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Is Greek language an Illuminati language; it can be used to translate the earliest languages where as Latin cannot, is that true?
Of course any Illuminati that you have in mind as relating to Ancient Greece will have precious little to do with the historical freethinkers of Bavaria. So in answering this question, I am safely untethered from historical fact, and find myself adrift in a world of which Meek Mill raps “I don’t have to join the illuminati just to get a new Bugatti”. [24]
Yet even in this fondest flight of Conspiracy Theory, I have to pause and point out that to the ancient Greeks, Egypt was the site of magical and poorly understood lore, and Greeks only occasionally understood what hieroglyphics were about.
If Greek could be used to translate all those other ancient languages, they had a funny way of showing it. Like the Chinese, and for the same reasons, the Greeks were relatively incurious about other cultures — up until Hellenistic times, when people from those other cultures were themselves writing in Greek.
In any case, the only things Greek does that Latin doesn’t are a greater propensity towards compounds, definite articles, and the optative. You could argue that makes Greek better suited for translating Sanskrit, and perhaps German. It would be a pretty tenuous argument.
Though it would be an argument that the historical Bavarian Illuminati would no doubt approve.
What does the last name “Galifianakis” mean?
-akis is the patronymic suffix used in Crete; it’s a diminutive, like most patronymics in Greek surnames are.
The surname in Greek is Galifianakis Γαλιφιανάκης or Galyfianakis Γαλυφιανάκης; I see the upsilon surname much more frequently online (except with reference to Zach himself). Galifianos means “from Galifa”; there are references online to a Galifian carnival, ΓΑΛΥΦΙΑΝΟ ΚΑΡΝΑΒΑΛΙ 2012. Galifa in turn is a village in Crete near Iraklio: Γαλίφα Ηρακλείου – Βικιπαίδεια. The village is first mentioned in a census from 1538, and has a current population of 250. The village is spelled with both iota and upsilon.
I don’t know the etymology of the village name, but the related adjective γαλίφης “flatterer” comes from the Italian gaglioffo. An Italian name makes sense as Crete was under Venetian rule; not sure why a village would be called “female flatterer” though.
In Greek, when do you use Iota, Eta and Upsilon? What’s the difference?
So, here’s the mainstream answer. 🙂
Greek had iota, eta, and upsilon as different letters, because they used to be pronounced differently:
- Iota was always an /i/
- Eta was a long /ɛː/. In fact, in many archaic variants of the Greek alphabet, it was written as an epsilon /e/; that was the case in Athens before 404 BC, when they adopted the Ionic variant of the alphabet, which had the eta as an /ɛː/ instead of a /h/. Eta switched from /ɛː/ to /i/ some time around 300 AD, although there are dialects of Greek where an /e/ value survives for eta (notably Pontic).
- Upsilon was probably originally /u/; in Attic it was /y/. The switch to /i/ is very recent: we have a poem from 1030 AD where a priest is made fun of for pronouncing ξύλον as ξίλον. There are dialects in which a /y/ pronounciation survives as /ju/; they include Tsakonian, Old Athenian, and Maniot.
That’s the history. Modern Greek uses those letters because its orthography is historical: if a word was spelled in Ancient Greek with an eta or an upsilon, it still will be spelled with one in Modern Greek. A lot of the controversy around modern Greek orthography in the early 20th century was because philologists had to work out the etymology of modern words, to work out how they should be spelled. Hence the switch of “to watch” from κυττάω to κοιτάω.
There was also a tendency to use the old variant i’s anachronistically, in transliterating loanwords and foreign names. A long /e/ would be transliterated as αι; a long /i/ as η; a long /o/ as ω; a spelling <y> as υ. So Σαίξπηρ <Saixpēr> for Shakespeare, which is just pronounced /sekspir/. That tendency has been abandoned the last few decades. I spell train as τραίνο <traino>, but I’m old; the spelling being taught now is τρένο <treno>. The ratio of the old-fashioned Χίλαρυ <Chilary> to the phonetic Χίλαρι <Chilari> online for Hillary is 1:50.
Do you know any ideographic conlang?
The most successful one has been Blissymbols; it was conceived of as an auxlang, but has it seen usage helping disabled children acquire language.
