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What’s the best translation of the intensifier “the fuck” in other languages?
Modern Greek.
“What” (τι) questions will have σκατά “shit” inserted after it: τι κοιτάζεις “what are you looking at” > τι σκατά κοιτάζεις “what shit are you looking at”.
The more generic intensifiers are στο διάολο “to the devil”, for interrogative sentences, or ρε γαμώτο “for fuck’s sake; literally hey, I fuck it”, for other sentences.
Τι κοιτάζεις > τι στο διάολο κοιτάζεις “what the hell are you looking at?
Πότε στο διάολο θα έρθει “when the hell will he get here?”
Κοιμήσου ρε γαμώτο “Sleep, for fuck’s sake”.
Ρε γαμώτο, νόστιμο είναι το φαΐ “Fuck, that food is tasty”
Γαμώτο has the historical linguistic distinction of being an ossified piece of mediaeval Greek, in which the “it” follows rather than precedes the verb (γαμώ το); in Modern greek, “I fuck it” would be το γαμώ. Because it is an ossified piece of mediaeval Greek,
- people treat it as an exclamation: Voula Patoulidou, Olympic gold medalist at the 100m hurdles, exclaimed Για την Ελλάδα ρε γαμώτο θα τρέξω, και για κανέναν άλλο! “I’m running for fucking Greece, and nobody else!” And her patriotism was widely held to excuse her profanity. Για την Ελλάδα ρε γαμώτο “For fucking Greece” was a catchphrase for several years afterwards.
- people also treat it as a noun: the expression το γαμώτο της υπόθεσης “the ‘fuck it!’ of the issue is…” corresponds to “the catch is…, the rub is…”: it’s the part of an issue that makes you exclaim “for fuck’s sake!”
If the Confederacy had become independent, would their English eventually be considered a different language?
OP, but the question comes from Jason Blau, at https://www.quora.com/Why-Arabic…
Fascinating question!
Reposting his full question:
If the Confederacy had become independent, would their english eventually be considered a different language? (Very similar of course, like the relationship between Dutch and Afrikaans). One could assume the prestige dialect would be as distinct as possible from “Yankee” speech, there would be much less media/cultural influence over southern english to ensure that it was relatively intelligible to Northerners, the little to no immigration to the Confederacy would ensure the North would drift further away, and most importantly, the Confederacy would have had an army and a navy.
My answer:
If this was 1000 years ago, sure, they would have drifted apart. But 150 years apart in modern times? With the universality of print (including print from the UK)? I think you’d get a situation more like Australian English vs British English. The prestige accent certainly wouldn’t be Midwestern in the CSA, accents would diverge a bit more, and you might see idioms like fixin’ to in standard CSA English which you won’t in standard US English.
But I believe the forces that have kept US English and UK English mutually intelligible would still in play for US and CSA English, even if they hated each other.
EDIT to respond to Jason Blau’s question in comments.
Spoken English dialects? With less Damn Yankees around, with a less industrialised economy so less mobility in general, and with less of a centralised identity pushed in schooling (it is the con-federacy after all)… there’d be more drift, yeah. Not sure if that would extend to the Bayou though: it’s still a “foreign” language, and I can’t imagine that there’d be no Speak American sentiment in the CSA (or rather, Speak Southron).
Why does language grow in a democratic way?
I’m going to limit this to lexicon, and not get into other areas of language change.
Think about it. You just spoke of scientific terms being planned out meticulously and promoted by universally acknowledged authorities. Scientific terms are part of language. That includes smaller languages’ authorities, which come up with canonical translations of other languages’ scientific terms.
Why doesn’t that happen in general with vocabulary? It’s not like there’s a shortage of authorities wanting to run languages.
First, the only function of scientific language that scientists consciously acknowledge is referential, describing the world. (There’s other stuff they don’t acknowledge, such as group identity.)
But language in general does a lot of stuff, that a central authority is simply not going to be able to predict. And language is a spontaneously changeable instrument, which authorities simply can’t intervene in in practice. It’s the major vehicle of interpersonal relationships, and of individual expression.
Even if it did, language is transmitted person to person, and evolves through a network of influencers and followers—being a social phenomenon. Any central authority is going to be only one of the influencers. And not everyone is going to choose to follow everything a influencer does.
