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How do you pronounce η (eta)?
How do I pronounce eta?
In Modern Greek: /i/.
When reading Ancient Greek to myself, still /i/. I’m Greek, which makes me Reuchlinian, as Haggen Kennedy described: I pronounce Ancient Greek as Modern Greek to myself.
When reading Ancient Greek out loud, or describing Ancient Greek historically, I do not use whatever weird-ass Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching they have in these parts. I do what we reasonably think eta originally was: [ɛː].
Why isn’t there a single Modern Latin language like Modern Greek?
How many months ago did you A2A me this, Zeibura S. Kathau? I’ve been clearing out my backlog.
The question really is not why isn’t there a Single Modern Latin, but why is there a Single Modern Greek.
- Actually, there is not a single Modern Hellenic language. Under no linguistically informed notion of language is Tsakonian or Southern Cappadocian the same language as Standard Athenian Greek. You have to be damned generous to say Pontic is. And if we’re being honest, basilectal Cypriot is pretty iffy too. But it is still fair to say that there is less diversity within the Hellenic languages than there is within the Romance languages.
- The area over which Modern Romance languages were spoken historically is much bigger than the area over which Modern Hellenic languages were. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Romania, patches of the Balkans; vs. Greece, Cyprus, and patches of the Anatolian hinterland [EDIT: and some other bits: see Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s comment]. Greece may have been the Eastern Roman Empire’s lingua franca, but that didn’t hellenise the Slavs or the Syrians.
A rough guess at 800 AD dominion of Romance and Hellenic languages.
- There are lots of substrates at work in Romance, both Celtic and Germanic (and whatever the hell the substrate of Romanian is). That’s a large part of what has differentiated the Romance languages. Now, Greece has had its share of other peoples moving in too, and there’s a lot of adstratal effects on Greek: Greek is a part of the Balkan Sprachbund, especially on the Balkan mainland, and there have been clear contact effects—not all one way. But even though there were clearly substantial hellenised Slavic populations in the middle ages, Greek does not come across as a language with a whole lot of substrate going on.
- Tsakonian does; but Hesseling was pilloried for suggesting it. By town council meeting, no less.
- If an Egyptian Greek had survived, you’d be seeing a lot more substrate effects. They’re certainly quite clear in the papyri.
- The prestige of archaic Greek (particularly church Greek; much later on, written Greek in general) had a profoundly conservative effect on the language, in a way that was different to Western Europe. In fact, the Greek Aromanian linguist Nikos Katsanis has pointed out that the most extreme palatalisations that have happened in Greece were in Tsakonian and Aromanian. Both were so far removed from the language of the Church, that the language of the Church could not have any effect on their pronunciation.
- He left out Lesbos, where there’s been similar hi-jinx. But it’s a nice observation.
Why does the definition of one word recall other n words and m definitions?
The question is somewhat opaque, but OP is getting to the question of, why is the definition of a word such a complex, and potentially circular, graph of links to other definitions. Your original question, OP, was in fact about circularity.
The answer is:
- Dictionary definitions aren’t particularly concerned about rigour or non-circularity: you’re assumed as a language learner to already have a baseline understanding of the definitional human language, which you can use to bootstrap any other definitions.
- Attempts at a rigorous semantics of definitions will inevitably have to bottom out on a list of Semantic primes, a set of concepts that have to be taken as givens rather than defined themselves.
- Identifying that list of primes, and using them for definitions, has not been a popular pastime. It’s work. Natural semantic metalanguage is an admirable initiative in that direction.
- Unfortunately, NSM also wanted to use those primes in human-intelligible definitions. That makes things dirtier. The initial Spartan beauty of Anna Wierzbicka’s Lingua Mentalis had 14 primes; now it’s in the 60s.
- Definitions of words in NSM are a valuable discipline to get into: they really force you to break concepts down. They are also a hilariously forced subset of English.
Look into Wierzbicka’s work, OP. Even if you don’t like the approach, it’s got some excellent insights. And start with the early stuff, including Lingua Mentalis itself.
Why are the generic male endings -er and -or accepted as gender neutral but -man isn’t?
The archaicness of -trix is indeed very very relevant to the topic.
I agree with Jason Whyte’s answer, I’ll just elaborate on it.
In the past of English, gendering was overt, and feminine actor suffixes were quite marked. –er was masculine and had a –ress counterpart; –or was masculine and had a –trix counterpart; –man was masculine and had a –woman counterpart (kinda).
When English ideologically moved away from gendering of roles, –trix was pretty marginal already, so people just forgot it was ever there: dominator/dominatrix is the only instance where -trix is alive and well. –ress is far from dead, but English is pretty ungendered much of the time, and it was easy for –er to generalise from masculine to generic. Not all the time: the US prefers she’s a server to she’s a waiter—but note, it’s still serv-er. The masculine connotation of -er was weak enough, and -er was generic enough already in meaning, that it could be ignored.
