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Month: February 2016
Where is the heart of the Balkans?
From linguistic criteria (having the most features of the Balkan sprachbund ), FWIW, it’s the Bulgaro-Macedonian language continuum, with Albanian a close second, then Romanian/Aromanian, Greek halfway in, and Serbian, Romany and Turkish peripheral. Dunno about Ladino. Dimitra as a northerner would be more enthusiastic about the Balkan affiliation of Greece than me as a […]
What are the different fingers called in other languages and cultures?
Modern Greek: thumb: μεγάλο δάχτυλο “big finger” (vernacular) thumb: αντίχειρας “opposite to the hand” (formal) index finger: δείκτης “pointer” (i.e. index) (formal) middle finger: μέσος “middle” ring finger: παράμεσος “next-to-middle” little finger: μικρό δάχτυλο “little finger” (vernacular) little finger: ωτίτης “ear finger” (i.e. use to scratch the ear) (formal) … If you go online, you’ll […]
Is djent an irregular verb?
Djent (which I hadn’t heard of coz I don’t get out much… … oh hang on, it’s the onomatopoeia! Djent djent djent. OK, carry on… ) could be a verb, sure. It’s English, we do that. We had a DJ here (the famous Molly Meldrum ) get in legal trouble 30 years ago, because he […]
How do you say swear words in Greek?
With gusto? *Look at his stats* *Finds that his most popular answer ever is Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean?* *Breathes in* Let’s go with Lenny Bruce’s 9 dirty words, the predecessor to George Carlin’s Seven dirty words . ass κώλος. Cognate with colon. Is used for both arse and […]
Since the Greeks and the Romans seemed relatively cultured people (at least by the standards of their time), how were they deceived by Christianity?
Hm, question with assumptions much? Note that: The Roman Empire was not a Gene Rodenberry Humanist utopia. It was fertile ground for all manner of (as the Roman sceptics would have put it) strange cults from the East, and it certainly had not turned away from religion in any meaningful sense. Lucian derided many of […]
What is the plural form of the word “vertex”? Why is it irregular?
Vertices. Why? Because the word is straight of out Latin, and Latin has a lot of declensions that look weird from the perspective of English. In particular, the plural vertices suggests that the singular should be vertix, just like the singular of matrices is matrix. There are a lot of –ices plurals corresponding to –ex […]
What interesting differences would there be today if I went back in time to ensure that “-tion” words in English instead ended in “-tio”?
where the endings “-tion” and “-tio” both were in use. Alack, not so. The Latin ending is nominative –tio, genitive –tionis, dative –tioni, accusative –tionem, ablative –tione. That’s a pain, sure, but the common pattern is that the underlying ending seems to be –tion– (and that’s what you’d reconstruct the proto-Latin nominative as). The nominative […]
Is Greece more West or East?
Greece was an Eastern country in 1832, and has been telling itself ever since that it’s a Western country. (That’s what the Westerners were telling her too. At least, to her face.) By the 1990s, Greece was a Western country. But the Eastern roots are still there. When the switchover between East and West happened […]
Does Monaco have its own language, or local dialect?
Yup. Close to the dialect of Genoa, which Monaco sits next to: Monégasque dialect. There’s been some promotion of Monegasque recently, but Monaco isn’t in the right part of the world for promoting small languages. The Duchy of Savoy (in the same general area, and homeland of Franco-Provençal/Arpitan) made French its official language three years […]
Are memes a novel linguistic category of proverbs?
Hm. In this subculture, sure. Adage at least, if not proverb. The fragmentation of culture in the Anglosphere, and the lack of common cultural reference points as a result, is a strange thing. It feels unprecedented. You can’t fall back on common literary references any more. The Anglosphere thinks traditional wisdom is old hat and […]