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How is a sign identified as a letter, a picture, and a number?
For pictures, we hope for extreme iconicity. Writing systems often originate in pictures, but end up looking quite abstract and conventional. That applies even to Chinese. So if you have a lot of symbols, and only a few of them look like animals, you can conclude that the ones that look like pictures really are pictures. That’s what happens with Linear B and its accounts of cattle and sheep, for example.
Numbers are often iconic as well, and they tend to occur in fixed places (like before symbols of cattle), and add up into sums. So in accounting texts, they are easy to pick. Even in astronomy texts, they can be identified with some work, because they are predictable. Mayan numbers were identified and deciphered long before Mayan hieroglyphs. We have not deciphered the Easter Island texts, but we do know they are calendars for the same reason.
What’s left are letters. They have regular distributions recurring within words, and based on how many distinct letters there are in the corpus, you can work out whether they are an alphabet, a syllabary, or ideograms.
How do I translate these sentences into Latin?
This is parasitic on Alberto Yagos’s answer. Would be nice if we could call these collaborative answers!
Don’t let your dreams be memes.
Alberto is more than right to call memes graffiti. So:
Ne tibi fiant spes inscriptionum res.
Let not your hopes be the subject matter of graffiti.
Not… great, not at all.
If a code can’t be bugless, how can a human be perfect?
You know, it’s a bit too pragmatic of me, but I’m ok with codex being used for code. It does also mean medical prescription, which is… a little close.
Si non codex sine erratis, quomodo homo sine peccatis?
If no code without errors, how a human without sins [or faults]?
I’ll pass on “Expression of frustration is necessary”. Rahul, should be snappier in English anyway. 🙂
What origin does the last name Gargasoulas sound to you?
Ah yes. Dimitrious “Jimmy” Gargasoulas, man who two days ago stabbed his brother for being gay, drove off with his pregnant girlfriend hostage, did donuts in the central intersection of the Melbourne CBD, then sped off with the cops in pursuit, and plowed into a shopfront, leaving four dead and tens injured.
2017 Melbourne car attack – Wikipedia
The (misspelled) Dimitrious already gives his name away as Greek: “However, the suspect claimed to be “Greek Islamic Kurdish” in his Facebook posts.” The Greek press is identifying him as ethnic Greek: Μελβούρνη: Αυτός είναι ο ελληνικής καταγωγής οδηγός που σκόρπισε τον θάνατο [εικόνες & βίντεο] .
The name was unfamiliar to me, and in fact it’s confused the Greek media, who have been transliterating it back into Greek as either Γαργάσουλας [ɣarˈɣasulas] or Γαργασούλας [ɣarɣaˈsulas]. There’s no such surnames on Google: the surname matching on Google is Γκαργκάσουλας/ Γκαργκασούλας [ɡarɡasulas]. For instance, Ο Γκαργκασουλας ανακοινωσε τον νεο συνδυασμο! refers to a Kostas Gargasoulas who is a councillor in the Argolid.
It’s not a Hellenic-sounding name, especially with the hard g. I’m finding hits of the surname online in the Argolid, Arcadia, and Boeotia, so my guess is it’s Arvanite (ethnic Albanians who settled in central Greece in the Middle Ages).
How do linguists determine whether a language is agglutinative or it has postpositions?
Well, let’s generalise the question (though I don’t know Urdu well enough). This is not going to be a complete answer btw, and I’ll ask for help from others.
What is the difference between a preposition and a prefix, or a postposition and a suffix? That one is a word, and the second is part of a word. But how do you tell whether something is a word or not?
People assume that it’s obvious how, from written language. But that’s a convention. If your language is not written down, people will often get much more confused. I’ve seen that even with Tsakonian: people know how written Greek works fine, but they have difficulty extending those rules to such a deviant variant of Greek.
If a word has its own independent accent, then it’s not really different. In áfter áll, we can tell that after has its own accent.
But if the word is a clitic, an unaccented word, it’s much more difficult. There is a shade of grey between a clitic and an affix. How different do for every and forever sound? Often though, you can still put a word between the clitic and the host (main word), and that demonstrates that the clitic is still a separate word. For everybody > for almost everybody.
So there are syntactic and phonological tests you can apply, to determine whether something is truly an affix or a clitic, a case-ending or a postposition. But it can get subtle.
I am not across Urdu enough to say anything more, but this should keep you going until I find someone who does, Khateeb!
During antiquity, did anyone in Greece or Rome recognize similarities between Greek and Latin languages and hypothesized relationships between them?
Yup.
Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek/Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek is a paper on that. And Are there any accounts of the Romans realizing linguistic similarity between Latin and Germanic languages? • /r/AskHistorians is a Reddit thread of it.
The locus classicus is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but the idea was doing the rounds:
LacusCurtius • Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities
The language spoken by the Romans is neither utterly barbarous nor absolutely Greek, but a mixture, as it were, of both, the greater part of which is Aeolic; and the only disadvantage they have experienced from their intermingling with these various nations is that they do not pronounce all their sounds properly.
Answered 2017-01-20 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
Ancient Greek transliteration: why does the letter κ become c, and the letter υ become y?
Vote #1 Amy Dakin: Amy Dakin’s answer to Ancient Greek transliteration: why does the letter κ become c, and the letter υ become y?
Bear in mind that K was imported into Latin from Greek, but it was a something of an affectation. It was never used seriously, so it was never going to be used in the latinization of Greek.
The reason Upsilon was imported into Latin from Greek was that Upsilon by then really did have a distinct sound from I and U. In fact we know that Upsilon was pronounced as ü in Greek right up until the 11th century.
Vote #1 Amy Dakin.
Why are irregular “to be”s quite different?
The reasons for the striking irregularities of the copula verb in Indo-European are addressed in Did the present indicative forms of the Latin verb “esse” evolve from two different roots? As those answers show, the Proto-Indo-European verb was in fact almost regular.
But there is a broader question of why the copula in particular is persistently irregular cross-linguistically. That has to do with the fact that it is the most frequent and the least contentful verb in a language.
Because it is underspecified, it attracts more suppletion, such as can be seen in the merger of be and was in English. Because it is so frequent, it is subject to much more phonological pressure towards ease of pronunciation and erosion. And because it has such a core function, language learners use it as a fixed set of given words, seared into their brains, and they resist any effort within the system to regularise it. That is why irregularities persist only in very frequent nouns and verbs.
What does “copped a serve” mean and what is the origin of the expression?
Vote #1 Danya Rose, who as far as I know has the right answer.
Danya Rose’s answer to What does “copped a serve” mean and what is the origin of the expression?
To my astonishment, OED does not have the phrase. It does have related phrases under cop, v. 3: “to capture, catch, lay hold of”:
- to cop it “to be punished, to get into trouble”
- to cop a packet [no definition]
- to cop a plea “to plead guilty, usually as part of a bargain or agreement with the prosecution”
- to cop a feel “to fondle someone in a sexual manner”
However, under serve, n. 2 we do find the almost identical phase to give (someone) a serve: “to deal roughly wit; to criticize or reprimand sharply”, described as Australian slang. The noun is derived from to serve, and there are three definitions given: “service, adoration” (Middle English); tennis service; and “a serving or helping of food” (“3 serves of the bacon”).
I don’t know enough about tennis to know why cop a serve wouldn’t be referencing tennis. OED does strongly suggest that’s the only way to interpret it..
Do Greeks get offended when someone calls them Grecian?
There was a bit of merriment when George W Bush used the word.
I actually don’t know whether Greeks in Greece know about the oddity of “Grecian”. My take, as someone bicultural: it’s not offensive, it’s just archaic; so seeing it in live use is puzzling. Because it’s archaic, I’m led to wonder whether I’m being exoticised into a box with Mine Ancient Ancestors and Urns—or whether the speaker just plain doesn’t know that it’s archaic English, which is why W was mocked for it.
There are, of course, contexts where Grecian is entirely appropriate to use. Such as my parody of Henry Higgins, in what at least one of my friends here has termed my best answer ever:
Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die?
Is anyone eligible to distribute ancient and classical texts commercially?
What Gwydion Madawc Williams said: Vote #1 Gwydion Madawc Williams’ answer to Is anyone eligible to distribute ancient and classical texts commercially?
With one edge case as an exception.
An editor does work in reconstructing the original form of an ancient text preserved in manuscripts. That work is intellectual labour, and it can end up being substantial intellectual labour. But it has not usually been deemed a sufficient contribution for the editor to claim copyright over the ancient text they’ve reconstructed.
(They could claim copyright over the Critical apparatus of the text; and it’s no coincidence that the TLG has never entered the app crit in their digitised texts.)
But if a text is extremely fragmentary, and the editor has expended considerable ingenuity in filling in the blanks—and that does happen in some work attested in scraps of papyrus—then most of the words in the text might be not on the papyrus at all, and might be the editor’s IP instead. In that case the editor may well have more of a claim of intellectual ownership.
IANAL.