Hm, question with assumptions much? Note that: The Roman Empire was not a Gene Rodenberry Humanist utopia. It was fertile ground for all manner of (as the Roman sceptics would have put it) strange cults from the East, and it certainly had not turned away from religion in any meaningful sense. Lucian derided many of […]
Vertices. Why? Because the word is straight of out Latin, and Latin has a lot of declensions that look weird from the perspective of English. In particular, the plural vertices suggests that the singular should be vertix, just like the singular of matrices is matrix. There are a lot of –ices plurals corresponding to –ex […]
where the endings “-tion” and “-tio” both were in use. Alack, not so. The Latin ending is nominative –tio, genitive –tionis, dative –tioni, accusative –tionem, ablative –tione. That’s a pain, sure, but the common pattern is that the underlying ending seems to be –tion– (and that’s what you’d reconstruct the proto-Latin nominative as). The nominative […]
Greece was an Eastern country in 1832, and has been telling itself ever since that it’s a Western country. (That’s what the Westerners were telling her too. At least, to her face.) By the 1990s, Greece was a Western country. But the Eastern roots are still there. When the switchover between East and West happened […]
Yup. Close to the dialect of Genoa, which Monaco sits next to: Monégasque dialect. There’s been some promotion of Monegasque recently, but Monaco isn’t in the right part of the world for promoting small languages. The Duchy of Savoy (in the same general area, and homeland of Franco-Provençal/Arpitan) made French its official language three years […]
Hm. In this subculture, sure. Adage at least, if not proverb. The fragmentation of culture in the Anglosphere, and the lack of common cultural reference points as a result, is a strange thing. It feels unprecedented. You can’t fall back on common literary references any more. The Anglosphere thinks traditional wisdom is old hat and […]
In the last few decades, written Greek uses Roman script for foreign names by default, unless the name is extremely newsworthy. So you’ll see Το συγκινητικό ντοκιμαντέρ για τη ζωή της Amy Winehouse (The moving documentary on Amy Winehouse’s life) Rehab της Amy Winehouse, σε διασκευή των Vocal Adrenaline. (Rehab by Amy Winehouse, arranged by […]
Good insight, Sabeshan. Probably. And they probably wouldn’t have cared. 300 BC was a good time to be doing historical linguistics. The Indo-European languages were a lot closer to each other back then than they are now. In fact, the only reason Indo-European was discovered and reconstructed when it was, was that we had 2000 […]
I am going to regret wading into this. I am quite OK to say Czechia; then again, I have been exposed to languages that are quite OK to say Czechia (Tschechei, Tchéquie, Τσεχία, Ĉeĥio). So why the anomaly in English? It could be an endogenous reason—because Czechia doesn’t work for English speakers; or it could […]
Well. Grammaticalisation theory posits that there is a regular process in language of content words becoming function words and then bound morphemes. Opponents of grammaticalisation theory (e.g. Lyle Campbell, Brian Joseph) posit that grammaticalisation theory is not particularly meaningful if there are counterexamples (degrammaticalisation), whereby function words or bound morphemes become content words. Their ultimate […]