Author: Nick Nicholas

Website:
http://www.opoudjis.net
About this author:
Data analyst, Greek linguist

What is the difference between Orthodox Christianity and other forms of Christianity?

By: | Post date: 2016-02-04 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Mediaeval Greek

Oriental Orthodoxy and Church of the East have Christological differences from other Christian churches. The Church of the East (Assyrian) rejects the Council of Ephesus  (Christ–God is the same being as Christ–Man), and Oriental Orthodoxy rejects the Council of Chalcedon (Christ–God is a distinct nature from Christ–Man). This diagram in Non-Chalcedonianism  helps: Non-Chalcedonianism . The […]

Are Greeks an ethnoreligious group?

By: | Post date: 2016-02-04 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: History, Modern Greek

Weeell… in the Ottoman Empire (and in the Byzantine Empire before it), identity was primarily credal, organised as Millets (Ottoman Empire). As far as everyone in the Ottoman Empire was concerned, there were: Muslims Franks (Catholic) Romans (Orthodox) Armenians Jews See Albanians or Bulgarians in that list? Me neither. In fact, Bulgarians were only able […]

Do I need a good understanding of mathematics in order to excel at linguistics?

By: | Post date: 2016-02-03 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

IMHO: for most disciplines no. Steve Rapaport has spoken on Applied Linguistics; but Applied Linguistics is a very different discipline to Theoretical/General. Phonetics is an experimental science, so you’ll need statistics there. Reconstructing in historical linguistics requires a degree of rigour and thinking in terms of rules which is a bit like maths, but only […]

What do you look like when you speak Ancient Greek (Koine) in Greece today?

By: | Post date: 2016-02-02 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

How soon my fellow respondents forget Katharevousa. Just as well they do, too. Katharevousa (Puristic Greek), the project of purifying Greek of the last 2000 years of linguistic evolution, was a motley, incoherent, and rarely lovely thing. Some of its grammar was Attic, a lot more of it was Koine, and by accident it ended […]

Do many modern Greeks feel a sense of failure or perhaps inferiority when compared with their ancient Greek ancestors?

By: | Post date: 2016-02-02 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

The feeling has been there for a very long time. Theodore Metochites  in the 14th century lamented that the Ancients had said everything that needed to be said, so there was nothing left for his contemporaries to do. The Greek peasantry would make up stories about the pagan giants who built the inexplicable structures all […]

Why is ‘pronounciation’ spelled as ‘pronunciation’ in English?

By: | Post date: 2016-01-29 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Brian Collins’ answer is impeccably correct for why pronunciation was not spelled pronounciation after the combination of the Great English Vowel Shift and Trisyllabic laxing (a long vowel three syllables back is shortened, as in insane ~ insanity). But all the answers aren’t really answering why pronunciation is still being pronounced pronunciation. Let’s look at […]

Why isn’t Cyprus part of Greece?

By: | Post date: 2016-01-28 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: History, Modern Greek

Greece got most of the Aegean islands from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, after the Balkan Wars. There were three exceptions: Greece did not get Imbros and Tenedos (Gökçeada and Bozcaada), because of their strategic importance right outside the Dardanelles. When the invasion at Gallipoli happened, the British (and ANZACs) were based at the next […]

What other logical languages are there other than Lojban?

By: | Post date: 2016-01-28 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

Lojban is begotten from Loglan; Lojban is a schism of Loglan, and seems to have taken most of the Loglanists with it. Loglan also begat Guaspi, although I don’t think that it got much of a following (and its inventor  is also a Lojbanist). That’s the Loglan family of logical artificial languages that I know […]

Why do we need to capitalize “I” and the days of the weeks in English?

By: | Post date: 2016-01-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Writing Systems

No disagreement with the answers here. I’ll philosophise a bit more generally: Each language authority or community ends up with a particular set of conventions about punctuation and capitalisation—or borrows them from a more prestigious language. You only become aware of alternate ways of doing things if you’re exposed to other communities. And it only […]

Is it true that some non-American children who watch American TV shows have adopted that accent?

By: | Post date: 2016-01-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

My parents were first generation immigrants to Australia. My mother had no English when she came here. My father had high school English, but no Australian accent. My parents worked in their fish and chip shop attached to the house, so much of the daytime I was reared by Sesame Street; I interacted with my […]

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