I don’t know the full answer, and I’m not seeing enough of an answer in Wikipedia. Let me put together what I know. There have been Roma in Greece for the better part of a millennium; we know linguistically that they went through Anatolia and Greece on the way to Europe, there is Greek in […]
Hm. You didn’t ask why the letter looks like that, which I’ll answer anyway: Italicised й: й Wikipedia Ŭ suggests it was formed by analogy with proposed Byelorussian ў. Like someone else said on Wikipedia: [citation needed] Now, why <ŭ> and not just <u>? Zeibura, you dawg, you know that I love this kind of […]
Yup. You could argue (as both the English and Esperanto Wikipedias do) that the main inspiration for Newspeak was Basic English, which Orwell had been a fan of before rejecting. The minimal vocabulary premiss of Basic English (revisited in xkcd: Up Goer Five) is something Orwell derides in Newspeak. But minimal vocabulary was also a […]
Go to Names of the Greeks: much good information there. On the eve of the Greek War of Independence, the prevalent term for Greeks was Roman (Romioi). That was what the simple folk used, and they used it to refer to Greek Orthodox Christians (the Rum Millet), as the folk of the East Roman (Byzantine) […]
People do mispronounce remuneration as renumeration all the time, contra some people’s denial of it here. God knows I’ve done it, and I should know better. Why do people do it? Because: The stems muner– and numer– are confusable through the oldest confusion in the historical linguistics book: Metathesis (linguistics). People are familiar with the […]
Well, I’ve gone to LSJ. The definitions I find there are: ὑπερφρονέω Group I to be over-proud, have high thoughts (Aeschylus) to be proud in or of something (Herodotus) overlook, look down upon, despise (Aeschylus) (passive) to be despised (Thucydides) think slightly of (Eurypides) Group II surpass in knowledge (Aeschines); excel in wisdom (Hippocrates) ὑπερήφανος […]
Here is an utterly left-field video I saw today, in the context of my day job (because my CTO is awesome). It’s knowledge management consultancy stuff, but I think it goes some of the way to explaining why I love linguistics: Cynefin Framework: Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or […]
Thanks to Loren Peter Lugosch for posting the Wikipedia link. The most serious recent attempt to purify English was William Barnes. He called for the purification of English by removal of Greek, Latin and foreign influences so that it might be better understood by those without a classical education. For example, the word “photograph” (from […]
This could go one of two ways, neither pretty. You could phonetically transcribe English into Greek, Ancient or Modern, using the phonetics of the Greek alphabet unchanged. As Konstantinos Konstantinides says, that would sound horrible, because it really would be English with Greek vowels and consonants. In fact, when Greeklish ( Greek in ASCII) was […]
Let’s collate these responses against Tripoli (disambiguation) from Wikipedia: Tripoli, Libya Tripoli, Lebanon, the second largest city in Lebanon Tripoli, Greece, the capital of Arcadia, Greece Tripolis (Larisaia), an ancient city Tripolis ad Maeandrum, an ancient city on the borders of Lydia, Caria and Phrygia Tripolis (Pontus), an ancient city Tripoli, Iowa, a city in […]