What made Roman script suited for adoption? The fact it was adopted a lot. Latin on its own is not particularly suited for a lot of phonemes, but it was the only game in town in Western and Central Europe, and that meant there was a long, long tradition of workarounds—both digraphs and diacritics. So […]
Not aware of one in Greek folklore. Lots of Arapis in Greek fairy tales, filling the same niche as ogres and giants—sometimes benevolent, sometimes malicious, but always exotic. But not aware of White Arapis. Answered 2016-05-02 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-a-White-Black-prototypical-character-in-the-Balkan-Turkish-Middle-Eastern-or-Arabic-folklore-or-fairy-tales/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
There was use of Greek script to write Turkish: Karamanli Turkish. Illustrated in https://www.quora.com/How-has-it… But without some concerted linguistic work, Greek script was not much better suited to Turkish than Arabic script was. No differentiation between <ı> and <u> for example: both ου. No systematic differentiation of <c> and <ç>, just as Greek (at the […]
I referred to my wrong answer in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it like to be able to fluently speak Klingon?. The oddity is also commented on in Pedro Alvarez’s answer to What English word is pronounced the most differently from the way it is spelled? Here’s the deal, from the appendix to Vox […]
Uncontroversially: from the Greek εις την Πόλιν [is tim polin], “to the City”—The City being the informal name of Constantinople in Greek, to this day. There is at least one similar Turkish placename: İstanköy is the Turkish for Kos (εις την Κω /is tin ko/). There are some uncertainties about why it ended up as […]
νόστιμος, /nostimos/. The etymology (yes, that’s what I do) is odd. The primary meaning of nostos, the word that nostimos is derived from, is “return”: it’s the word for Odysseus’ return to Ithaca. Wheat gives a rich return on investment, so nostos also means the yield of ground grain. Hence the adjective means “abundant”, referring […]
What my betters have said, with both the pros and cons from Don Grushkin’s answer. Be aware of the following constraints: Don’t get too caught up in what language you work on. A friend of mine came to Australia to write a grammar of an Aboriginal language, any Aboriginal language. There’s 20 healthy languages left, […]
Without getting into the issue of how much of Genesis is historical and how much is wishful thinking: The Babylonian captivity, which can be independently verified from archaeology, was 580 to 530 BC. That’s when the Hebrew Scriptures as we know them were consolidated. Omri is the first independently verified King of Israel, and he […]
The founder of Chobani is Turkish, and çoban is Turkish for “shepherd”. The final <i> is either decorative, or a link to Greek—which has borrowed the Turkish word as nominative tsopanis, oblique tsopani. Given çoban and tsopani, the intended pronunciation is presumably [tʃoˈbani], “choh-BAH-nee”. Answered 2016-04-29 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-correct-pronunciation-of-Chobani/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Apart from the more reasonable answers from other respondents: English speakers can tell that the land in Zealand means land. (And they’re right.) They see that it’s Zealand not Zealland, so they’re not prompted to go from Zeal-(l)and to the backformation Zeal. Even if they were, zeal already means something in English. So instead, Zealand […]