, if any.
Klingon has a fair bit of polysemy, and that has been used for jokes. I’ve mentioned here, I think, my spontaneous pun when I walked into my first Klingon meetup, and a guy I’d managed to antagonise said SaH ’Iv? (“Who cares?”) Quick as a pistol, I responded jISaH jIH, naDev jIHmo’: “*I*’m present, because I’m here.” (The verb is ambiguous.)
Polysemy also explains a joke by Okrand, which at first glance seems to be an anti-joke:
Doq’a’ SuvwI’pu’? ghobe’! SuD! “Are warriors red? No! They are blue!”
The chuckle by Michael Dorn on the recording was… unnerving.
But SuD doesn’t just mean blue. (Or green. Or, in violation of how human colour works, yellow.) SuD also means “to take a risk”…
Technically speaking, is Doggo a pidgin language?
Hate to bring the serious to the answer, but I’m with Jiim Klein:
- Pidgins are called that because of their origins, rather than their grammar, although they do tend to be remarkably similar.
- “Foreigner talk”, the way people dumb down language when talking to non-fluent speakers, are informally called pidgins, and indeed foreigner talk is a major origin of actual pidgins.
- Language games are typically not called pidgins.
- The recurring features of pidgins are things like dropping grammatical markers, using unmarked inflections, very simple syntactic structures.
Now, I’m not up on my memes, coz I’m old.
- Lolcat is a mix of foreigner talk, baby talk (which has overgeneralised inflections rather than unmarked inflections), and all-out whimsy; I find it hard to believe that any real pidgin would use the I of I can haz cheezeburger?, let alone the are of I are crying cuz I are out of focuss.
- Doge (meme) has a syntactic frame much too restricted to be a pidgin (many mis-subcategorisation, much exclamatory, such ludic), and a far more subtle sense of modifiers than any pidgin would bother with.
- I don’t know Doggo. If Doggo is not Doge, and is exemplified in How did the doggo language start? • r/OutOfTheLoop: doggo does a bork and u r doing me a frighten—then again, too much play on normal English syntax, and too much play with wrong inflections and derivations to be pidgin-like: a pidgin would just cut it down to Yu mekim mi frait.
You point out the use of gerunds for tense in Doggo as a pidgin: a pidgin is not going to know what a gerund is, because pidgins drop all the grammar they can. Tense in pidgins are separate words; the classic English-based pidgins use words like by-and-by (future), finish (perfective), been (past).
I mean, if people stuck on a plantation with no common language but what the masters barked at them spontaneously started speaking in Doggo, then yeah, Doggo would be a pidgin. But what I’m finding doesn’t look like a pidgin. What I’m finding is comically inverted English, rather than radically stripped down English.
Could someone tell of “owt” or “nowt” regarding Yorkshire?
Well, this is what the Googles gets me (with a peek at the OED):
Owt and Nowt are shibboleths for Yorkshire: they are very common dialect words. The historical pronunciation seems to be something like /ou/. They are indeed derived from aught and naught; the spelling with an au is from Early Modern Southern English, and Middle English usually spelled them as ought and nought. Brought in Yorkshire rhymes with owt. (Remember that in Middle English, the <gh> was a kh sound.)
On the other hand, the <ou> diphthong which normally rhymes with <ow> in English is either -ah-, in the West Riding (e.g. Sheffield), or -oo- in the North and East Riding: abaht, aboot.
Hence Nathan Morris’ answer to Could someone tell of “owt” or “nowt” regarding Yorkshire?
A can tell thee owt tha wants to know abart.
[I can tell thee aught thou wants to know about]
EDIT:
Joseph Boyle asks whether the aboot of East Yorkshire is related to the aboot of Canada and the US South Highlands.
The Yorkshire and Scots aboot really is pronounced aboot. It is a an archaism, representing the pronunciation of <ou> before the Great English Vowel Shift. (Middle English used the French pronunciation of <ou>.) Notice that Yorkshire keeps <ou> and <ow> separate.
The Great English Vowel Shift changed iː to əi to ai. It’s why reconstructed Shakespearean pronunciation sounds like a pirate: West Country English, on which Hollywood pirate talk is based, has kept the older əi pronunciation.
What happened to Middle English i: also happened to uː : uː > əu > au.
- uː is the original Middle English pronunciation, preserved in East Yorkshire.
