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Which Western language has the most un-phonemic spelling system?
Irish, especially before the mid-20th century spelling reforms, quite possibly; its marking of slender vs broad consonants is still pretty baroque even now. It led to the following comment on the Lojban mailing list in 1993 by And Rosta:
“Some of the English might say that the Irish orthography is very Irish. Personally, I have a lot of respect for a people who can create something so grotesque.”
Oh, and that’s with reference to the new spelling.
The old spelling was an accretion of dialects and obsolete pronunciations, on top of the lenitions and palatalisations and mutations of Celtic, that led to entertainments like this:
old spelling new spelling
beirbhiughadh — beiriú
imthighthe — imithe
faghbháil — fáil
urradhas — urrús
filidheacht — filíocht
Even if pronunciation was recoverable from the spelling (which I’m not sure about), teaching that many silent letters is just looney tunes.
From Wikipedia, the spelling reform process was messy, controversial, and what prevailed was the work of civil servants (the parliamentary translation service), who had less compunctions than the linguists about what might be put into practice.
And yes, the standardisation of Irish did run roughshod over dialect, which was inevitable. The survival of Ulster Irish does not owe a debt of gratitude to Standard Irish.
No, btw, the fact that Irish spelling reform succeeded does not mean that the Irish are an inherently superior people to the “Anglo-Saxons”. It’s far easier to do spelling reform on a moribund language, when the second-language learners are running the standardisation, and the native dialect speakers barely write anything. American English is not Ulster Irish. And it’s unlikely to see the UK Parliament and the US Congress get into spelling regulation in my lifetime…
What are the differences in grammar between Australian English and British English if any?
Thanks to Robert Charles Lee for his answer.
The one grammatical difference I’ve noticed is that British English allows do next to auxiliary verbs as a pro-verb; Australian English does not. So Did you ever see the Pope? can be answered I haven’t done in British, but only I haven’t in Australian.
Have any creoles become national languages?
Neel Lex Lumi’s answer names Tok Pisin and Haitian Creole. Add:
Papiamento: “is the most-widely spoken language on the Caribbean ABC islands, having official status in Aruba and Curaçao. The language is also recognized on Bonaire by the Dutch government.”
Maltese language: may or may not be a creole.
Afrikaans: may or may not be a creole.
Bislama: one of the official languages of Vanuatu.
Seychellois Creole: It shares official language status with English and French (in contrast to Mauritian and Réunion Creole, which lack official status in Mauritius and Réunion).
Kituba language: “It is a creole language based on Kikongo, a family of closely related Bantu languages. It is an official language in Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is not entirely accurate to call Kituba a creole language as it lacks the distinction between superstrate and substrate influence that is typical of creole development.”
Sango language: “Some linguists, following William J. Samarin, classify it as a Ngbandi-based creole; however, others (like Marcel Diki-Kidiri, Charles H. Morrill) reject that classification and say that changes in Sango structures (both internally and externally) can be explained quite well without a creolization process. … Today, Sango is both a national and official language of the Central African Republic.”
What is the best and most up-to date Ancient Greek-English dictionary?
Depends on your criteria.
Biggest & Up to date is not English, but the now online DGE Diccionario Griego-Español . Only goes up to epsilon though, and I don’t see it finishing for another century.
Biggest in English remains Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon — though the online editions don’t include the 1996 Supplement.
The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is coming out next year; it’s not meant to be as big as LSJ, but it has been redone from scratch, rather than copypasting previous lexica (a tradition LSJ itself is part of).
The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek came out last year, as a translation of Montanari’s Italian dictionary. I haven’t gone through it; from the headword count, it sounds close to LSJ (more than the original edition, less than original + supplement), and I know that Montanari maintained PAWAG-Poorly attested words in ancient greek, with 1000 words not in LSJ (well, a substantial subset of them, anyway).
It won’t be as comprehensive as DGE, which quite confidently does Proper Names and Early Byzantine texts, an area previous dictionaries have shied away from. But then again, DGE is up to epsilon.
Is there any psychological journal that is written in Esperanto?
