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How likely is it that the Cypriot Greek word for ironing board is related not only to horse but also to the English “apparatus”?
Not likely.
Not impossible. But not likely.
Let’s think this though, and the considerations for us thinking this through are not specific to Cyprus; they are pretty generic in etymology.
English was a donor language to Cypriot Greek while the British ruled Cyprus, from 1878 through 1960, and as an international language since. While there is English in Cypriot, there’s isn’t all that much; there’s a lot more Old French, Venetian, and Turkish. (Btw, if anyone reading thinks that Cypriot Greek tʃaera is a borrowing of English chair, stop that. It’s a borrowing of Old French chair.)
The first question to ask is: could the word be just Greek? The second question to ask is: could the word be English at all? If the answer to both is yes, then you may well be dealing with a contamination of the two sources: words don’t always have a single origin, especially if the two origins sound very similar.
So, first up, could someone come up with the term “horse” to describe an ironing board? Of course they could. An ironing board has four legs, and a flat back that you put things on. From Google, I see that ironing horse is occasionally used in English to refer to ironing boards. I’m not seeing any indication that the Standard Greek άλογο is used to refer to ironing boards, and I wonder whether ironing horse was calqued into Cypriot from early 20th century British English.
Second: could English apparatus have been borrowed into Cypriot, and conflated with the similar-sounding Cypriot apparos, to refer to ironing boards?
There’s several problems with such a possibility:
- How often were English terms borrowed for household items into Cypriot? Was English going to be the language used for household items at all, when relations between Cypriots and the British were nowhere near as intimate as, say, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots?
- Going from apparatus to apparos requires a slight leap of imagination. Not a huge leap, it’s not impossible, but it’s not tempting either.
- Why would you borrow apparatus as the word for an ironing board? As opposed to the specific name of the thing, ironing board? Or, you know, ironing horse. You might as well borrow the word beverage to refer to tea. That kind of thing can happen in language, but again it’s not tempting.
- Does anyone even refer to ironing boards as apparatus? *Googles* Ah they do: Patent US20130192102 – Ironing board apparatus and methods. Well, would anyone within plausible earshot of a Greek Cypriot in 1930, as opposed to someone in the US Patent Office in 2012, be likely to refer to ironing boards as apparatus?
I think coincidence is a more plausible explanation here.
Could emoticons form the script of a new constructed language?
Obviously, Vote #1/#2 Daniel Slechta’s answer to Could emoticons form the script of a new constructed language? and Daniel Ross’ answer to Could emoticons form the script of a new constructed language?
(I disagree with Daniel Ross’ first point, that the emoji must be conventional and not iconic for them to be a language at all. I think the real issue is his second point, that icons can only go so far.)
(I will hold my tongue about Esperanto diacritics, because I otherwise like Daniel. ;^)
See also: Could emojis ever replace written language? Why or why not?
My concern, as expressed in that question, is what your verbs and syntax are going to look like, if your emoji-based language is not going to be just some rebus—or, as Daniel Slechta argues, extremely restricted in what it can talk about.
The challenge has been addressed in an actual symbol-based universal constructed language, Blissymbols. But I don’t think anyone would argue that Blissymbols’ verbs are intuitive.
Are second Aorist tenses in Ancient Greek more frequent that first Aorist?
More frequent? No. But certainly very noticeable!
The second and first aorists are equivalents of the strong and weak verbs of Germanic. Strong verbs and second aorists form their past tense by ablaut, vowel change. Weak verb and first aorists form their past tense by suffix. The older pattern is the ablaut; the newer and more frequent pattern is the suffixation. There’s more second aorists in Homer than in Attic.
As the new pattern generalises, the verbs that hold out in the old pattern the longest are very frequent verbs, which are quite entrenched in people’s memories, and people don’t feel as compelled to simplify. So εἶδον “I saw”, ἔβαλον “I put”, ἦλθον “I came”. Have a look at this list of frequent second aorists in the New Testament: Second Aorist
And the second aorist was stone dead by Early Modern Greek, but it did in fact enjoy a resurgence in the Koine, particularly with passives in the Septuagint. βασταγῆναι for example instead of βασταχθῆναι. Cf. Modern US English dove for dived: Dove vs. dived – Grammarist
Why is this language still called English, when the majority of its speakers are not even English?
