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Month: April 2016
Should the Greek people give Alexis Tsipras another chance as their prime minister?
I no longer follow Greek politics for the same reason I stopped following US politics: too depressing. I refer you however to the Greek version of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”, as I have illustrated here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean? I […]
How does Turkish sound to non-Turkish speakers?
https://youtu.be/iJZxmfhcSn0 Originally Answered: What does Turkish sound like to foreigners? Like French with a /ɯ/ in it. I was about to say “and without the annoying mumbling”; but, having been to Istanbul: Like French with a /ɯ/ in it. I do actually like the sound of it. (Although as a Greek I’m not allowed to […]
Why is there a ‘d’ in the word fridge but not in the word refrigerator?
Allow me to write a more general answer. The phonotactics of a language, and the conventions of its spelling, can lead speakers to expect letters to be pronounced differently in different contexts—for example, at the start or at the end of a word. Truncation, in words like (re)frig(erator), takes a sound from the start or […]
Why are there languages which are spoken the same but written in different script or alphabets?
Traditionally in Europe: religion. As a more general answer than religion, which covers the other answers here: culture. Scripts comes from a particular culture, and adherents of that culture adopt that script. If speakers of the same language belong to different cultures, they use different scripts. If there is a massive cultural shift in the […]
What is the Greek word for actor?
Modern Greek: like everyone else said, ηθοποιός. In Ancient Greek this meant “character-building”. The modern meaning came about because plays can be character building, I suppose, but I can’t find out when the meaning shift happened. Pretty sure it’s very recent. The word is from katharevousa. The old vernacular word is θεατρίνος, which is still […]
With knowledge of modern Greek what historical literature could I read?
Hm. I keep disagreeing that you’d understand all of the New Testament. Mark and John, sure; Paul, not so much. Byzantine learned literature: forget it. It’s not identical to Attic Greek, but you’ll need Attic Greek (and a decoder ring) to make sense of it. Byzantine Vernacular literature (1100 onward): sure, but knowing some dialect, […]
What is the etymology of the Russian word vishnya (cherry)? There seems to be a connection to the Turkish word.
The answers given here have opened up a secondary conundrum. It’s uncontroversial that Turkish got the word from Bulgarian. The controversy is whether the Slavic word came from Greek, the Greek word came from Slavic, or the similarity is a coincidence. The Greek word could easily have come from Bulgarian; and if it’s a Slavic-wide […]
Why does Basque sound like Spanish despite Spanish being linguistically closer to French, Persian and Hindi?
The Greek spoken in Southern Italy sounds like it’s spoken by the Mario brothers. The Greek spoken in the Ukraine sounds soaked in vodka. And when I’m not in Greece, my dentals become alveolar: I sound like a caricature of “Uncle Nick from America”. Basques live in Spain. The grammar has remained impervious to contact, […]
How does Hungarian sound to someone who doesn’t speak it at all?
One of my favourite pastimes when I was younger was to channel-surf to SBS (the multi-cultural broadcaster), and try and guess the language being spoken in the movie I’d landed halfway through. The rule of thumb I’d worked out is, if they sound Turkish and look Swedish, they’re Hungarian. Answered 2016-04-12 · Upvoted by Jácint […]
What are the differences between linguistics and philology?
Philology is what linguists think they are above doing, and they are boneheads for doing so. Philology was the study of language in its literary context; so it was confined to written language, and historical linguistics, both of which have become decidedly old fashioned. So when the Old Man of Modern Greek Linguistics, Georgios Chatzidakis, […]