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Month: May 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 […]
Why doesn’t Google offer an English-Ancient Greek translation when there is an English-Latin translation?
Google translation does not work by rules and grammars. Machine translation gave up on that decades ago. Pity, because I spent well over a decade coding morphological rules for Greek, and it was a lot of fun. Machine translation works on statistics. To gather the statistics, you need a large amount of bilingual texts. Now, […]
What do Greeks think about the film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”?
It depends on where the Greeks are. Greeks in the diaspora loved it. It is a movie that pokes caricatured fun at the antiquated notions that the first generation of migrants had, and how they did not assimilate and retained a rural worldview. That kind of caricature is a commonplace of second-generation members of diaspora […]
Would “This enrolling first took place managed by Quirinius of Syria” be more accurate than “when Quirinius was governor”?
No. The participle ἡγεμονεύοντος and its subject Κυρηνίου are in the genitive. That makes this a Genitive absolute, which corresponds to the Latin ablative absolute. Its job is to indicate the time or circumstance under which the main clause happened: it is a separate clause. English equivalents are Absolute constructions, such as The referee having […]
Would a universal language be symbolic?
There have been a few proposals for symbolic universal language, most of them taking their inspiration from Chinese ideographic systems. Pasigraphy was at the start of the universal language movement: they were akin to universal thesauruses in symbolic form. Rather naive in retrospect. Blissymbols was probably the most thorough recent effort, and it has found […]
What is the last letter in the Coptic alphabet?
On seeing this question, I thought, “Huh? Why is this not a question for Wikipedia?” And then I looked at Wikipedia—English and German and French; and I realised that it’s not as trivial a question as you might think. The last three letters of the Coptic alphabet listed on Wikipedia (all three languages) are Ϭ, […]
Was Homer being transcribed when written vowels were invented for the Greek alphabet?
Nestor’s Cup is one of the earliest inscriptions in Greek, and it’s got a metrical inscription that may allude to the Iliad: So it’s feasible that Homer started being transcribed as soon as vowels were introduced—which pretty much was as soon as the alphabet was adopted in Greek. (We have no evidence of Greek using […]
If you already have an undergrad degree (not in linguistics), what is the best way to pursue a linguistics degree/graduate degree?
The way I did it, which may not work everywhere, is: Take as many breadth subjects in linguistics as you can, while doing your degree in another faculty. Demonstrate through charm and wit and intellect that you would be an asset to the linguistics department. If at all possible, do a cross disciplinary postgraduate degree […]