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Day: February 21, 2017
Why is Aromanian not officially recognized in Greece?
Oh dear. Greece has long had a model of state nationalism which, like that of France, treated minorities as a threat to national unity, and pursued assimilation. The Greek Orthodox ethnic minorities of Greece, who had identified with ethnic Greeks as fellow members of the Rum millet, enthusiastically embraced assimilation for the most part. So […]
Why do most people focus on ancient Greek history ignoring the rest of the Greek history?
The West claims its patrimony from the Renaissance West and Mediaeval West. The Mediaeval West claimed its patrimony from Rome. Rome, and the Renaissance West, claimed their cultural patrimony from Ancient Greece. So Ancient Greece matters to the West, because the West regarded itself as the cultural inheritor of Ancient Greece. The Byzantine Empire was […]
What do Albanian Italians and Greek Italians think of each other?
I don’t know the answer as to what contemporary attitudes are. I do know two things though: The Arbëresh settlements in Italy were nowhere near the Griko settlements: the Arbëresh were much further to the north. There would have been a brief period when they shared church administration, before the Griko switched from Greek rite […]
Is “how much am I owing you” grammatically correct?
The only correct answer here is from Andrew McKenzie; however he has left it a bit brief, and I’m happy to elaborate a bit more. English divides verbs between dynamic and stative. See Stative verb – Wikipedia. Dynamic verbs are verbs that can be put in the progressive (be doing); stative verbs normally cannot. So […]
Do linguistics departments normally include mostly women, gay men, vegans, and leftists?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/07/teenage-hyperpolyglot-0 Hahahahaha. Well, let’s see. Linguistics in the West appears to have broken down the barriers against women getting academic promotion relatively early, and the majority of enrolments at undergraduate level in my department were women. I remember a male linguist (Newmeyer? Pullum?) citing approvingly a hotelier’s guide to the convention partying styles of various […]