But –man? Well, it’s identical to man.
At this point, you could retort that –man in Old English meant “human being” (“man” was were), and people should have accepted that –man was generic. Well, they could have, but they didn’t. People interpret the meaning of morphemes in a synchronic paradigm (what other words and suffixes do I know right now, not historically). The synchronic identity of –man and man has been too compelling for people, and (this is also crucial) the use of –man as a suffix infrequent enough that it was never as generic as –er.
What is the Origin of idiolect?
If you’re asking about the etymology of idiolect:
idio-: from Greek idios “particular, individual”. Cf. idiosyncrasy, idiot (originally: private citizen, loner), idiom.
-lect: back-formation from dia-lect, originally “something conversed about/in”, from dia “through” and lektos “spoken”.
See:
If you’re asking why there are idiolects, where they come from:
We like to abstract languages, sociolects, and dialects as the common property of a language community. But that is always an abstraction.
What occurs in reality is that each individual has their own mental model of a language, with their own influences from the people they’ve learned from and spoken to, and with their own individual variations.
Idiolects are the source of all language variation and change: those variations are levelled and grouped together because people talk to each other, and that’s how the higher groupings of languages, sociolects, and dialects are real.
What is known about the symbols on the Arkalochori Axe (possibly a script)? Are there any attempts to decipher them?
This question has been sitting, lonely and neglected, in my inbox for quite a while.
I’ll answer it so it can be out of my inbox. I don’t have any special knowledge about it, but:
- Cretan hieroglyphs is a superset of Arkalochori and Phaistos; it also includes a bunch of seals.
- The latest published corpus is J.-P. Olivier, L. Godard, in collaboration with J.-C. Poursat, Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae (CHIC), Études Crétoises 31, De Boccard, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-86958-082-7.
- That corpus analyses Cretan hieroglyphs as:
96 syllabograms (representing sounds), ten of which double as logograms (representing words or morphemes). There are also 23 logograms representing four levels of numerals (units, tens, hundreds, thousands), numerical fractions, and two types of punctuation.
- So while nutjob amateurs think Arkalochori and Phaistos look like belonging to the same script, professional linguists also think they belong to the same list.
- Yes, there are nutjob amateurs deciphering Arkalochori, just as there are for Phaistos, and all the ones I’ve seen decipher it in Greek.
- No I’m not going to link to them.
Is the use of the word “niggardly” acceptable and politically correct?
There’s several perspectives one can take on the whole sorry-ass saga of niggardly, on which as always see Controversies about the word “niggardly”.
There’s the perspective of the linguist, the language-lover, the activist, and the anti-American.
The Anti-American first, so I can get it off my chest:
Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.
Australia has a bad history with its Indigenous people, with the Melanesians it colonised, and now with the Somali refugees who are the latest marauding evil criminal youth gangs (it was the Vietnamese 20 years ago). But…
Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.
More on that later.
The linguist:
If a critical mass of people within a language community think the word is unacceptable, well, then it’s unacceptable. Enough people here and in related threads have indicated that it is.
It doesn’t mean they’re etymologically right; but etymology is only one factor in how words work. There’s any number of connotations words acquire without being informed by etymology: language is a synchronic system, and connotations works synchronically.
Of course, my fellow personas Anti-American and Language-Lover don’t particularly feel they’re in the same language community as the people who object to niggardly, or even the same planet. But that’s not how it works. The word’s become a trigger for a critical mass of people, and is resulting in people reporting comments on Quora: Why would one of my comments be reported because I used the word niggardly?
Back to the Anti-American:
FFS, I don’t live in your God-forsaken country; do I have to put up with your “Is X random ethnicity white” and “niggardly is a bad word” bizarre racial obsessions here too?
The linguist:
Yes. Yes you do.
Well, not the former one. But yes, because you’re still part of the same language community.
The language-lover:
Niggardly is a useful word. And it’s useful because of its added connotations: it says things that miserly doesn’t. In particular, it (probably) comes from the same Scandinavian word as niggling does, and it has the connotations of niggling that miserly does not: pedantic, fussing over details, penny-pinching.
The linguist:
Yeah. But connotations work both ways. And now it has the added connotations of “that word that that guy in DC got fired over”, and “that word that sounds like nigger”. Because connotations work synchronically and not just etymologically.
The Anti-American:
In fricking America it does. And not to all Americans either, just a vocal minority of whingers.
The linguist:
And you’re still stuck in the same language community as them.
