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Month: March 2017
What is Yevanic?
Yevanic, or Judaeo-Greek, or Romaniote, is the version of Greek formerly spoken by Romaniote (Greek-speaking) Jews. Yevanic language – Wikipedia: There are no longer any native speakers of Yevanic, or have less than 50 speakers, for the following reasons: The assimilation of the tiny Romaniote communities by the more numerous Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews; The emigration […]
How accurate is this quote from Henry Kissinger about the Greek people in Greece?
It’s a Greek urban legend, of the type Greeks love to boost their persecution complex. On the debunking of the urban legend by language blogger Nikos Sarantakos, see: Η περιβόητη δήλωση Κίσινγκερ και ο Λάκης Λαζόπουλος Ο μύθος για τη δήλωση Κίσινγκερ Και πάλι για τη δήλωση Κίσινγκερ Was it 1974? Or 1973? Or 1997? […]
If you were allowed to add a symbol to unicode, what symbol would it be, and what would it mean?
I should be recusing myself from this question, because in fact I have added dozens of symbols to Unicode, both as an employee of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and as a tapped on the shoulder expert. When Asmus Freytag tapped me on the shoulder, though, and said to me “We want to finalise Greek: Suggest […]
Why doesn’t Mongolia use the Uighur script again and leave out Cyrillic?
Read the fine print of the caption in the image of what Wikipedia would look like in Mongolian script, at Mongolian script – Wikipedia. Mongolian Wikipedia preview. A representation of what mn.wiki would look like if Mongolian script support was properly implemented. Mn.wiki already exists, but support has not been implemented. Not all text is […]
The Death of Twyborn
Digenes Akritas was a hero of mediaeval Acritic songs, ballads celebrating the deeds of border guards of the Byzantine Empire. The hero survived into Modern Greek folk song, and The Death of Digenis is a song that got a lot of renown. I cited its depiction of the Grim Reaper at https://necrologue.quora.com/Som… , since I’ve […]
Why is Cæsar pronounced “seezer” and not “sayzer” or “sahzer”?
Traditional English pronunciation of Latin – Wikipedia One of the characteristic features of Anglo-Latin is that the diphthongs æ and œ merged with e. This is fully represented in the American spelling of Latin loanwords, though the simplified spelling is not consistently applied: æon and eon, æther and ether, amœba and ameba, anæmia and anemia, […]
What is the difference between egoism and egotism?
As I harrumphed in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is the etymology of the word “egotism”?: There is a recherché distinction that some people have made between egotism and egoism in English: egotism is a bad thing, egoism isn’t. But that distinction is pretty much made up, and noone really bothers with it any more. […]
In which parts of Greece do people pronounce the word “και” as “che” instead of “ke”?
Lots. Your search term is tsitakismos, the Greek name for the affrication of palatal /k/ [c] to [tʃ, tɕ, ts], as exemplified by the pronunciation of /ke/ “and” as /tʃe/ instead of Standard Greek [ce]. Going through the Centre for the Greek Language’s writeup of Modern dialects, and looking for that tsitakismos keyword: South-Eastern Some […]
equitable
Definition of EQUITABLE having or exhibiting equity : dealing fairly and equally with all concerned an equitable settlement of the dispute existing or valid in equity as distinguished from law: an equitable defense Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017? So here’s the deal. I’m not writing any […]
Why is the letter x doubled in neologisms such as doxxing and anti-vaxxers?
Speculation, but I’m assuming there’s a direct line from haxxor to doxx(er) to vaxxer. Leetspeak, the affective use of creating spellings in hacker communities, has taken up the use of -xxor or -xx0r as a creative spelling of –cker; thus, haxxor for hacker. haxxor – Wiktionary. The duplication of <x> is an affectation. In fact […]