To add to the other answers, and to answer a slightly different question 🙂 : between the 1300s and the 1800s, the region *around* Athens was substantially Albanian-speaking (Arvanitika). That’s why the map Brian Collins included in his answer has a patch of white. (A friend of mine once called that patch of white the […]
The harder bits. 🙂 In particular: * The fine differentiations in aspect and tense, including Lexical aspect (achievement, event, accomplishment, state). Hard to speak, not sure how successfully they’ve been taken up, but fascinating.* The abstraction particles: Events, Qualities, Quantities, And Other Vague Words: On Lojban Abstraction. Even more fascinating, even harder to speak.* Raising […]
Gave me a podium to be a language pioneer for a little while. I gather I am still revered in some circles as the first fluent speaker. 🙂 Gave me a severe sequence of intellectual challenges at a time when I needed it; helped me sharpen several of my skills, including writing in English. 🙂 […]
Nick Enfield [Page on sydney.edu.au] (who I did linguistics with, and boy does he look different twenty years on) just got an Ig Noble [Improbable Research] for claiming the universality of Huh? (The Syllable Everyone Recognizes, Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?) Of course the realisation of Huh? does differ by language; in the Mediterranean, for […]
There used to be a lot more Turkish words in Greek, but purism and changes in institutions have gotten rid of a lot of them. There are still a fair few in daily use. Nikos Sarantakos’ blog [Page on wordpress.com] has a list of 218 Turkish words that remain in daily use. I am taking […]
Ergative languages are a very hard thing to wrap your head around, if you don’t speak one. A *very* crude way to explain it is: verbs look like they’re passive by default: I am slept.I am killed by the enemy. If you’re just sitting there, including having something done to you, you’re the subject. (Absolutive […]
Language revivals almost never restore the language to what it was. Because the initiatives say they are “revivals” and not “reinventions”, they don’t particularly highlight the fact: but yes, there are much more Yiddish grammar and German calques and Ashkenazi phonology in Modern Hebrew than linguistically there should be—to the extent that Ghil’ad Zuckermann considers […]
Been thinking about this question for a little while. I don’t have a firm answer, but I do have some idle chatter. tl;dr (a) English does not have consonant diacritics because England isn’t in Eastern Europe.English does not have vowel diacritics because (b) initially neither did French, and (b) by the time diacritics could have […]
Thx for A2A. The Wikipedia treatment of the topic, Names of the Greeks, is pretty damn good. Basic story: The Classical Greek term for Greeks, Hellenes, had not generalised until early Classical times. Before then, Greek tribes used local terms for themselves, and any peoples that came in touch with them would pick up those […]
I’m not as sanguine as other respondents on this. If history and human and society go on as they have done, then yes, there are centripetal and centrifugal pressures on language: communities want to be understandable within each other, but communities also want to sound distinct from each other. The community you identify with in […]