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Day: May 21, 2017

Which conjugation is Gnōthi ‘know’, as in Gnōthi sauton ‘know thyself’?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-21 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

This is the aorist imperative active, 2nd person singular, of γιγνώσκω ‘to know’ Alas, γιγνώσκω ‘to know’ is one of the many irregular verbs of Greek. The particular irregularity here is that while its present tense is thematic (a normal -ω verb), it forms its aorist stem γνω- according to the older, athematic paradigm (represented […]

Is there a difference between asking which language is older and asking which species is older?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-21 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Will you take a “Yes… and No”? 🙂 The Cladistics of biological species was inspired by the cladistics of languages; the cladistics of languages, in turn, was inspired by the cladistics of classical manuscripts. All three fields have similarities. In all three fields, the classical tree model of divergence is an oversimplification; in fact, in […]