It’s a good question, Mehrdad, and it deserves a serious answer.
Language has functioned as a cohesive social force, much longer than the nation state has. Language has long bound people within an ethnic group, and those outside the ethnic group who also speak it. Language, it is true, is emblematic of ethnic groups, and is named after them. But that bond has never been so strong that the language has to be renamed, when the language spreads beyond the initial ethnic group.
And in fact, languages do not change name very often. The main motivation for changing a language name is when the old ethnic group no longer exists, and the language becomes primarily associated with a new ethnic group. You can argue that’s what happened with the Romance languages.
But English people still exist, and most Americans don’t object to their language being named after them. The English language is important to American nationalism, but the constitution and the flag are more important. The spelling and the dialect of English are unique to America, and that is enough for American nationalism. The name doesn’t have to be unique as well.
Based on historical precedent, it would take a cataclysm for English to change name. Most likely a cataclysm through which English people no longer understand Americans.
What was your first scientific published paper?
Nicholas, N. 1998. To aper and o opios: Untangling Mediaeval Relativisation. In Joseph, B.D., Horrocks, G.C. & Philippaki-Warburton, I. (eds), Themes in Greek Linguistics II. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 159) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 283-323.
Τὸ ἄπερ and ὁ ὁποῖος: Untangling Mediaeval Greek Relativisation
This was a very tangled paper, that kept tripping itself over.
The paper is about an oddity in legal documents written in official Greek in Southern Italy, between 1000 and 1350. These documents routinely featured τὸ ἅπερ, “the which”, as a relative pronoun. The problem with that “the which” construction is, the “the” was in the neuter singular, and the “which” was in the neuter plural. It is a construction that doesn’t appear elsewhere in Greek (though a singular/singular version does once or twice), and that makes no linguistic sense.
The construction is reminiscent of a Romance “the which” construction, which ended up in English, and also in Greek somewhat later (ο οποίος); but the documents seem too early to allow for that influence. The plural really makes no sense at all, and after tying myself in all sorts of knots trying to make sense of it, I end up mumbling that maybe another linguist’s suggestion that it was some sort of phonetic effect is it.
The really interesting thing was to look at the structure of the land deeds that the construction appeared in. The land deeds were highly formulaic, and the construction kept showing up in the same place, time and again: the definition of the land boundaries. However the construction got into the earliest land deeds, it got into the later land deeds through the monks robotically using those deeds as templates.
The paper has a common fault of my papers: it goes into way too convoluted reasoning, exploring every option and alternative, whether they are germane or not. In fact, the paper explores so many options, it ends up unreadable; several of them did.
Why is Aromanian not officially recognized in Greece?
Oh dear.
Greece has long had a model of state nationalism which, like that of France, treated minorities as a threat to national unity, and pursued assimilation. The Greek Orthodox ethnic minorities of Greece, who had identified with ethnic Greeks as fellow members of the Rum millet, enthusiastically embraced assimilation for the most part.
So there was no enthusiasm through the 19th century for any official status of a language other than Greek, and not many Greek citizens who would think it a good idea. Just as there were not many French citizens who thought official status for Breton or Basque or Occitan or German was a good idea.
In the 20th century, as Greece expanded north, the strife in Ottoman Macedonia between ethnic groups (what Greeks term the Macedonian Struggle) involved various nations as sponsors of those groups. The ethnic free-for-all involved not just ethnic Greeks and Slavs (Macedo-Bulgarians), but also Aromanians. There were Aromanians who identified with Greece, and Aromanians who identified with Bulgaria, and in fact there were Aromanians who identified with Romania.
