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Archive:
Day: October 8, 2015
With TV, radio, film and other forms of mass media will accents and dialects slowly die out or transform until there is just one national/non-regional dialect?
Certainly the trend in many countries is for dialects to die out, particularly countries with a strong centralising tendency in culture and education. Greece and France are very good examples of this. Even in England, what survives is more accents with some variant vocabulary than the full-fledged dialects of two centuries ago. Countries that have […]
Why do some languages have translations for cities while others don’t?
Some other factoids from Greek: * Languages with inflectional morphology will tend to inflect town names, especially town names they care about, as Daniel Lindsäth correctly points out. Ancient Greek tended to do that a lot, though not universally, as you can see in the Geography (Ptolemy): most towns end up looking declinable, though some […]
What is it like to be able to fluently speak Klingon?
Surprising. You are aware of the gaps in the vocabulary, and they are annoying; but it’s a buzz when you manage to actually hold a decent conversation anyway. The last conversation I had in Klingon was the most surprising: at an airport, about how come deixis is pronounced with an [aj]. You wouldn’t think Klingon […]
How does Esperanto sound, to you?
One objection raised about the vowels of Esperanto by Kalocsay and Waringhien (the authors of the standard Esperanto Grammar Plena Analiza Gramatiko – Vikipedio) was that there was no alternation of vowel length, so it sounded rat-tat-tat — like Spanish and Greek do. They proposed introducing vowel length according to syllable structure, which was meant […]
Artificial Languages: What’s it like to speak Lojban?
Intense, mainly because of having to control the syntax coming out of your mouth, and remembering to to say the “bracketing” words (terminators). It was more intense for me than others at the time, because I was better at remembering to say the terminators. 🙂 This was still human communication, though, and context was still […]