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Month: September 2016
Does the Greek word for Palaces, Megara, come from the Aramean word Magharat or Zagharat “caves”?
Maybe. There is a plural megara word in ancient Greek, which means “a kind of crypt into which live pigs were thrown during the Thesmophoria festival”. This is related by both Chantraine and Frisk to Hebrew me‘ārā “cavern”, meaning it is Semitic (in all likelihood), and thus related to Arabic Magharat. The singular megaron “hall” […]
Do some incorrect or imprecise terms stick just because English language hasn’t better options?
Never, never, ever underestimate the power of inertia. In the instance you cite, of sex addiction vs compulsivity: the distinction is itself fairly new, and the use of the description to describe the patient has not yet stabilised, because the notion of compulsion as a medical condition has not been pervasive. So there’s a huge […]
Are there certain types of words that humans remember far easier than others?
Shulamit Widawsky is right about the emotive loading of words affecting their memorability. In the specific context of dirty words, you may well have been highly motivated to learn them. (There’s always keen motivation to learn dirty words in foreign languages, as evidenced here on Quora.) If you were strongly motivated and were delighted by […]
Why was a Greek city with the name Mαρωνεια written Marogna in Latin and not Maronia?
As far as I can tell, you are referring to Maroneia in Thrace, and the rendering Marogna appears in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854) Maroneia is reckoned among the towns of Macedon. The modern name is Marogna, and it has been the seat of an archbishopric. Cramer (1828) also gives the name […]
When and how does semantics meets phonetics?
Good question, Anon! By design, they’re not supposed to. Linguistics makes a point of segregating them hierarchically: Phonetics: how individual sounds work Phonology: how sounds are organised into meaningful contrasts as phonemes Morphology: how phonemes are organised into meaningful components of words as morphemes Lexicon: how morphemes are organised into meaningful words Semantics: how the […]
What are some of the limitations of truth conditional semantics?
Here’s another limitation: speech acts. A statement of how the world is (a declarative speech act) can be true or false. A command, a promise, or a performative statement (“I hereby declare…”) cannot meaningfully be true or false: it can only be felicitous or infelicitous (that is, appropriate). Here’s yet another, which Gary Coen already […]
Was Ionian the mother dialect of Herodotus?
Inasmuch as we can trust the ancient sources, Herodotus’ native dialect was Doric, and he may well have been a Carian speaker. As Wikipedia says, we can’t trust the ancient sources anyway: Herodotus Herodotus wrote his ‘Histories’ in the Ionian dialect, yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda […]
How was Greek literature lost through time?
For documents to survive, they needed to be important enough to the copyists to keep recopying, as the technology of books was upgraded—from wax tablet to scroll to codex in capitals to codex in lower case. And they needed to be important enough to be copied multiple times, so that random destruction of books did […]
How related are Turkish to Greek culture?
*shrug* Similar. 500 years of close coexistence and bilingualism (not that people can grok that now). Lots of food in common, with traffic in both directions, and different preferences of spices. Several common cultural practices, such as taking shoes off before going inside. Many, many formulaic expressions in common. Significant musical overlap: in some genres […]
What are some similarities and common things that Greek has with Arabic?
Commonalities between Greek and Arabic? They belong to different language families—Indo-European vs Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Phoenecian); noone has proven a more distant relation between the two. The alphabet of both derives from Phoenecian; hence the similarity in letter names to this day. That also extends to Hebrew: […]