Probably, but not necessarily. As the astute Joachim Pense put it (answering this question, rather than the OP’s question): Joachim Pense’s answer to Linguists believe Proto indo European is the root of all those European languages. Does this mean that at one time everyone spoke the same language? No. Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction that has […]
The question about this is always whether it’s a survival or a revival. The Greeks of Cargèse for example convinced themselves that their main clan (the Stephanopoli) were descendants of the Comneni, and got the paperwork from the King of France to prove it. As a result, almost everyone from the village is now surnamed […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
Thank you OED: four < *fowr < Middle English fower < feower < Old English feower forty since 15th century; fourty Middle English up to 17th century < Middle English fourti (and, in parentheses, forti) < feouwerti < Old English feowertig .So the forti spelling was apparently occasional in Middle English, but not regular. This […]