The sample phrase on Wikipedia is:
Person-1st Verb-feeling-fire Verb-legs house camera-move
“I want to go to the cinema”
Why do we learn languages at school that most of us will never remember, be fluent in or use (coming from Australian education background)?
The fact that you are Australian is significant here.
Foreign languages are taught in school because foreign languages have been decided to be useful to a country’s citizens. They can be useful practically, or they can be useful culturally.
Classical languages were initially taught because they are useful practically as well as culturally. Latin was the language the European elite communicated in internationally, and classical Greek is where Latin got its culture from. When the practical utility fell away, classical languages became more of a niche, but they were still felt essential to the cultural grounding of the elite. When the culture shifted away from that, classical languages became even more niche.
There are only a few countries in which a majority of citizens don’t need to learn a foreign language for very practical reasons. And many of those countries are English speaking. In such countries, you learn a foreign language in school either because a minority still will finds it useful, or to contribute to the cultural grounding of the citizenry.
In the US, teaching Spanish makes sense for practical reasons, because a minority of non-Latinos clearly will still find it useful, whether south or north of the border. The same applies in Australia, with teaching Japanese or Indonesian or Mandarin.
The same kind of applies to Britain with the teaching of French and German. There is a bit of cultural grounding going on there, as well, given the importance of French and German culture. But those really are the two languages an educated Briton was most likely to run into.
French and German were taught in Australia, because French and German were taught in Britain. I am grateful that I was taught French and German, but I concede that the priority given to French and German until 20 years ago in Australian education was an anachronism.
Could someone tell how electric power resembles juice?
The analogy is not with juice as in orange juice, as suggested by Dobhran Black’s answer to Could someone tell how electric power resembles juice?. Clearly there’s an analogy with fluids to be made; but why juice and not water? Or quicksilver?
Or blood?
The analogy is with vital juices, a concept that was kicking around as a literal concept from the ancient Greeks until modern medicine, and that indeed persists even now, both metaphorically, and in reference to plants (to judge from Google Books).
Vital juices encompasses the fluids moving within a living organism, that allow it to keep living. If the vital juices are flowing through the organism, then it does things like grow (if it’s a plant) and move (if it’s an animal).
If there’s electricity flowing through a machine, then it does things that resemble life: it is animated, so to speak. It moves, it whirrs, it does things.
So, the similarity is both the fluidity of electricity, and the vitality it confers.
What is the first language that had order for letters in alphabet, and how did people decide to use this particular order?
See Michael Moszczynski’s answer to How did the alphabet get its order? Who came up with the order of the alphabet? The first such language was Ugaritic, several centuries before Phoenecian. As Michael Moszczynski points out, two alphabetical orderings of Ugaritic survive, one via Phoenecian, and one via Ge’ez into Amharic. He concludes that, while the cause for those particular orderings is unrecoverable, we can tell from their independent survival that they were conventional.
And once the convention was invented, it stuck, and it stuck hard. Abecedaries, inscriptions copying out the alphabet in order, are very common in archaic Greece. And it took the Greeks centuries to work out that the Phoenician alphabet had letters redundant for Greek.
Is there any word which cannot become a conceptual metaphor?
I’m not strong on cognitive linguistics, but it’s an intriguing A2A.
What does it take for a word to become a conceptual metaphor? The meaning it expresses needs to be transferred to an analogous conceptual domain from its normal meaning; as a result of this, some of its meaning is preserved (the meaning that survives the transfer), some does not.
Now, function words clearly have meaning, though they do not always have denotation (they don’t always point to things in the world). But can their meaning always be transferred into an analogous domain?
That’s routinely true for prepositions. Prepositions historically tend to start off as spatial relations, and those relations are used as metaphors for other things all the time. If I say you’re on drugs, I’m not saying that you’re lying on top of some ecstasy pills. I’m saying that the dependency between you and drugs is analogous to the spatial proximity of something on top of something else—drawing on metaphors of closeness, coverage, foundations, and so on.
