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Month: July 2017
Why do English-speaking people not prefer to say natrium, silisium, kalium, and use other Latin names of elements instead?
EDIT: QUESTION HAS BEEN MANGLED BY QCR: It is about Natrium, Kalium, Silicium vs Sodium, Potassium, Silicon. Faulty premiss. Sodium – Wikipedia, Potassium – Wikipedia. Sodium and Potassium are not more or less Latin than Natrium and Kalium. (If anything, that K in Kalium is not particularly Latinate.) They are just alternate names proposed for […]
Why are the 1st, 2nd and 3rd declensions called this way?
The Ancient Greek (Roman-era) grammarians, Dionysius Thrax and Aelius Herodianus, were giants that we are in debt of for a lot of our understanding of grammar, and traditional grammar comes from them. But they did not quite get declensions. They certainly did not get the number of declensions in Greek down to something manageable. We […]
How is Keneh Bosem translated in different versions of the Greek old testament?
So the passage in question is Exodus 30:23. The place to look up the other Ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) is the Hexapla, a collation by the Christian theologian Origen. A modern edition has been coming for over a decade, so the edition to consult is still Origen Hexapla : […]
How do I fathom the 3rd declension?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_grammar_(tables)#Third_declension And I weigh in too, though my answer is not really different to Desmond’s. The way to fathom the 3rd declension is via proto-Greek. That’s what the grammars do, whether it’s the most useful thing to do or not. Focus on the recurring endings: -(ς) -ος -ι -α -Ø, -ες -ων -σι -ας -ες […]
Does the use of line breaks in text incentivize (critical) thinking?
I think you could argue the reverse, if anything, though I still think that linebreaks are preferable anyway. Let me take an historical approach to this. We use space and punctuation and typography to chop up written discourse into digestible units. Once we have these units, we use our thinking to build up a model […]
Can we exclude that in the not so distant past Tsakonian was familiar to those from North of Sparta to South East of the Arcadian capital Tripoli?
We can’t exclude it. Tsakonian is an absurdly archaic variant of Greek, and that speaks to long-term isolation from the rest of the Greek speaking world. It would have to be longer-term isolation than Old Athenian, the cover-term for the enclaves of Greek (Athens, Aegina, Megara, Kyme) blocked off from the rest of the Greek-speaking […]
What would a native Greek speaker differ in if they spoke French, dialect, tone, or accent? Would there be a difference?
… You know, I’ll take the challenge. I have a PhD in linguistics and I know the IPA backwards, but my accent in foreign languages is horridly Greek. From Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does Genesis 1:1-3 sound like in your language? : Vocaroo | Voice message Don’t assume that polyglots always have a great […]
Why does the unmarked “or” usually imply the exclusive meaning in natural languages?
Tamara Vardo’s answer is most of the answer. I think there’s a psychological component as well, though this is getting into speculation. It’s convenient for implicature to have xor on a scale before and, and to require the less natural notion of inclusive or to be expressed as a combination of the two, rather than […]
Why do we not use morpheme analyzers for English language?
Do you mean, why is something as ludicrously unlinguistic as Snowball the state of the art of stemming in English? And why do we stem words, instead of doing detailed analysis of affixes, when we parse words in Natural Language Processing of English? Because English lets us get away with it. There’s not a lot […]
What is the difference between η and ᾱ in classical Greek (first declension FEM nouns)?
Dialectal. To clarify, the question is about the nominative singular ending of first declension feminine nouns. Some of those nouns end in a short -ă, and they’re accented accordingly on the antepenult: thálassa “sea”. The remainder end in either a long -ā or a long -ē. The difference in Classical Greek is a matter of […]