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Day: January 11, 2016
Where is Minoa today?
Um. Per Minoa, there are several sites that have been known as Minoa, mostly in the Aegean. But in the sense Minoa is used on Quora, as a shorthand for “site of the Minoan civilisation”, that would be Crete. In fact, since the Classical survival of non-Hellenic Eteocretan language was in easternmost Crete, where I […]
How do words like “mouse” get their plural form?
Vowel change was a strategy for forming plurals in Old English. The process is shared among Germanic languages, and is Germanic umlaut. Ultimately it comes from –iz being a plural suffix in Proto-Germanic: the plural of *mūs was *mūsiz, and the plural of *fōts was *fōtiz. In time, *mūsiz went to mȳs in Old English […]