Conjunctions? They tend not to be spatial but conceptual already; but they’re no less subject to analogy. Transferring causation from the locutionary domain (causes for things happening in the world and described through speech acts) to the illocutionary domain (causes for speech acts themselves), for example: I’m late because there was a traffic jam (this happened because…) vs I’ll be there, because I’m a man of my word (I say this because…)
Pronouns and articles are trickier, but still doable. 1st and 2nd Personal pronouns presuppose personhood, but they can be metaphorically used of anything that can be individuated or in a collective. If I say “we spoons are dumped at the bottom of the pantry”, there’s a metaphor of personhood being imbued to spoons, alright; but the only place that metaphor resides linguistically is in the pronoun. Every other word is literally true.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Hu… issued a challenge on indefinite articles. Indefinite articles have a meaning: they indicate that the referent of noun phrase is not previously defined in the discourse, or is generic.
What’s going on when some boxer, say, says I’m not just *AN* athlete: I’m the best athlete there has ever been?
Well, the sentential stress on an should be telling you immediately that something unusual is going on: the whole point of the indefinite article is that it’s not something you emphasise, even contrastively. And the phrase cannot be literally true: a boxer is an athlete. An here is being used metaphorically: it’s being transferred from the conceptual domain of “generic” (which “an athlete” is: it’s a type) to the metaphorical use of “generic”: “uninteresting, ordinary” (which is not intrinsic to an: Usain Bolt is an athlete is true, and that does not imply he is uninteresting or ordinary).
The claim at first glance looks overwrought, but all words have some meaning, all meaning has at least a default semantic domain, and all meaning can be transferred to an analogous semantic domain, shedding some of its sense and retaining some of its sense. The only way that would be impossible is if a meaning were both atomic (and I’ll concede there are some semantic atoms), and not in a semantic network with other meanings and presuppositions (which is clearly not true, as we saw with we).
So… yeah. All words (including function words) can indeed be used in a metaphorical manner.
How long would it take for English from anglophone countries to become separate languages?
I’m pretty much agreeing with Dmitriy Genzel’s answer: Dmitriy Genzel’s answer to How long would it take for English from anglophone countries to become separate languages?.
If you look at my related answer to How long would it take an isolated group of people to develop what would be considered their own language?, you’ll see that historically, it could take something like 500 or 1000 years for languages to diverge. Universal literacy has a profoundly conservative effect on language, however, and those effects look to be intensifying, as English-speakers from different parts of the world are now becoming more in contact, not less.
This does not mean that their dialects are actually converging. Linguists have argued that vowels are currently off doing their own thing in different parts of the US, and there is no evidence that the subdialects of US English are converging—the opposite is happening. There are several clear grammatical differences that are entrenched between different variants of US or British English.
But my guess is that there are enough conservative forces in the current Anglophone culture, to slow down any divergence of national variants English significantly, compared to the historical norm.
Whether those conservative forces remain in place—that is to say, whether Western Civilisation or Globalisation survives—is an entirely different question.
How long would it take an isolated group of people to develop what would be considered their own language?
This is a question linguists don’t want to answer, because it raises the spectre of glottochronology.
Glottochronology is an assumption made in the fifties, that a core 100 or 200 words of vocabulary in all languages would be lost at a constant rate. The figures that a study came up with was 86% retention per millennium for a core 100 words, and 81% per millennium for a core 200 words.
Glottochronology is derived from lexicostatistics, which uses the same core vocabulary to classify languages. The rule of thumb that field linguists apply is that two languages are separate if they share only 80% of the core 100 words. Joining the two together, you get maybe 1300 years to separate two languages.
Lexicostatistics is still used in poorly attested language families, when you have no other choice. It gets a lot of use in Papua New Guinea. 80% seems to me to be on the low side, though.
Glottochronology on the other hand was discredited very early. The statistical study was heavily flawed: the languages were almost exclusively European, and Latin ended up counted 5 times. A study done in 1962 found that Icelandic (universal literacy) had lost just one word out of 100 in a thousand years, whereas Inuit (taboo substitution of words) had lost close to half in the same period.
So there is no constant rate at which languages separate.
But we have plenty of instances in history where people migrated away, and the language slowly diverged. The instances I can first think of, such as early modern resettlement within Europe, or colonialism in the New World, show that 300 years is clearly not enough. A ballpark figure is going to be closer to between 500 and 1000 years. With all the provisos already given.