Do “quantity” and “quality” also rhyme in your language?

By: | Post date: 2016-06-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

In Modern Greek, posótita and piótita; in Ancient Greek, posótɛːs and poiótɛːs. So… sure.

But look at what’s actually happening here. The two words are derived from the words for “how much” and “what kind” (in Latin, quant-um and qual-e), plus the affix for nominalising adjectives (Latin –itas). It’s literally “how-much-ness” and “what-kind-ness”. If the affix is a suffix, the words are bound to rhyme, or at least end in the same syllable. In fact, it’s English where they off-rhyme: the consonants after the accent are not identical.

As the other answers show, lots of languages calque the terms with native roots. Thus Albanian sasi and cilësi (I recognise cilë, at least); and Croatian purist kakvoća količina (I recognise kak).

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