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Day: February 5, 2017

Irrefragable

By: | Post date: 2017-02-05 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Remember when Dennis Miller was commentating the NFL, and peppering his commentary with obscurity after obscurity, and a panoply of blogs popped up to offer exegesis to the befuddled masses? This here blog may be that for the Magister, and I don’t want the Magister to start getting all self-conscious about his recondite lexis. Don’t […]

Why don’t Asians in Australia have the Australian accent?

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Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

As other respondents have said, (a) it depends, and (b) they do. Reflecting on the Asian Australians I’ve known in the past thirty years: People who’ve come off the boat naturally aren’t going to have an Aussie accent. Duh. Although I’ve spoken of a counterexample here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who are some people you […]

Why does NACLO use “living” languages in some of its questions?

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Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

http://nacloweb.org This is a more general question: why would linguistic Olympiads and competitions in general use for their puzzles real, non-obscure languages, which someone among the the contestants may already know? I know nothing about NACLO in particular, and I will offer some speculation which I still think relevant. Oversight: “meh, noone will know Turkish”. […]

What is the etymology of etymology, and is it good etymology or bad etymology?

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Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, English, Linguistics

I think I get your question. Is the etymology of etymology subject to the Etymological fallacy? The etymological fallacy is a genetic fallacy that holds that the present-day meaning of a word or phrase should necessarily be similar to its historical meaning. This is a linguistic misconception, and is sometimes used as a basis for […]

What does British English sound like to Australian speaker?

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Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Scottish English? My Scottish personal trainer reports people have difficulty understanding her. I can’t fathom why, and I don’t, but maybe my ear isn’t as tin as I think it is. (FWIW, it’s rare that any Scots creeps in to her speech: cannae only once in a while.) Northern English? I think highly of it, […]

What are some patterns in accenting Koine Greek when compounding?

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Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

Eg : αὐλέω to αὐλητής, actually. 🙂 For a list of suffixes and how they work in Ancient Greek, see Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges from §833 on for more detail than you’ll ever want on the mechanics. The list starts at §839. That list is for Ancient Greek; Koine is substantially […]

Do some people still have old Latin names and surnames?

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Posted in categories: Latin, Linguistics

Translating your surname into Latin was in fashion in the 16th through 18th centuries for many Germans and Swedes; Linnaeus (von Linné), for example, or Neander (as in Neanderthal; Neumann). EDIT: Philip Newton points out Neander is Greek. True dat. OK, try Faber (surname), Latin for “Smith”. Or Schmidt. Sometimes, it has stuck around. I’m […]

Could Esperanto seriously become the lingua franca?

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Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

A2A by Rahul. Ah, Rahul. This hurts. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it like to be a kabeinto? What was it like to leave Esperantujo? But, you asked. The lingua franca? Of course not, not any more. There might have been a brief window with the League of Nations, maybe even the UN, but […]

By which languages was your native language influenced the most?

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Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Modern Greek? In terms of vocabulary, Italian (including Venetian), but not by much; toss-up between Italian and Turkish. Then Latin, then French, then English. In terms of grammar, any significant influence was through the Balkan Sprachbund. A lot of the Sprachbund features originated in Greek (and we can tell through the history of Greek and […]