Good answers from my fellow respondents. So: For a long time, there was no Greece, so there was noone to do the holding on. For a long time after that, Greece didn’t have most of the islands: it had to get hold of them: The Cyclades and Euboea, and the Saronic Gulf islands, were part […]
Well… Talent as is in the ancient coin is τάλαντον, as Haggen Kennedy said. Talent as in being talented, not so much. The googles tell me that the modern sense is Mediaeval Latin, with an allusion to a parable in the Bible: Online Etymology Dictionary . As far as I know, that metaphorical extension did […]
Not a mathematician, but: Mathematics as practiced in the West is a European invention, and it calls for its symbols on European patrimony. That means: Roman (italics, to differentiate from text) Including Fraktur if you want to spice things up And avoiding diacritics, not because they aren’t old (disagree with Martin Ekman’s answer to What […]
What Steve Theodore’s answer to Was Latin spoken in the Byzantine empire, even though the official language was Greek? And did Byzantines study Latin texts? said, and what Steve Theodore’s answer to Were the medieval Byzantines familiar with the famous figures of Roman antiquity, like Cato the Elder, Scipio Africanus, or Cincinnatus? said. In particular, […]
Constituency. If people are going to run words together, they don’t so randomly. They run words together when the words form a syntactic grouping. And the stop running words together when they run into a syntactic break. A clause like “in so far as I am able” is analysed syntactically as: [in [so far]] [as […]
What Tomasz Dec’s answer to Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages? said. Icelandic is likely the most successful, as the poster-child of conservative intervention in language change in general. Lots of European languages have had bouts of this. German fought the good fight for a fair while, and their […]
Hm. Noone teaches Byzantine Greek as something distinct from Ancient Greek. That’s because for most purposes, it isn’t distinct. I’m going to go through a potted history of Byzantine Greek for others who might stumble on this question. There are three registers of Mediaeval Greek to consider; I’ll use Mediaeval to include Greek under Latin […]
*Probably* not. Language change is influenced by several things, in both a conservative and a innovative direction. Input from older versions of the languages demonstrably has an effect in holding back language change — or at least, in promoting use of the older version’s features in parallel. Outright reversing language change doesn’t happen that often, […]
Logan R. Kearsley has written a comprehensive answer on one angle. I will throw a hint on another angle: if you have enough Noun Incorporation (linguistics) and polysynthesis at a language, you’re going to end up with languages where what European languages treat as nouns or adjectives usually end up as affixes—so what look like […]
Did the Ancient Greeks have a different *language* for sacred purposes? No, Ancient Greek was their language. But the Ancient Greeks did use different dialects for different genres of literature, to an extent that has not been paralleled since. Epic dialect (a mix based on archaic Ionic) for epic poetry, and allusions to it, is […]