- au is the usual Modern pronunciation.
- aː is a further development from au, found in West Yorkshire.
- əu is the missing link between uː and au. It is how Shakespeare would have pronounced about. It is also how Canadians and Southern Virginians pronounce about: Canadian raising – Wikipedia, [əbəut].
So Shakespeare would in fact have sounded like a Canadian pirate.
The chain of development is East Yorkshire aboot > Canadian and Southern Virginian əbəut > standard English about > West Yorkshire abaht. Logically, that tells you that the missing link pronunciation used to occur in West Yorkshire as well, and eventually gave rise to abaht via about. But there is no reason to think that there is anything Yorkshire about Canadian raising. It appears to be a general archaism, although not one that Wikipedia has much history on.
And yes, all my information is from Wikipedia.
What were the last years of the Byzantine Empire like in Constantinople?
Stop reading this, and go upvote Michael Pothoven’s answer to What were the last years of the Byzantine Empire like in Constantinople?
I MEAN IT.
I’ll wait.
One of the conundrums of early Ottoman Constantinople is that there were many churches that were left alone after the Conquest, and not converted into mosques. The norm was that if a Christian city resisted a Muslim siege, all its churches could be converted to mosques; if the city surrendered, its churches would be left alone.
I don’t remember where I read this, but the solution to the conundrum I’ve seen proposed is that by then, Constantinople was so sparsely populated, that its outer suburbs were effectively separate settlements, surrounded by farmland. And those suburbs, cut off and living from subsistence farming, could easily have organised their own surrenders to the Ottomans, ignoring what was happening downtown.
Michael Pothoven paints a depressing picture of the last days of Constantinople. The detail I’ve given here, I find even more depressing.
There are modern Greek bibles on Bible.com called FPB (Filos Pergamos Bible) and NTV. When were these published, and what does NTV stand for?
The Filos Pergamos Bible is the 1993 translation by Spyros Filos, published by Pergamos publishers:
- Η Αγία Γραφή—Μεταφορά στη Νεοελληνική: Παλαιά Διαθήκη/Καινή Διαθήκη, Σπύρος Φίλος, Εκδόσεις Πέργαμος, Αθήνα, 1993/1994.
- Η Αγία Γραφή-Μεταφορά στη Νεοελληνική – Βικιπαίδεια
As discussed at https://www.quora.com/Are-there-… , my assumption is that the NTV is the “Four Professors’” translation of the New Testament, which was published by the Bible Society in 1967. But I don’t know that for a fact, and I don’t know what NTV stands for (New Testament Version? Neohellenic Translation Version?):
- Η Καινή Διαθήκη των Τεσσάρων Καθηγητών: Καινή Διαθήκη, Βασίλειος Βέλλας, Ευάγγελος Αντωνιάδης, Αμίλκας Αλιβιζάτος και Γεράσιμος Κονιδάρης, Ελληνική Βιβλική Εταιρία, Αθήνα, 1967.
- Η Καινή Διαθήκη των Τεσσάρων Καθηγητών – Βικιπαίδεια
In Ancient Greek, how common is this declension? It’s in the second declension group but called “attic declension.”
To add to the others:
- Vote #1: Humphry Smith’s answer to In Ancient Greek, how common is this declension? It’s in the second declension group but called “attic declension.”
- Vote #1: Robert Todd’s answer to In Ancient Greek, how common is this declension? It’s in the second declension group but called “attic declension.”
The Attic declension is indeed specific to Attic: it represents a sound change specific to that dialect, whereby V̄ο > V̆ω, where V is any vowel that can be long. So Doric νᾱός, Ionic νηός, Attic νεώς.
As Robert Todd said:
Personally, I didn’t memorize these. I pick them up in continuous reading and apply the following mental adjustment to the “ο” stem second declension specimens – it it’s ο, ου, α then ω, if οι then ώ.
With λαγώς, you’re also seeing some vowels being merged together.
This is an annoying peculiarity of Attic, and Koine dropped it like a stone; abandoning the Attic declension is in fact a major source of Doric words in Koine.
I don’t even go as far as Robert in my memorisation: I just think “Oh, an omega is there. Attic Declension. I’ll treat it like an omicron. Or an omicron upsilon. Whatever works.” They really are just second declension nouns with a long final vowel.