My guess: no.
If anyone would have written articles in an Esperanto psychological journal, that would have been the late Claude Piron, who lectured in psychology, and who also wrote a psychoanalysis of people’s attitude to international languages. (No, I’m not endorsing that kind of thing.)
I’ve looked through his now defunct fan page at Pironejo , Claude Piron: Bibliografio . Not seeing any evidence he published in anything such.
I’m not sure there have been academic journals in Esperanto about anything other than Esperanto (including Esperantologio and Planlingvistiko, which were pretty good).
How do you refer to your left foot with languages that only use cardinal directions?
To elaborate on Joe Devney’s answer to How do you refer to your left foot with languages that only use cardinal directions?
Yes, your South foot, if you’re facing west, and your North foot, if you’re facing east. Just as geographically oriented languages will refer to it as your seaward foot if you’re by the beach, and as your landward foot if you turn around.
That’s the thing about languages with no relative direction. They really have No. Relative. Direction.
Which means, you might ponder, that they don’t refer to their left foot the same way all the time; how they name it depends on which way they’re facing. Yes it does. They know it’s the same foot, they just shrug off the fact that the name for it changes. Just as you shrug off the fact that your left is the opposite of my left.
Did Greek Cypriot took Venetian caraguol, Spanish caracol with the nuance “fort” to denote a snail (karaolos)?
Thanks to Eutychius Kaimakkamis and Alberto Yagos.
Alberto, you have Andriotis’ etymological dictionary? Awesome!
The Cypriot dictionary I opened up at random confirms caracol/caracollo as the origin of karaolos, and they confirm your etymology as “twisted”. It did not say that the etymology of caracol in turn was ultimately Greek kokhlias via Vulgar Latin *cochlear, which makes karaolos a round-about Rückwanderer: caracol – Wiktionary
And who knew that the Romance words for spoon have the same derivation.
What’s this about patrolling, though? A caracole is a snail-shaped (i.e. spiral) military manoeuvre or move in dressage. Is it as generic as “patrol”?
Is the Greek Cypriot and Cretan pronunciation kk = ts (zz) derived from Venetian, or is it archaic?
The question and the question details are asking different things, and I’ll address them separately.
It is the doom of /k/ in front of a front vowel (i, e) to be palatalised, to be pronounced as [kʲ] > [c]. The palate is a notoriously difficult place to articulate a stop (too much surface area). So [c] more often than not ends up become (a) an affricate and (b) palatoalveolar: [tʃ] (moving forward in the tongue root, to where there is a more well defined articulator). It can move even further, and become an alveolar affricate: [ts].
That’s what’s happened to Latin <ci> throughout Romance. Caelum would have started as [cielu]; then [tʃielo] in Italian, then [tsiel] in French, which then simplified further to [siel].
The same change has happened in the Cretan and Cypriot dialects of Greek: /kokina/ ‘red’ > [kotʃina]. Standard Greek, on the other hand, stops at [c]: [kocina]. Both Crete and Cyprus spent time ruled by Venetians. Did they get [tʃ] from the Venetians?
No need to: this is a linguistic commonplace, and it has happened in dialects of Greek with no contact with Italian: Tsakonian, for instance (/kairos/ > [tɕere]), or Cappadocian (/kelyfos/ > /tʃefos/). In fact, Peloponnesian–Heptanesian, the base dialects of Standard Modern Greek, are outliers in not having palatoalveolars.
The question details throw some words:
Latin Aretium > Italian Arezzo
Darıca, a town in Turkey whose Greek name was Aretsou, and whose ancient name may have been Arethusa (though its classicising name was Rhysion).
Now, alveolars also palatalise cross-linguistically: Latin <ti> has indeed been through a bunch of changes, moving it towards the roof of the mouth, although it typically does not go further than affrication: [ti] > [tsi]. So Latin natione > Italian nazione [natsione] > French [natsion] > [nasion]. English in turn palatalised [sj] to [ʃ].
