As others have said: sometimes, coincidence happens. Sydney was named for Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney, and Sidney (surname) derives from Old English sīdan īege, “at the wide island”, i.e. Water-meadow. Old English sid means “wide, extensive, broad”, and is the ancestor of Modern English side. Wiktionary tells me it comes from Germanic *sīdaz, which […]
I’m saying the same thing as JJ Hantsch, but with different emphasis. Is there a tendency for languages to gain or lose complex clusters over time? Both, but with different causes. Languages lose complex clusters through various processes of phonotactic simplification. Languages gain complex clusters through dropping vowels [EDIT: or adding consonants for ease of […]
https://www.quora.com/profile/Nick-Nicholas-5 What Lyonel said. I’m away from my references 🙁 , but see North American Icelandic. The story is that Icelanders noticed the merger in the 1920s, stigmatised it as “fisherman’s language”, and got rid of it successfully (although the link says that the e/ö merger is still around). In North America, of course, no […]
No reference needed further than the Wikipedia definition: Deixis: words and phrases, such as “me” or “here”, that cannot be fully understood without additional contextual information — in this case, the identity of the speaker (“me”) and the speaker’s location (“here”). Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies […]
https://www.quora.com/What-does-your-Arabic-handwriting-look-like Originally Answered: Can I see a sample of your Greek handwriting? I could say that I’m capable of writing neater than this, but I’d be lying. Twenty years ago: maybe. Two texts. For modern monotonic, my favourite song lyric, stixoi.info: Του κάτω κόσμου τα πουλιά. For ancient polytonic, the beginning to the Discourses of […]
The study of language has an -ology word in Greek (unsurprisingly enough): γλωσσολογία /ɣlosoloɣia/, “language-ology”. Italian uses the more Attic version sometimes as well: glottologia. Beyond those, yeah, linguistics. Answered 2016-06-14 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Does-the-study-of-language-have-an-ology-word-or-is-it-simply-linguistics/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Greek: Someone drunk is, or becomes: 1. στουπί, meaning oakum, or tow: Oakum: “loose fibre obtained by untwisting old rope, used especially in caulking wooden ships.” Tow: the coarse and broken part of flax or hemp prepared for spinning. It’s a traditional society concept, so the modern metaphorical meaning is the main one. Presumably the […]
In Modern Greek, posótita and piótita; in Ancient Greek, posótɛːs and poiótɛːs. So… sure. But look at what’s actually happening here. The two words are derived from the words for “how much” and “what kind” (in Latin, quant-um and qual-e), plus the affix for nominalising adjectives (Latin –itas). It’s literally “how-much-ness” and “what-kind-ness”. If the […]
An attempt at a grand unified theory of filotimo. Eleftherios V. Tserkezis touches on all the key aspects. It is a Greek’s sense of honour, to use the old fashioned wording; of being respected in society, of social capital. It is what one can take pride in as an engaged member of society. But this […]
They did: Imbros and Tenedos. Like the other islands, they were substantially ethnic Greek, but they remained in Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne, presumably because of their strategic importance outside the Dardanelles. Of the other Aegean islands near the shores of Turkey, the islands from Samos up were ceded to Greece by the Ottoman […]