Subscribe to Blog via Email
Archive:
Day: March 25, 2017
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. […]