Note also that the negative connotations have taken over, because niggardly was not a common word to begin with.
The activist:
…
The Anti-American:
Nick, pull the other one mate. You’re not an activist.
The observer of activism:
I note with interest the initial reaction of the late Julian Bond, head of the NAACP at the time, to the Ground Zero incident in 1999, where the guy was fired: (Controversies about the word “niggardly”)
Julian Bond, then chairman of the NAACP, deplored the offense that had been taken at Howard’s use of the word. “You hate to think you have to censor your language to meet other people’s lack of understanding”, he said. “David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back—and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them.”
Bond also said, “Seems to me the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue” and that as a nation the US has a “hair-trigger sensibility” on race that can be tripped by both real and false grievances.
Now I like what Bond said for a couple of reasons. One, because I’m a libertarian in matters of free speech—more so than is usual in contemporary Australia. In fact, you might even say…
The Anti-American:
Don’t! Don’t do it! Don’t say anything good about America EVERRRR!
The observer of activism:
Two, because politically, I don’t think you win the battle of ideas by censorship, or by being seen as hypersensitive (“false grievances”): you win the battle of ideas by argument, not by distractions.
The language-lover:
Three, because Bond liked dictionaries. In fact, he thought all staff should have them.
The Anti-American:
Yeah. Sounds like Bond was a great American, and displayed many of the virtues some people grudgingly admire about Seppoland. (Not me of course.)
The linguist:
Australian English Seppoland < Seppo < Septic tank < Rhyming slang for Yank < Yankee < Dutch Janke < Jan < Latin Ioannes < Hebrew Yohanan.
The language-lover:
Language. It’s a beautiful thing.
The Anti-American:
Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your country.
Why is linguistics considered a science?
Supplemental to the list given by David Rosson (ah, your American bias is showing, David 🙂
- As Dmitriy Genzel points out, Historical Linguistics is an observational science, like Astronomy. A lot of hypothesis testing though.
- To add to Tibor Kiss’ list of German words, Linguistic Typology is a Versammelnde Wissenschaft: a science based on data collection. Like biological taxonomy.
- Semantics, depending on the flavour of Semantics being done, is an observational science (lexicography), or logic, or philosophy.
- Pragmatics is something in between cultural anthropology and philosophy (but a very cool, nuts-and-bolts philosophy).
- Discourse Analysis is observational science, but with dirtier data.
Oh, and phoneticians’ papers look just like psychology papers. Four pages long, with graphs. Historical linguists’ papers are old-school chatty. Syntax papers have at least some pretence of rigour. The style of the papers lines up to the kinds of science (or Geistwissenschaft) their subdisciplines aspire to be.
What’s the onomatopoeia for a computer?
Thing about onomatopoeias is, they get conventionalised and stick around, even if the referent no longer makes that sound.
I mean this sound?
This sound, the doot doot doot bloop bleep flurgh frump virrrr of a dial up modem? Hasn’t been heard in functional use for what, twenty years? And yet it is still used here and there, as emblematic of the internets.
I submit to you, learned Quorans, that there is an onomatopoeia for computers lurking around, but it dates from the 60s and 70s.
And that the onomatopoeia is bleep or bloop bleep.
What are the drawbacks to standardizing languages?
You lose linguistic diversity, as the dialects gradually die out, or at least are marginalised. You may not may not care about linguistic diversity, of course.
You lose ways of saying things that are specific to non-standard dialects. Cretan dialect for example has a distinct word for “trickle”. (To my annoyance, I don’t remember it.) Standard Greek only has “run”, a verb which applies equally to dripping, trickling, and leaking. Pontic Greek works on animacy, not gender. Tsakonian has some very archaic usage of the participle, which end up sounding closer to English than Modern Greek (he started barking αρχίνιε κχαούντα; I am seeing έννι ορού).
You lose the cultural associations that the dialects expressed; you sacrifice the distinct cultures conveyed by the dialects in favour of the standard.
If your language is moribund and there are still native speakers, standardising languages turns out not to be a good idea. Oh sure, you have limited resources to promulgate the language, and they’re more efficiently expended through using only one standard form. But when the standard form is not what the native speakers of the language actually speak, all you’ve ended up doing is alienating those speakers from the media you use. That’s what happened with Gaelic for example: the remaining speakers out in the Hebrides felt even worse about the language they spoke, because it didn’t match what BBC Alba was broadcasting.
If the standard is not anyone’s native dialect, you’re going to have some disruption while people learn the new standard, and get used to it. In fact, if the standard is not preexisting, you’re going to have some disruption while people flesh it out and elaborate it. And they may do a bad job of it.
If the standard is someone’s native dialect, you’re going to have enduring resentment from speakers of the dialects which have missed out.