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Day: July 24, 2017
What are some examples of obfuscation of language to the point of amusement or downright hilarity?
Pidgins have limited vocabularies, because they are by their nature sparse languages, and pidgins sound like colonial language babytalk, because paternalism. And some of the more amusing Pidgin coinages, we can be reasonably sure, are the colonials poking fun at the natives yet again, rather than genuinely used circumlocutions. Such as, for example, the notorious […]
What Greek dialects sound Italian?
Lara Novakov and Konstantinos Konstantinides are both right. The dialects of the Ionian islands have had the longest exposure to Italian (from 1200 through to 1800), and has substantial Italian vocabulary. This performance of Petegola from Corfu (Mardi Gras skits) may exaggerate the intonation as vaudeville, but exaggerated vaudeville is probably the closest you’re going […]
Is there a phonological explanation of why the letter “s” dropped in many French words (resulting in adding the circumflex accent)?
Between them, Christopher Ray Miller’s answer and Brian Collins’ answer have most of it covered. There’s one more way to look at it though. French dropped /s/ at the start of consonant clusters, at the start and in the middle of words. So /sp/ > /p/, /sn/ > /n/, /st/ > /t/ etc: hospital > […]
Is it correct that only Orthodoxy kept the Greek language alive? Were non-Christian Greeks not speaking Greek up to the 1900s?
It’s only correct that Orthodoxy kept the Greek alphabet alive; scripts in the Ottoman Empire were associated with creed. Thus, according to the creed of the Greek speaker, Greek was written in Greek script (Orthodox), Latin script (Catholic: the Franco-Levantines, including many works of the Cretan Renaissance, and in the Aegean sponsored by Jesuit schools), […]
How is being drunk perceived in your culture?
I don’t know that you’ll find many cultures that think getting blotto is a wonderful thing, but Greek traditional culture is one of many that tut-tuts public drunkenness. The maxim my father used to warn me with was, να το πίνεις [το κρασί], να μη σε πίνει: “You should drink it [wine], you shouldn’t let […]
How come the Greek peninsula remained Orthodox Christian and Greek, but Anatolia and Thrace/Constantinople got ‘Islamified’ and ‘Turkified?’
Pre-1453 and Post-1453 policy. Before 1453, Christians were given the status of Christians anywhere in Islamdom as dhimmis, and were subject to missionary activity, as described in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?. Even so, intense conversion of Christians to Islam in Anatolia only happened in […]
Could you do your local rendition of “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”?
https://literarydevices.net/my-kingdom-for-a-horse/ So how *would* I render this in Klingon? A battle in Star Trek space opera involves spaceships. Mobility in Star Trek involves spaceships, shuttles, and transporter beams. A quick exit in Star Trek routinely involves the latter. Therefore, obviously, jolpat! jolpat! jolpat vIDIlmeH, wo’ vInobrup! A transporter system! A transporter system! In order to […]