When the dust settled after the Macedonian Struggle, Romania extracted from the Greek government the concession that Romanian-language schools could operate for Aromanians in Greece. Anecdotally, the villages where Romanian was taught were the villages where Aromanian died out the fastest: the concession made the locals’ allegiance to Greece look suspect.
Official languages other than Greek have never been encouraged in Greece; that has not been the model Greek nationalism has embraced. Talking too loudly about languages other than Greek in Greece has not particularly been favoured either. There is a resurgence of interest in Arvanitika and Aromanian now; but it’s safe for there to be a resurgence, now that the languages are moribund. And unlike the Makedonski of Greece, the loyalty of the Arvanites and the Aromanians to Greece has never been questioned. (An exception for the Aromanians would be the Principality of the Pindus; but that was a marginal phenomenon.)
Why do most people focus on ancient Greek history ignoring the rest of the Greek history?
The West claims its patrimony from the Renaissance West and Mediaeval West. The Mediaeval West claimed its patrimony from Rome. Rome, and the Renaissance West, claimed their cultural patrimony from Ancient Greece.
So Ancient Greece matters to the West, because the West regarded itself as the cultural inheritor of Ancient Greece.
The Byzantine Empire was not regarded as the cultural ancestor of the West. It is regarded as the cultural ancestor of Russia, which is why you can find a lot of Byzantine Studies PDFs on dark corners of the Russian internet. But the West has no more reason to pay attention to Byzantium than to the Abbasids or the Safavids: an important empire, but not their empire.
Ditto Modern Greek history. If the West doesn’t pay that much attention to Ottoman history (not their empire), it will pay even less attention to the Greek elite within the Ottoman Empire. And Modern Greece is just another poor southern European country.
Now, I’m Greek, and Mediaeval and Modern Greek history is incredibly important to me. Mediaeval and Modern Greek history is also important to many Westerners (Byzantine studies is not a Greek-only or even Eastern European-only affair), and I’m grateful for it. But there are sound cultural reasons why Byzantium is of more interest to the average Russian than the average French.
What do Albanian Italians and Greek Italians think of each other?
I don’t know the answer as to what contemporary attitudes are. I do know two things though:
- The Arbëresh settlements in Italy were nowhere near the Griko settlements: the Arbëresh were much further to the north. There would have been a brief period when they shared church administration, before the Griko switched from Greek rite to Roman rite. But as far as I can tell, the two populations would barely have been aware of each other before the 20th century.
- The Griko really are Italian first (actually, given campanilismo, Salentini and Calabresi first), and Greek second or third. While Girolamo de Rada was the first Albanian patriot, I suspect the same is true of the Arbëresh. And as I posted at Nick Nicholas’ answer to How is the enmity between Greece and Albania different to that between Greece and Turkey?, enmity between Albanians and Greeks is a fairly recent thing—especially as the Arbëresh were originally Orthodox.
So if there’s any bad blood in Italy, it’ll be by people paying attention to what’s been happening in the Balkans, and who feel a very strong bond to what’s happening back there. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I’d be surprised if it’s a big thing.
That aside, folklore enthusiasm and minority status would certainly be bringing Arbëresh and Griko together nowadays, whether as language advocates or as music performers. Those people, who are the vanguard of preserving their respective identities, would have much more cause to regard each other as allies within Italy.
Is “how much am I owing you” grammatically correct?
The only correct answer here is from Andrew McKenzie; however he has left it a bit brief, and I’m happy to elaborate a bit more.
English divides verbs between dynamic and stative. See Stative verb – Wikipedia.
Dynamic verbs are verbs that can be put in the progressive (be doing); stative verbs normally cannot.
So “how much am I owning you”, and for that matter “how much am I owing you”, are not normally grammatical in English, because own and owe are both stative verbs.
However, that ends up saying that you can’t put own or owe in the progressive, because neither are verbs that you put in the progressive. Let’s tease this out a little more.
Dynamic verbs are verbs that describe actions or activities, something that happens in the world. Stative verbs describe states, situations that just are.