Which makes it ultimately a democratic-ish outcome.
In linguistics is there a term parallel to “nominal” referring to a category used to group together verbs and adjectives based on shared properties?
I don’t know of one; in fact what I’ve seen is linguists call adjectives in Asian languages verbs, to deal with the commonalities. Stative verbs, if you make it more precise.
In fact, whether adjectives are real as a cross-linguistic category is a legit question.
Will the Norn language see a successful revival in Orkney and Shetland?
Ah, a lot of doom and gloom here from other respondents.
I’ll admit that all I know about Shetland is that they have ponies, and all I know about Orkney is “huh, isn’t that halfway to Norway already?” But I knew Norn existed. I’ve had a quick look at Wikipedia (and pasted links in details).
And I’ll post not specifics (a Shetlander or Orcadian will need to supply those); but some questions to ask, and some stuff I’ve gleaned from both reading, and a friend working on language reclamation here in Australia.
Will you get the kind of revival that Hebrew had? Of course not. The Jews of Palestine spoke different languages, and even when they didn’t, they were strongly motivated to abandon their native languages. The Ottomans and British weren’t coercing their language onto the Jews of Palestine. The kibbutzim were like the plantations that pidgins developed in, only not coercive.
Obviously, that’s not happening in Norn territory. Everyone speaks English, everyone will keep speaking English, and a revived Norn would only ever be a part-time hobby thing.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing not real about that. But let’s stop comparing Norn to Hebrew, as the measure of a successful revival case. The proper comparison is with Cornish. (Which features in How many dead languages have successfully been revived as spoken languages of a group of people in the modern world?) And Cornish has not been an utter failure; people speak it and write it. Even if it is more emblematic than anything else in Cornwall.
So. Can Nynorn get to the status of Cornish? Well, let’s see.
- It’ll need strong Shetlander/Orcadian nationalism. Strong enough for people to see the point in investing their time, seeking each other out to chat, organise cultural revival festivals featuring it, memorise the Hildina ballad (the one surviving non-trivial text). Nynorn needs to be the vehicle of a culture: it needs to motivate people.
- I don’t know whether there is strong Shetlander/Orcadian nationalism. Without it, the revival’s going to be pretty damn marginal.
- The naysayers on the forums, though, and anyone speaking of utility, can kiss my conlanger tuchus. Noone’s putting a gun to their head to learn Nynorn. Or French for that matter. If they think it’s a waste of time, they can go have a party with all the shmucks who are aghast I’d spent time on Klingon. As long as they don’t get in the way of anyone who does want to learn Nynorn.
- It does NOT need a huge well-documented corpus of original Norn. Which is just as well, ’cause we don’t have one.
- Yes, Nynorn is going to be a linguistic fiction, based on analogy with Faroese to fill in the blanks. Big deal. Cornish Mark #1 used Breton to fill in the blanks. Australian languages get revived based on a couple of scrappy word lists and triangulation.
- The point is not that Nynorn be a completely historically accurate replica of 16th century Norn. The point is that it be good enough to be serviceable to the community. There are Aboriginal communities who were quite content with getting just a dozen words back, to inject into their Aboriginal English: it was enough for their purposes.
- The error of Cornish (leading to Cornish Mark #2 and Cornish Mark #3) was thinking it needed to be more and more historically accurate. Why? You’re not going in a time machine any time soon. Language revival does not need to go all Jurassic Park. If you can understand the Hildina and can still talk in Nynorn about buying a pint of lager and a pony (or whatever it is people talk about over there), you’re good. The perfect must not be allowed to be the enemy of the good.
- My friend was skipping the ergative in her revivals, because the tribe she was working with couldn’t get their heads around it. The linguists shook their heads. But my friend wasn’t doing the revival work for the linguists, or for herself (who, after all, knew perfectly well what an ergative is). She was doing it for the community. And it does the community no good if you revive a language for them, that they can’t wrap their heads around.
- Dialects get in the way, because revival is only practical around a single standard.
- Promoting standard forms of Irish and Scots Gaelic through the radio actually backfired: the native speakers of Irish and Gaelic got even more disheartened, because they found that not only was their mountain gibberish not the Queen’s English, it wasn’t even the Queen’s Celtic. A Greek dialectologist like me is not going to be grateful to the Greek government for sending teachers to the Ukraine: it’s not like they’re sent to teach the version of Greek that’s actually spoken there.
