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How did those unworthy Terran petaQ manage to plagiarize Shakespeare so many years before first contact?
Lucky you, OP, because I wrote the introduction to The Klingon Hamlet, and translated the verse of the play (or rather, in-universe, I was editorially involved in the Terran edition of the play Tragedy of Khamlet, Son of the Emperor of Kronos, by Wil’yam Shex’pir, and translated the introduction).
And the introduction pays glancing mention to this issue. If I may quote myself (or rather, in-universe, what I translated):
It is regrettable that, during the years when the Empire and Federation were at war—a war the Federation fought on the propaganda front even more keenly than on the battlefield—certain indivduals resorted to crude forgeries of Shex’pir, claiming him as a conveniently remote mediaeval Terran, a certain Willem Shekispeore, and hoping by this falsification of history to discredit the achievements of Klingon culture.
We will not dwell on this unfortunate episode, although we are dismayed by the fact that this belief persists amongst many in the Federation to this day. In this edition, we juxtapose the Klingon original with the most prevalent of the versions of “Amlet” purported to have been written by “Shekispeore”. We think that the quality of the two plays—on the one hand, the spontaneous, direct, vibrant verse of Khamlet, and on the other, the flacid, ponderous, convoluted meanderings of “Amlet”—speak for themselves. Those who persist in being Doubting Thomazeds would do well to consult the Central Federation Mediaeval Archival Database on the meagre, unconvincing amount of information extant on the existence of this Shekispeore, and compare it to the testimonials of the Declassified Approved-For-Aliens pre-Khitomer Personnel Rolls on Wil’yam Shex’pir.
It remains a fact, though, that these forgeries were as thorough as they were malicious: gigabytes of allegedly Industrial Age back-dated so-called Shekispeorian Criticism were fabricated, and the works disseminated as part of a well-organised campaign. This campaign appears to have succeeded far beyond its initiators’ anticipations. For better or for worse, works like Amlet, for all their crudity, have acquired a certain resonance amongst citizens of the Federation, and Terrans in particular. This is no doubt due to their pseudo-mediaevalist parochial appeal, which has rendered these incisive masterpieces of sociopolitical analysis into innocuous picturesque period pieces—a genre favoured on Terra (and Betazed) much more than on planets like Vulcan and the Human colonies.
And of course, the notion of a mass-scale falsification of historical records did not originate with me in 1996. There are Quora users right now, claiming that the bulk of our accounts of Ancient history passed down in mediaeval manuscripts are Carolingian falsifications.
Are ήρθε and ήλθε interchangeable? Is there a difference in meaning?
No difference in meaning.
ήλθε is the archaic form. ήρθε is the vernacular form, and represents a regular sound change in the modern language.
ήρθε is now the unmarked verb form. If you use ήλθε, you will come across as speaking in Puristic (Katharevousa); 100 years ago, that made you be educated, 50 years ago, that made you a conservative, and nowadays, it makes you an oddity.
There will be some verb compounds where the old ήλθε form makes more sense; certainly in the Katharevousa-derived verb κατήλθε στις εκλογές “he ran [“down-went”] for election”, the vernacular *κατήρθε would be absurd. On its own as a verb for “came”, though, it’s hard to justify in contemporary use.
Why does reconstructed Proto-Indo-European seem so cumbersome to pronounce?
As ever, Daniel Ross’s answer is so thorough and well thought out (Vote #1 Daniel Ross’ answer to Why does reconstructed Proto-Indo-European seem so cumbersome to pronounce?), that it is embarrassing for me to attempt a better answer. In fact, I won’t: I’ll offer a worse answer, but one that is actually hinted at in his “PIE might be, in minor ways, a little bit over-reconstructed”.
And that is that the reconstructions of PIE are not for the purposes of being spoken at all. They are for the purposes of expressing correspondences between cognate languages in a shorthand.
We observe a systematic correspondence between k and w and p, and we put them in the blender, and we call it *gʷ. We could have called it *ʛ. Or *%. Or *Jimmy. We called it *gʷ because that’s an economical articulatory hypothesis for how a single sound can end up as k or w or p. But we don’t know for sure; we weren’t there.
And if you multiply that by a few dozen other hypotheses, and add in the strange algebra of Saussure’s laryngeals, you get a proto-language that internally makes sense, has a consistent root structure and explains the daughter languages—but was never meant to be spoken. It’s a theoretical construct. In practice, we may have missed some smoothing out of the sounds. We may be conflating different stages of the proto-language. We may be reconstructing an abstract phonology of the language, and be completely in the dark about its far more pronouncable allophony.
And maybe Proto-Indo-European did actually sound just like that. But remember: its sound is not what it was reconstructed for. It’s an explanatory tool for linguistic diversity, not a time machine.
What is “liar, liar pants on fire” in latin?
What we’re actually looking for is a Latin proverbial expression that means what the English means. And the English has nothing to do with inflammable pants at all: it just says “Hah! caught you lying!”
I noodled around latin Via Proverbs. The closest I get are:
Mendacem memorem esse oportet.
A liar should have a good memory.
(Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 4.2.91)
Because if you don’t remember what you lied about, you won’t be able to keep your story straight. And when you get found out, then it’s Liar Liar Pants On Fire.
