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Is it possible to be fluent in Lojban?
As it turns out, I’m the person who has been accused of being a fluent Lojban speaker the earliest on. The answer is yes, it is possible. With some provisos.
- The vocabulary is small, and you don’t want to be coining new predicates on the fly if you can help it. Especially if you need to work out a complex argument structure for them. That can keep fluent speech on the simple side.
- With Lojban, you are speaking in brackets. Remembering how deeply nested your sentences are, and how to close them off, is the biggest challenge to fluency. You want to aim for right branching if you can.
- Lojban is capable of some extremely subtle distinctions — in abstractions, in tense, in event types. If you’re aiming to fluency, you’ll be lucky if you have enough time to differentiate facts from events.
- The syntax is big (and bracketed). You won’t have time to delve into it. It will be simple structures for you much of the time.
You can speak Lojban fluently. I’m not as sure you can speak it fluently and correctly and completely, all at once.
How long did it take you to learn Esperanto? What methods are available to learn it?
A2A: long time ago, I was 13, and I don’t clearly remember, but I think I was up and running within a month.
Does the pejorative meaning of the word Silly “to pray, holy” have any relation with the word Wasilas “priest” in ancient Greece?
OK. This is still A2A clearing out season. (I’m almost done, because for some reason Quora is throttling my unanswered legacy A2As.)
I’m not aware of basileus “ruler, king” being used in Ancient Greek to mean “priest”, or of any hint of Caesaropapism/conflation of the sacred and the secular in the word. I’m not an expert in the field, but I’m not aware of it. The fact that placenames around Mt Olympus now have Vasil– stems in them (as OP mentions in comment) doesn’t tell me anything about sacred rulership: those placenames can by default be assumed to be modern and referring to Byzantine emperors, or fairy tale kings.
I know that the word was written as qasireu in Linear B, and Wikipedia says the proto-Greek would be gʷatileus; the form is likely not Indo-European.
That makes it unlikely to be related to any of the other forms OP has adduced, which are Indo-European and spoken very far from Pelasgia: French sale, English sully, English silly, and Greek salos.
Well, the last one may be pre Greek too. But you can’t just chop off two syllables and a vowel and call the results cognate.
Going through:
- English sully < Proto-Germanic *suliwōną, *sulwōną, *sulwijaną (“to sully, make dirty”), < Proto-Indo-European *sūl- (“thick liquid, muck”). Cognate to soil.
- French sale “dirty” < Old Frankish *salo (“dull, dirty grey”), from Proto-Germanic *salwaz (“dusky, dark, muddy”), from Proto-Indo-European *salw-, *sal- (“dirt, dirty”). That’s actually a bit of a surprise, I’d have thought they were the selfsame stem. The English cognate is sallow.
- English silly < Middle English seely, sēlī (“blessed; good; innocent; weak; guileless; pitiful; lowly; punctual”) < Old English (ġe)sǣliġ (“blessed; fortunate”) < Proto-Germanic *sēlīgaz < *sēliz < Proto-Indo-European *sōlh₂- (“mercy, comfort”).
- Greek σαλός “silly, imbecile” (attested in Hesychius and scholia to Aristophanes; it is mediaeval Greek); Chantraine tentatively derives it from σάλος “disturbance, storm”, whose etymology is unknown. That would mean that salos originally meant something like “stormy”—or “disturbed”.
English silly and Greek salos are interesting in that they actually switched meanings in mediaeval Christianity, in a weird kind of way.
Silly started out meaning “blessed”, a meaning its German cognate selig retains. If you’re acting blessed according to the precepts of Christianity, that means that you’re acting guileless; that means you’re naive; that means you’re foolish; that means you’re silly.
Modern Greek had the same conclusion about acting guileless. The word that in Modern Greek means “guileless to the point of being simpleminded, too naive to live” is…
… agathos. The Ancient Greek for “good”.
But salos went the opposite way. It started meaning “disturbed”, and thence “imbecile”. In Bithynian Greek (which would date from after the 16th century), it came to mean a “baby”. (In the rest of Greek, mōron came to have that meaning.)
