This is NSFW. Kinda. The Greek word for a porn film is tsonta. The word comes from the Venetian word zonta, which is cognate with Italian giunta and English joint. The original meaning of tsonta was the same as Louisianan lagniappe: it’s an extra helping, an extra portion of the merchandise you’re buying, that the […]
Felidae is the Family (biology) that cats and great cats belong to. All animal families are formed with the suffix –idae. In this case, –idae is suffixed to the Latin word felis, meaning cat. The –idae suffix is a Latin plural counterpart to Greek –idai (singular –idēs), meaning offspring. In the plural, the –idai suffix […]
Currently, no. Historically, Greek has been used routinely to write other languages, including the Bactrian language (hence Sho (letter) ), Karamanli Turkish, and Albanian. Answered 2016-01-13 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-any-language-that-uses-the-Greek-Alphabet-other-than-Greek/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
There’s lots of these—Modern Greek from Ancient Greek, Russian from Old Church Slavonic—but I’m not aware of a generic term. In Greek. for example, these are referred to as learnèd loans (λόγιο δάνειο)—but a learned loan in English is a loan from Latin, not Old English. (In fact we do have a term for learned […]
The Sir Thomas More answer is correct. However, the 14th century Byzantine theologian Neophytus Prodromenus independently coined the term in his treatise Against the Latins [Catholics]. In his text, it was a variant of ἀτοπία “un-placed-ness”, which was the Greek word for absurdity, fallacy. Answered 2016-01-13 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/How-was-the-term-utopia-coined-and-by-whom/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
the definition of polity 1530-40; < Latin polītīa < Greek polīteía citizenship, government, form of government, commonwealth, equivalent to polī́te-, variant stem of polī́tēs citizen Online Etymology Dictionary 1530s, from Middle French politie (early 15c.) or directly from Late Latin polita “organized government” (see policy (n.1)). Policy and Police ultimately derive from the same Greek […]
Product (mathematics) . The Greek for it is the participle γενόμενον, “what has become, what has come into existence”, which I would assume was calqued into Latin as “what is produced”. The LSJ dictionary lists the participle “what has become” for product as being used in Euclid ; but the verb “becomes” for “adds up […]
Um. Per Minoa, there are several sites that have been known as Minoa, mostly in the Aegean. But in the sense Minoa is used on Quora, as a shorthand for “site of the Minoan civilisation”, that would be Crete. In fact, since the Classical survival of non-Hellenic Eteocretan language was in easternmost Crete, where I […]
Vowel change was a strategy for forming plurals in Old English. The process is shared among Germanic languages, and is Germanic umlaut. Ultimately it comes from –iz being a plural suffix in Proto-Germanic: the plural of *mūs was *mūsiz, and the plural of *fōts was *fōtiz. In time, *mūsiz went to mȳs in Old English […]
Will they improve my thinking, logic, though process or my communication skills or understanding? All language learning does, and so do artificial languages. I’d argue that you get to some of the interesting aspects of language learning—such as different approaches to semantics—quicker than you would learning natural languages. OTOH, there are some aspects of natural […]