Actions and activities are situations that perceptibly start and stop, and can keep going on, and can happen just for a little while. For that reason, it is meaningful to speak of a difference between ran and was running, or walks and keeps walking.
States are not situations that perceptibly start and stop, and do not happen just for a little while: they just keep going on. For that reason, it is not meaningful (normally) to speak of a difference between knows and was knowing, or likes and keeps liking. They are states that already have built in the notion of keeping on being true.
Owning something and owing someone something are taken in English as states, not actions. They’re not stop–start, they’re not something you can do for a little while or continuously: they are ongoing states, just like knowing or believing or hearing.
Now, some verbs are dynamic though they look like states. Sitting and sleeping for example. And some verbs are stative though they look like actions. And you can reinterpret a verb so that it turns from one category to another. You hear noises, you are not hearing noises; but you can be hearing rumours about me, because that kind of hearing is more about gaining intelligence than sensory perception. On the other hand, Franciscus Alex Rebro’s example of I’m owning you in this game works, because that sense of own is not a state of possession, it is an action of defeating someone.
So the grammatical division between the verbs is leaky and contextual. But by default, both am owning and am owing are ungrammatical in English, for reasons of both verbs being perceived as states.
Do linguistics departments normally include mostly women, gay men, vegans, and leftists?
Hahahahaha.
Well, let’s see.
Linguistics in the West appears to have broken down the barriers against women getting academic promotion relatively early, and the majority of enrolments at undergraduate level in my department were women.
I remember a male linguist (Newmeyer? Pullum?) citing approvingly a hotelier’s guide to the convention partying styles of various professions. Under Linguists, the guide allegedly said that they were relatively well behaved, and that they “brought their own women”. Those weren’t their own women, the writer pointed out. Those were themselves linguists.
There are unofficial uniforms and standards of dress and makeup in different disciplines here in Australia. I overheard a female prof once say “… You don’t think I put on too much lippie today, do you?” I also remember a girl stumbling into a tutorial, asking if this was Economics 201. We took one look at her—tailored suit, abundant makeup, power heels—and at us—jeans, no makeup, Doc Martens. No, this was not Economics 201.
There were gay men and women in our department; I’ve related elsewhere the tale of a male tutor who had a crush on me (Nick Nicholas’ answer to Would you want to see a list of everyone who has ever secretly had a crush on you?). I don’t know that linguistics disproportionately attracted them, but an Arts department would impose much less pressure on gay men to stay in the closet than, oh, I don’t know, Electrical Engineering.
There were vegans, and there were leftists, sure. Not many vegans, but certainly mostly leftists. Two factors there.
First, as has been discussed elsewhere here at length, academia tends to disproportionately attract public service-oriented over business-oriented minds, and that correlates with being left wing. That’s going to be even more the case in the humanities, which does not have a hard nosed practical utility, and which overrepresents those willing to scrutinise and question accepted authority.
Second, my department in particular was heavy on anthropological linguistics and fieldwork, in its general linguistics, and critical discourse theory in its applied linguistics. That’s not going to be the case everywhere; for general linguistics, it’s certainly not the case in Europe or much of America. But if your department is full of people who trot off to Boingo Boingo and spend three months with the locals (and end up called in as expert witnesses to defend their land title claims), don’t be surprised if a lot of them are going to be sympathetic to the dispossessed in general, and strive to be cultural relativists.
That occasionally erupted into disputes like whether Myanmar instead of Burma was really respecting the local practice or just a tinpot dictatorship, and whether cultural relativism really meant we should keep shtum about human rights abuses. But that was a debate within the left, as far as I could tell.
Yes, there were exceptions. Our best linguist was a Charismatic Anglican, who ended up becoming a pastor, and more recently an anti-Muslim polemicist. But I think it’s fair to say that the linguistics departments I’ve seen have been homes of bienpensant leftism. (The Charismatic Anglican did leave to become a pastor, after all.)
That’s not intrinsically a problem, it’s self-selection. But it is a bias to be aware of.