Or maybe:
Mendacia curta semper habent crura.
Lies always have short legs.
(Mediaeval proverb)
Meaning, lies can’t run far: they’ll get found out eventually.
Do you speak Klingon, and why did you choose to learn it?
Federation Standard, eh, English translation follows:
HIja’, tlhIngan Hol vijatlhlaH. qaStaHvIS wa’maH DIS, jIQummeH Hol vIlo’, ’ej SeQpIr lutmey vImughta’.
qatlh vIghojmeH vIwIv ’e’ choyu’, tlheybura qatlhaw qaH. reH jIHvaD Daj Holmey ’oghlu’bogh. ghojmeH ngeD chaH, ghojchu’lu’meH DuH tu’lu’, ’ej Hol mIwmey waHlaH.
maSterS vIHaDtaHvIS, HolQeD qaD lIngpu’ ghojwI’, tlhIngan Hol lo’taHvIS. jIHvaD chu’ Hol. muvuQ, ’ej vIghojchoH. pItlh.
Dajmo’ vIghoj, ’ej jIqeqmeH vIghoj; latlhvaD jIQum ’e’ vIqImbe’. ’ach ’InternetDaq ghojwI’ tu’meH ngeD Qu’: lojban Holmo’ ’e’ vISov.
Yes, I can speak Klingon. For ten years I used it communicatively, and I have translated Shakespeare.
You ask me, Mr K’leybura Katzau, why I chose to learn it. I always found artificial languages interesting. They are easy to learn, it is possible to learn them to completeness, and they can test out the possibilities of language.
When I was doing my Masters, a lecturer wrote a linguistics assignment using Klingon. The language was new to me. It fascinated me, and I started learning it. That was it.
I learned it because it was interesting, and to practice at it; I wasn’t concentrating on communicating with others. But I knew from Lojban that it would be easy to find learners online.
Why are there so many languages in the world?
Originally Answered:
Why are there several 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.
Second, because like all social phenomena, language is a dynamic system subject to change through conflicting factors. Change at an individual level is moderated through the pressure to retain intelligibility within a community. But if two communities are distinct, there is no longer any pressure for their languages to remain intelligible to each other, and they will end up evolving independently and diverging.
Third, language is one of the primary vehicles of group identity. There is a strong motivation for groups to ensure that their language is distinct from that of rival groups. There is the example I read somewhere of a language in Papua New Guinea which historically seems to have changed all its p’s to k’s. That change makes no sense phonetically, but it makes a lot of sense if you are doing your damnedest not to sound like the next village down the road.
How does it feel for Greek kids when they learn their alphabet is an important part of maths?
The other answers are correct, but the question goes to something broader. Greek kids will sooner or later find out that a lot of mathematical and scientific symbols used in other languages are Greek, just as they find out that a lot of scientific vocabulary in other languages is Greek.
How do they feel? Unsurprised. They have heard all their lives that Greek culture was the foundation of the West. That their ancestors were building Parthenons when everybody else’s ancestors were eating acorns. Learning about that use of the Greek alphabet just comes to validate that for them.
No, by the way. I don’t think that’s healthy.
Do you pronounce BMW as “bee em double-u” or as “bey em vey”?
English: Bee Em Double You.
Australian English: Beamer.
Greek: well, Greek only referenced English as its default foreign language in the last generation. So it’s the German pronunciation: Beh Em Veh. (Μπε εμ βε)
Cypriot Greek: from memory, Pemve (Πεμβέ) —/b/ is rendered in Cypriot Greek as /p/, since Cypriot Greek has a three way contrast of /ᵐb p pʰ/.
Can anybody help with the Latin translation of “Showing up is the biggest step.”?
Apparere gradus maximus [est].
As always with these questions: no tattoo until you get a second opinion.
Where did the pronunciation of Ancient Greek (in modern times) come from? Who determined that it should sounds this way and why?
The ball got rolling, as Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching – Wikipedia notes, in the early Renaissance, a generation before Erasmus. Erasmus published the system that prevailed in the West since, and that was a closer approximation of the modern reconstruction than Modern Greek pronunciation was:
The study of Greek in the West expanded considerably during the Renaissance, in particular after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when many Byzantine Greek scholars came to western Europe. At this time, Greek texts were universally pronounced using the medieval pronunciation which survives intact to the present day.
From about 1486, various scholars (notably Antonio of Lebrixa, Girolamo Aleandro, and Aldus Manutius) judged that this pronunciation appeared to be inconsistent with the descriptions handed down by ancient grammarians, and suggested alternative pronunciations. This work culminated in Desiderius Erasmus’ dialogue De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (1528). The system propounded in this work is called the Erasmian pronunciation.
The pronunciation described by Erasmus is very similar to that currently regarded by most authorities as the authentic pronunciation of Classical Greek (notably the Attic dialect of the 5th century BC). However Erasmus did not actually use this pronunciation himself.
The Modern reconstruction was informed by more close reading of the ancient authorities, internal reconstruction, better knowledge of ancient dialects through inscriptions, and comparative historical linguistics. Once you look at the comparisons of Greek with Sanskrit and Latin, the reconstruction becomes pretty obvious.