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Day: May 18, 2017
What is the real meaning of κόλασις αἰώνιος (kolasis aionios)?
This phrase is a false friend. In Modern Greek, it sounds like “eternal hell”. In Modern Greek it would in fact be αιώνια κόλαση: the word order is slightly more fixed, adjectives before feminine nouns must have an -a and not an -o ending, and the third declension has been merged into the first. In […]
Is there any font for writing in cuneiform?
Every once in a while, I take offence at the possibility that any Unicode script might not be rendered on my Mac—even if I never use the script, will never see the script, and will have no idea what the script even is. And I go hunting for free fonts. There are five cuneiform blocks […]
Do you feel some people speak your native language better than you, that some people speak it worse than you, or that native speakers are equal?
Linguists and lay people answer this question differently, but that’s because they have different focuses on what language competence means. A linguist thinks of language as a rule system—a grammar, and a lexicon. As far as a linguist is concerned, the grammar is the common property of the entire language community: if you are a […]