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Month: February 2017
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 […]
What is a fetish for being bitten called?
I draw attention to Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die? as my credentials for answering this. Especially my line: Is not knowing shit about Classical languages a prerequisite for sexologists?! It is, and I’m not finding the bite fetish in Aggrawal’s exorbitantly misspelled listing of […]
From a stylebook perspective, what are the rules behind using asterisks and/or grawlixes to replace certain letters in curse words?
Unfortunately I don’t have style books to hand, but practice on this has varied in English. 100 years ago, the convention was to write only the first and the last letter of the obscenity, and to put dashes between them: d—d. The contemporary practices I have seen are to put ellipses between the first and […]
Why is standard Albanian language based on the Tosk dialect and not the Gheg dialect?
My answer is not ultimately different to User-13249930999434776143’s. (Vote #1: User-13249930999434776143’s answer to Why is standard Albanian language based on the Tosk dialect and not the Gheg dialect?) But it is a bit less nuanced. Albanian is divided into Tosk dialect in the south, and Geg dialect in the north. The standard language of Albania […]
Which language has the most beautiful name?
Oh, what is one’s standard for aesthetics when it comes to beauty? Tolkien’s? Tolkien’s make me want to slap him. “Ooh! Welsh! Ooh! Finnish! Ooh! Cellar door! Ooh! Arabic is so nassssty, my precious!! I’ll make the orcs speak it.” Pfft. I work on a more meta level. When I was lecturing, my coverall term […]
What are the most prevalent Arvanite surnames in Greece?
I mean, I know of some Arvanite surnames, but rather than rack my brains, I’m going to go to this blog posts ΕΛΛΗΝΟ-ΑΡΒΑΝΙΤΙΚΑ ΕΠΩΝΥΜΑ and ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΕΠΩΝΥΜΑ ΑΡΒΑΝΙΤΙΚΗΣ ΠΡΟΕΛΕΥΣΗΣ, both drawn from the book Arvanites by Kostas Biris, and cite the surnames I’ve heard of. Not as scientific a method as you’d like, and probably […]
Is it good to study modern Greek while learning Koine Greek?
I wouldn’t go so far as saying it would impede it, but you need to be careful. There will be false friends: words changed meaning from Koine to Modern. The drastic simplification of the grammar in Modern Greek will make you annoyed about having to learn more paradigms in Koine. I think, in many ways—particularly […]