- And of course, if the revival is to be driven by local pride, picking a non-local dialect is going to be a funny way for the locals to show pride.
- That won’t be as much of an issue for Nynorn, because noone has spoken Norn for a couple of centuries. But Orkney Norn and Shetland Norn look very different; and imposing a single Nynorn over both might be a bad idea, especially if the locals know that Orkney Norn and Shetland Norn look very different. (I have no idea if that’s what’s happening.)
Flag of Orkney.
Flag of Shetland.
Shetland ponies in Shetland.
Why are Armenia and Greece against Turkey and Azerbaijan?
As Ayse Temmuz said, this has been gone over very often.
Let’s go through the pairs.
- Armenia–Azerbaijan. I’m married to a diaspora Armenian, which means I know very little of Armenia. We spent 3 days in and around Yerevan during our honeymoon last year. And that was enough to convince me there’ll be war again soon. That enmity is live.
- Armenia–Turkey. The hostility is live as well, though not on a war footing. The sheep are only wandering into no-mans land at Khor Virap because they don’t know what guns are. The genocide is a big part of why the hostility is fresh on the Armenian side; I can’t speak to the Turkish side.
- Greece–Azerbaijan. I don’t think Greeks know enough about Azeris to hate them. I’m assuming vice versa.
- Greece–Turkey. Ah, Greece–Turkey. The reason is not just Cyprus or the Istanbul pogroms or the massacres in Chios and Tripolitsa. The reason is that Greeks and Turks have defined themselves in opposition to each other for the past millennium, around their creed. (That’s how the Turkic emirates and the Byzantine Empire did business, and the Ottoman Empire enshrined it in the millet system.) They’ve defined themselves as such, in fact, at the expense of their own ethnicities.
- And yet, since the earthquake diplomacy thing, that hostility has mostly gone away. There’s some residual unease; I suspect there always will be. But there are Ottomanists in Greece now, and experts on Ottoman art music. They simply did not exist 30 years ago. (Turks will need to let me know if there’s been something similar on their side. Ömer Aygün does Aristotle, but that’s Yunan, not Rum 🙂 )
Who are some notable linguists in the field of historical pragmatics?
Andreas Jucker seems to be the guy that single handedly conjured this field into being, including the journal and the collection of essays in the late 90s. (I think I reviewed it way back then.) Namechecked at Historical pragmatics – Wikipedia
Ah, bugger. He’s the Dean of Arts at Zurich U. No more research out of him, then.
Is there a time in history when the Greeks and Turks fought together in the same team?
To add to Andrei Stoica’s answer—
(Vote #1: User. This is a supplementary answer)
—Byzantines often used Turkish mercenaries, as Andrei pointed out, especially when they went nuts and fought civil wars in the 14th century that only the Ottomans could benefit from. And after the civil wars washed up, and Byzantines were a vassal state of the Ottomans, Byzantines fought as vassals of the Ottomans. But that wasn’t even an alliance, let along an “on the same team”, that was just work for hire.
Like Andrei said: no, never.
(Please read Andrei Stoica’s answer btw. Vote #1: User.)
In the Matrix, why is the Oracle’s message “Know Thyself” in Latin, instead of the original Greek?
Because Latin was always better known in the West than Greek. Greek proverbial expressions are almost uniformly quoted in the West in Latin; e.g. Deus ex machina, not apo mēchanēs theos; Et tu Brute, not kai sy teknon; quod erat demonstrandum, not hoper edei deixai.
Gnothi seauton seems to be as prevalent as nosce te ipsum for Know thyself, if you add up transliterations and Greek script on the Googles.
What is cod-Greek?
I’ve seen other such expressions, such as cod-Latin, and cod-Spanish. Cod-Latin is a synonym of Dog Latin, a fake Latin used playfully to imitate real Latin. The Wikipedia example is
Stormum surgebat et boatum oversetebat
The storm rose up and overturned the boat
Illegitimis non carborundum is another such instance. (“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”)
Cod-Greek would similarly be fake Ancient Greek, made up with English words and vaguely Greek-looking endings.
Got any references, OP?