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Month: May 2017
What exactly is the origin of the “ain’t no” kind of speech/dialect?
Ain’t – Wikipedia Ain’t is found throughout the English-speaking world across regions and classes, and is among the most pervasive nonstandard terms in English. It is one of two negation features (the other being the double negative) that are known to appear in all nonstandard English dialects. Take ain’t instead of am/are not, add the […]
Regarding Australian states and territories, say you have a certain word in your state. Have you come across different words in other states that mean the same thing?
Australians desperately hang on to the small lexical differences between States, as you’ll see here, because otherwise Australian English is ludicrously homogeneous geographically. Variation in Australian English – Wikipedia The names for different sizes of beer glasses (Australian English vocabulary – Wikipedia) is kind of the counterpart to the renowned Eskimo words for snow. (Yes, […]
How long would it take linguists to decode a language like Lojban if no speakers or reference grammar existed, but several original texts did?
Great answer from Roman Huczok: see Roman Huczok’s answer. Getting an undeciphered text with no Rosetta stone is, as Roman said, hard work, though not impossible. The question is after the peculiarities of Lojban which would make the decipherment harder—particularly given the whole exoticism that Lojban claims to, of encoding predicate logic as something quite […]
Why does the Greek “αγγε” transliterate to “ange” and not “agge” in English?
Ah, a Modern Greek perspective in the question details. I answered the corresponding Ancient Greek question at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has the word συγγεής two γ? I know it comes from σύν + γεν, and that later the ν disappeared, but why putting two γ? And why has the ν disappeared at the […]
Why had Middle English dropped the leading e- in words borrowed from Old French that began with es-[plosive]-?
I’ll start by giving the passage on this change from Elementary Middle English grammar : James Wright, as a change specific to French loans. §231. Initial e– disappeared before s + tenuis as Spaine, spȳen, staat beside estaat, stüdien, scāpen beside escāpen, squirel (O.Fr. escurel). Initial vowels also often disappeared before other consonants, as menden […]
In ancient Greek, how is the root determined in τὸ τεῖχος?
Humphry Smith’s answer is right, but let me spell it out a bit more. We come up with stem suffixes in proto-Greek, to explain the diversity of case endings of classes of nouns—a diversity between dialects of Greek, as well as trying to make intuitive sense of where they came from. The nouns in your […]
Did Caesar say “I could kill you faster than I could threaten to kill you?”
At a first stab (so to speak): Plutarch • Life of Caesar After this speech to Metellus, Caesar walked towards the door of the treasury, and when the keys were not to be found, he sent for smiths and ordered them to break in the door. Metellus once more opposed him, and was commended by […]
Since Cyamites is probably an epithet for Hades, could the scythe/sickle be the meaning of the digamma missing from his name?
As OP clarified elsewhere, the prevalent account for the name Hades is that it originally had a digamma in it, and meant Unseen: Hades – Wikipedia. Ἀϝίδης A-wídēs > Ἀΐδης Ā-ï´dēs > ᾌδης Ā´idēs. The archaic wid– stem for ‘see’ is the same as the stem vid– in Latin, and wit in English. (The terms […]
How different do dialects of the same language feel to you?
I was brought up in Crete. I read Cretan Renaissance literature as an adult, and was taken aback at the notion that the kinds of conceit you might find in Shakespeare (common Italian antecedents) were being expressed in the language my grandmother used to yell at her chickens. Greece is a country run on the […]
Will we ever decode Linear A or Cretan Hieroglyphs?
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 […]