But in Mediaeval Orthodox Christianity, being mentally disturbed was taken as a sign of holiness. The salos is the figure who is only marginally better known in English under its Russian name, yurodivy (which pops up in exegeses of Shostakovich): it’s the Fool for Christ:
The yurodivy is a Holy Fool, one who acts intentionally foolish in the eyes of men. The term implies behaviour “which is caused neither by mistake nor by feeble-mindedness, but is deliberate, irritating, even provocative.”
In his book Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, Ivanov described “holy fool” as a term for a person who “feigns insanity, pretends to be silly, or who provokes shock or outrage by his deliberate unruliness.” He explained that such conduct qualifies as holy foolery only if the audience believes that the individual is sane, moral, and pious. The Eastern Orthodox Church holds that holy fools voluntarily take up the guise of insanity in order to conceal their perfection from the world, and thus avoid praise.
Some characteristics that were commonly seen in holy fools were going around half-naked, being homeless, speaking in riddles, being believed to be clairvoyant and a prophet, and occasionally being disruptive and challenging to the point of seeming immoral (though always to make a point.
So silly described someone so holy they were considered mentally disturbed. And salos described someone so mentally disturbed they were considered to be holy.
Why is the word “the” declining in English?
The drop is indeed puzzling, but unlike Brian Collins I don’t think it reflects an actual change in English usage (such as the perishing of the encyclopaedic the—that wouldn’t make that much of a dint). I also don’t think Second Language Learner English would make such a dint. It’s about the representation of texts in the Google n-gram corpus.
The dip seems to be from 1960 on. What I think is happening is more texts from then on in the Google corpus have headline-like English, of the kind you see in dot points; headline-like English drops the readily. It’s a real written register (in business reports, instructional manuals, &c), and it’s not one that was really around before then. So:
- “Attach nozzle to faucet, see diagram A”
- “Referred director to board for more information”
- “Computer incapable of processing input”
EDIT: See comments: this is unlikely to account for the drop either, especially in fiction.
Linguistics: Why do interjections differ?
Because, contrary to what you might think, interjections are not always pure spontaneous exclamations from deep in the neural cortex, that are universal to all humans.
A few are; as I noted in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are there any short expletives that sound the same in different languages?
Nick Enfield [Page on sydney.edu.au] (who I did linguistics with, and boy does he look different twenty years on) just got an Ig Noble [Improbable Research] for claiming the universality of Huh? (The Syllable Everyone Recognizes, Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?)
Of course the realisation of Huh? does differ by language; in the Mediterranean, for example, it is E? But the general idea is a mid vowel (as close to a schwa as your language allows), with a questioning tone.
However plenty of them are culture specific; they may not be arbitrary in themselves, but the choice of which interjection to use can be; and in fact interjections can be borrowed between languages, just like any other word.
Two instances from Modern Greek.
- “Ouch” in Greek is traditionally [ax, ox]. English [autʃ ~ auts] has now been borrowed into young people’s Greek, from TV.
- The Greek sneeze interjection is [apsu]. I’ve just discovered that the Turkish interjection is [hapʃuː], and [apsu] is just [hapʃuː] nativised to Greek phonology. (How is the sound of a sneeze written out in different languages?)
Does the Greek word for Palaces, Megara, come from the Aramean word Magharat or Zagharat “caves”?
Maybe.
There is a plural megara word in ancient Greek, which means “a kind of crypt into which live pigs were thrown during the Thesmophoria festival”. This is related by both Chantraine and Frisk to Hebrew me‘ārā “cavern”, meaning it is Semitic (in all likelihood), and thus related to Arabic Magharat.
The singular megaron “hall” is less definite; it may be related to the town of Megara; it may be related to megas “big”; it may be borrowed from an external language (Frisk rejects the proposed Indo-European derivation by Brugman), and Chantraine notes that a Condoléon thought it was indeed the same word as the plural megara “crypts”. But that’s just one authority relating the two words.
Zagori OTOH is pretty obviously derived from Slavonic Zagore, “beyond the mountain”.
Do some incorrect or imprecise terms stick just because English language hasn’t better options?
Never, never, ever underestimate the power of inertia.
