You can use a diacritic only when it’s necessary to prevent confusion, or you can use a diacritic consistently, whenever the pronunciation goes one way rather than the other. In the former case, you reduce the number of diacritics in the language. In the latter case, you reduce the amount of pronunciation ambiguity. English has […]
It’s a fascinating question, and I don’t know that there is an existing word. Partly, that’s sexism, and partly, that’s the bias of historical linguistics in explaining derivation: Martina is the “feminine variant” or “feminisation” of Martin, and it doesn’t occur to people to describe the relationship of Martin back to Martina. In the rare […]
Thx4A2A. I’ve already answered a related question from a linguist’s perspective: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What makes Modern Greek an interesting language to learn, from a purely linguistic point of view?. But this question really should be about a lay description. (But I can’t resist telling Ilir Mezini: it’s Albanian, missing half the letters, and […]
Language is one of the primary vehicles of culture, and expressions of cultural distinctiveness. But it is not the only one. When a language dies, the language community has been linguistically assimilated into another community (assuming the community hasn’t been genocided). That is typically associated with cultural assimilation. But not always. As a counterexample to […]
If by Turkicised, OP, you simply mean “made to adhere to Turkish phonotactics, and often Vowel Harmony”, the answer is indeed most if not all. To add to Pierrick Jaouen’s examples, stin Poli (to the City) > İstanbul, is Nikea (to Nicaea) > İznik, Oinoë (mediaeval Greek /ynoi/) > Ünye, Ikonion > Konya, Kaisareia > […]
Since Andrew has blocked me, I have to add a correction here to Dimitris Sotiropoulos on https://www.quora.com/Which-was-… Iotabe is identified tentatively with Tiran Island, 27°57′N 34°33′E Syene is Aswan, 24°05′20″N 32°53′59″E Berenice Troglodytica is 23°54′38″N 35°28′34″E So Iotabe is not the southernmost point, unless Dimitris has evidence for an alternate identification of Iotabe as being […]
Given the addendum from OP: https://www.quora.com/Were-the-c… (which I’ve added to question details): The bulk of Ancient Greek drama that has survived has survived as part of the postclassical school curriculum, and has been transmitted through manuscript. Even so, we know that bits of the text that the authors must have written (for the text to […]
Well, there’s the classic ENGLISH SENTENCES WITHOUT OVERT GRAMMATICAL SUBJECTS by Quang Phuc Dong of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (pseudonym of James D. McCawley, 1967), and several others in that vein. But that’s linguists writing about swearing, not swearing per se. (There’s was quite a trend of little “who, me?” bombs in linguistic […]
έχω πει, the perfect tense, is only used in perfective contexts (completed actions); so you can’t use it for “I have been saying”. You will use the imperfect, έλεγα, for that. So Greek makes no distinction between “I was saying” and “I have been saying”. The English “I have been saying” looks like it’s both […]
Because when Latin started transliterating Greek, φ was still pronounced as /pʰ/: a p followed by an h. The shift of /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/ occurred later (the first evidence for it, Koine Greek phonology notes, is from Pompeii.) Answered 2016-07-22 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Why-is-the-Greek-letter-phi-translated-into-English-as-ph-and-not-“f”/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]