The corresponding palatalisation of /ti/ in Greek is rarer, but it has happened, and when it has happened, it’s been spectacular: /ti/ goes all the way back to [ci], in Tsakonian and Lesbian.
So. What about Aretsou?
I found out only today that [θθ] > [ts] was a thing in Finnish: Joonas Vakkilainen’s answer to What did your language sound like 500 years ago? (thanks, Joonas). But I’ve gotta say, I’ve never seen the equivalent in Greek. There is what <θ> pronounced as <σ> in Laconian, which appears backed up as rare instances of /θ/ > /s/ in Tsakonian. But that change was ancient, and likelier Laconian pronouncing /tʰ/ as /θ/ much earlier.
Aretsou is in Bithynia, so I was going to say “forget it, Bithynia was resettled by Greek-speakers in the 16th century from Epirus, there can’t have been any continuity from ancient Arethusa”. (Bithynia was the Ottoman heartland, so it was Turkicised early.) But Darıca is only 40km from Istanbul, so it’s plausible that it remained Greek–speaking after the Ottoman conquest.
Still, because I haven’t seen [θ] > [ts] elsewhere in Greece, I think Arethusa > Aretsou is unlikely. Any connection with Arezzo is also unlikely.
Which conlang can be considered best for everyday usage?
I’ve spoken Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon. And as I’ve posted elsewhere, I have a soft spot for Interlingua and Interglosa.
There are studies, but the numbers are hazy. The numbers mentioned here though are congruous with what I know. Esperanto would be in the hundreds of thousands; Klingon in the hundreds, Lojban in the much lower hundreds.
Long-term advantage as a world-language? Even Esperanto has pretty much given up on that.
Benefit that arises because of widespread use? Of course Esperanto has more usage and literature and community. Though English has even more. And what counts as useful really does depend on what you’re after.
In fact, I remember coming across an argument on Usenet along these lines (yes, I am that old), where someone was saying that you can get much more quality interactions in Esperanto than in English, because it’s a better-quality, self-selected community. Yup: the retort came quickly that the interactions in the Klingon and Lojban community are even better by that metric.
Where in the Balkan sprachbund did the invariable future tense marker originate?
A capital question.
You were right, Zeibura, in the discussion that prompted this: the Balkans is a big mess of not continuously attested languages and dialects; and the only hints of whether a feature originated in one place rather than another is whether the feature is also present in Koine Greek or Old Church Slavonic—both of which predate the Sprachbund.
We are, as far as I know, out of luck with the future, because neither is the case. The will-future first shows up in Greek about the time all the Balkan stuff shows up, in the 14th century. One of the first instances I know of is in Sylvester Syropoulos’ Memoirs (about the Council of Florence, 1438), when he speaks of Emperor John VIII Palaiologos strongarming Patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople, telling him “you want to agree to Church Union.”
Joseph II wanted no such thing: he was an opponent of Church Union. What John VIII was actually telling him, of course, was: “You will agree to Church Union.”
It is true, as Diana Vesselinova points out, that will-futures are a linguistic commonplace (it also happened in English, after all). But given that every single Balkan language does it, it’s hard to believe there was no influence between the Balkan languages.
You’ve also asked why the will particle is invariable. There’s a parallel phenomenon that was going on in the Balkans at the same time (and this time, we’re pretty sure Greek was the starting point for it): the elimination of the infinitive. We actually see multiple forms competing at the same time in Greek: I will go could be expressed as θelo ipaɣin “I.will to.go”; once you lose the infinitive, you end up with a phrase with both verbs marked for person, θelo na ipaɣo “I.will that I.go”, competing with an alternate phrase with only the main verb marked for person, θeli na ipaɣo “it.wills that I.go”.
The last one is the one that prevailed, with “it.wills that” θeli na ultimately reduced to the particle θa: θeli na > θena > θa. The principle is one of markedness: if the auxiliary only ends up marking futurity, then there’s not much point marking it independently for person. There also would have been analogy with other modals like prepi ‘it.must’ or bori ‘it.can = it is possible’; and θa itself ended up in the same paradigm as the suspiciously similar looking subjunctive marker na.