In the instance you cite, of sex addiction vs compulsivity: the distinction is itself fairly new, and the use of the description to describe the patient has not yet stabilised, because the notion of compulsion as a medical condition has not been pervasive. So there’s a huge amount of inertia behind addiction, and an even huger amount of inertia because there hasn’t been until now a term for “one suffering from a compulsion”, to match “addict = one suffering from an addiction”.
If we went to Latin, we would use the past passive participle, find it to be compulsus (cf. addictus), and say that the person is a *compulse. But that hasn’t happened in English with any of the -pulse/-pel verbs. Not least because pulse and impulse as nouns are abstractions.
Since a sufferer of compulsion is grammatically one who is compelled, we could use *compelee. But compel and compulsion have actually diverged—compel is not used in the psychological context.
So, by accident, we don’t have a straightforward derivative word to describe such a patient. What to do, OP, what to do…
… actually this has already been solved. compulsive can be used as a noun to describe someone who exhibits a compulsive disorder: a sex compulsive. This is also something that English does with adjectives; cf. captive prisoner > captive. It sounds odd to us, because compulsive disorder describes the compeller and not the compellee; but it’s better than the alternatives, and it’s already in use.
The grammatical strangeness may slow down the take-up of compulsive; but if there is a compelling (ha!) case for a single word to be used for sufferers of compulsion, it will be taken up anyway.
Are there certain types of words that humans remember far easier than others?
Shulamit Widawsky is right about the emotive loading of words affecting their memorability.
In the specific context of dirty words, you may well have been highly motivated to learn them. (There’s always keen motivation to learn dirty words in foreign languages, as evidenced here on Quora.) If you were strongly motivated and were delighted by the frisson of taboo, then the words are likelier to have stuck.
Does that mean naughty words should be prioritised in language textbooks? Well, if you’re taught them boringly by rote, all the fun goes out of them, and if all the fun goes out of them, you’re less likely to remember them. So in fact, maybe not.
I’d say getting people to look up their own words, as they need them in composition, can be very helpful, for a similar reason: it’s a word you needed, and invested some effort in. A lot of my German and Klingon stuck that way.
Why was a Greek city with the name Mαρωνεια written Marogna in Latin and not Maronia?
As far as I can tell, you are referring to Maroneia in Thrace, and the rendering Marogna appears in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854)
Maroneia is reckoned among the towns of Macedon. The modern name is Marogna, and it has been the seat of an archbishopric.
Cramer (1828) also gives the name of Marogna (A geographical and historical description of ancient Greece), citing a P. Mela.
I don’t see any evidence for Marogna being Latin; it is an Italian rendering of /maronja/ (Greek Μαρώνεια Bulgarian Мароня), and is presented as modern explicitly. With Italian mariners having the run of the Mediterranean, it would not have been unusual for a port in Greece to have an Italian rendering, or for the early 19th century rendering of a Greek (or Bulgarian) placename to have been spelled via Italian.
When and how does semantics meets phonetics?
Good question, Anon!
By design, they’re not supposed to. Linguistics makes a point of segregating them hierarchically:
- Phonetics: how individual sounds work
- Phonology: how sounds are organised into meaningful contrasts as phonemes
- Morphology: how phonemes are organised into meaningful components of words as morphemes
- Lexicon: how morphemes are organised into meaningful words
- Semantics: how the meaning of those words works.
The hierarchies are more leaky than we would like; they are convenient abstractions. There can be leakage between them. But by asking for semantics to meet phonetics, OP, you’re asking for an awful lot of leakage.
The closest I can think of is morphophonemes, which leak between phonology and morphology. Plural -s, for example covers both [s] and [z]. The two are clearly different phonemes of English now (though they didn’t used to be). You could argue that the neutralisation of contrast between the two in that context means that there is a single morphophoneme at work, -S, spanning /s/ and /z/. Enough of that kind of thing happens, through diachronic leakage, that Morphophonology is a thing.
That’s a bridge between morphology and phonology, anyway.
EDIT: Forgot to put in another leak: Sound symbolism. Phonemes are associated with particular vague vibes of meaning, and accordingly get used with naming particular concepts. It’s vague, it’s infrequent, it’s not reproducible (little sounds little, but does small?), and linguists usually get away with ignoring it outside the most explicit instances, in onomatopoeia. But it is a leak of some meaning from semantic classes down to phonetics.