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Day: September 20, 2016
Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?
In this episode of Quora Jeopardy!, I find that the source OP is drawing on (Dimitris Sotiropoulos’ answer to Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?, see comments) does not necessarily lead to the conclusion he is positing. The answer is drawn from the first successful Google hit I got on […]
What is your hometown’s dark secret?
I have several hometowns, but the hometown I’ll pick is Sitia, Lasithi prefecture, Crete. Small, no account place, placid, few tourists. I’ve made several discoveries about my hometown that came as a surprise to me. They had not exactly been publicised, and they’re embarrassing, so I guess they’re dark secrets. They get progressively darker. 1. […]
Not counting click languages, what is the oddest sounding language to speakers of English?
The weirdest sounds cross-linguistically would have to be those with a different airstream mechanism to the normal, pulmonic egressive mechanism. The normal pulmonic egressive mechanism is simply making the sounds while breathing out of your lungs. The lingual ingressive mechanism involves making sounds while sucking in air around your tongue. Those are, of course, clicks. […]
Is there a place in the world where we have differences between women and men in accent or even in vocabulary?
There’s lots of gendering in language, and people who have studied sociolinguistics more intently than me will be able to offer better examples. I actually don’t know of instances in Crete that OP has in mind. I do know that in Tsakonia in the 19th century, the palatalised allophone of /r/ appeared to be [r̝], […]
Does word villa, meaning house, have the same meaning in all European languages or are there some exceptions?
Yes, yes, OP, in Cypriot Greek, βίλλα, as a variant of βίλλος, does mean “dick”. Hence, per βίλλα – cySlang (the Cypriot counterpart to urbandictionary) and βίλλα, βίλα – SLANG.gr (the Greek counterpart to urbandictionary), the fans of Marcos Baghdatis would shout: Του Μάρκου η βίλα γκαστρώνει και καμήλα!Marcos’ dick will impregnate even a camel! […]
Does Greek have an equivalent of “ch” as in “chicken”?
Standard Greek does not. <ch> gets transliterated as /ts/. For example, when I was in Goody’s (the Greek competitor to McDonald’s) and ordered a cheeseburger, my order was relayed as ena tsiz! . You’ll see many Turkish loanwords with /ts/ in them: every single one corresponds to a Turkish <ç>. On the other hand, many […]
Do you collect dictionaries? What is the favorite volume in your collection?
I have in my time collected dictionaries, though often it was for utilitarian purposes, so photocopies rather than books. The one I think of with the most affection is John Sampson (linguist): The dialect of the Gypsies of Wales. It’s uncompromisingly scholarly, from a time when the Roma were considered beneath the notice of decent […]