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Day: May 8, 2017

Will we ever decode Linear A or Cretan Hieroglyphs?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Writing Systems

We can actually read Eteocretan language, because it’s in Greek characters; and we even have enough bilingual text that we know the Eteocretan for ‘cheese’. And we still can’t make head or tail of it. A lot of Linear A and Linear B characters are shared, which means we can guess at the pronunciation of […]

What does “not for nothing” mean?

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Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=not%20for%20nothing&defid=4426994 Contra the other two answers here, “not for nothing, but” is indeed used, as Urban Dictionary defines it, as a hedge. It is in fact a verbal tic of Aaron Sorkin’s that drew attention through its overuse on The West Wing: Inside Aaron Sorkin’s Brain, Sorkinisms II: Not for Nothing. Most famously in the […]

I recently reread Jack London’s “White Fang” and noticed the phrase “not for nothing” therein. Where did that phrase originate?

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Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Jack London’s example, as usage in What does “not for nothing” mean?, is: “Not for nothing had he been exposed to the pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious environment of the Wild.” Note that this […]

How do I search in the dictionary for the Ancient Greek verb υφηιρειτω?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

Well, you could go to a morphological analyser of Ancient Greek, type in the word, and see what comes out. Such as morpheus on Perseus, or the other offshots of morpheus publicly available, or the subscription only variant of morpheus that I worked on for thirteen glorious years at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, before my […]