Author: Nick Nicholas

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

With TV, radio, film and other forms of mass media will accents and dialects slowly die out or transform until there is just one national/non-regional dialect?

By: | Post date: 2015-10-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Certainly the trend in many countries is for dialects to die out, particularly countries with a strong centralising tendency in culture and education. Greece and France are very good examples of this. Even in England, what survives is more accents with some variant vocabulary than the full-fledged dialects of two centuries ago. Countries that have […]

Why do some languages have translations for cities while others don’t?

By: | Post date: 2015-10-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Some other factoids from Greek: * Languages with inflectional morphology will tend to inflect town names, especially town names they care about, as Daniel Lindsäth correctly points out. Ancient Greek tended to do that a lot, though not universally, as you can see in the Geography (Ptolemy): most towns end up looking declinable, though some […]

What is it like to be able to fluently speak Klingon?

By: | Post date: 2015-10-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

Surprising. You are aware of the gaps in the vocabulary, and they are annoying; but it’s a buzz when you manage to actually hold a decent conversation anyway. The last conversation I had in Klingon was the most surprising: at an airport, about how come deixis is pronounced with an [aj]. You wouldn’t think Klingon […]

How does Esperanto sound, to you?

By: | Post date: 2015-10-08 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

One objection raised about the vowels of Esperanto by Kalocsay and Waringhien (the authors of the standard Esperanto Grammar Plena Analiza Gramatiko – Vikipedio) was that there was no alternation of vowel length, so it sounded rat-tat-tat — like Spanish and Greek do. They proposed introducing vowel length according to syllable structure, which was meant […]

Artificial Languages: What’s it like to speak Lojban?

By: | Post date: 2015-10-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

Intense, mainly because of having to control the syntax coming out of your mouth, and remembering to to say the “bracketing” words (terminators). It was more intense for me than others at the time, because I was better at remembering to say the terminators. 🙂 This was still human communication, though, and context was still […]

When was the uncial Greek script adapted and abandoned?

By: | Post date: 2015-09-30 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Mediaeval Greek, Writing Systems

Thx for A2A. Being lazy, I refer you to An introduction to Greek and Latin palaeography : Thompson, Edward Maunde, Sir, 1840-1929 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive . From what he says (with nice photos for 1912), the uncial starts in codices 3rd century AD, but is anticipated in papyri in the […]

Do I need permission from any one to publish a story book in Klingon? Will it violates any copy right law? The stories are non sci-fi.

By: | Post date: 2015-09-30 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

You and I may think it is absurd to copyright languages; unfortunately Paramount doesn’t, and has forced someone to pulp their Klingon Martial Arts manual in Klingon. The safe thing to do is to approach the Klingon Language Institute (Page on kli.org): Paramount have designated them as a licensed user of the language, so they […]

What other languages influenced Greek?

By: | Post date: 2015-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek, Modern Greek

In terms of the usual interpretation of the question (what languages did Greek borrow words from), at different times Greek has borrowed words from: Persian (a small number) Latin (a fair few) Slavonic (surprisingly few) Albanian (surprisingly fewer) Aromanian (ditto) Catalan (one word, παρέα < pare(j)a) Romany (very few, although it is the go-to source […]

How different is the Ancient Greek language from the modern Greek language? Can any Greek-speaking people testify if they understand classical Greek of Homer, et al?

By: | Post date: 2015-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Modern Greek

I understand most of what’s going on in the Gospels, though much more so with Mark and John than Luke and Paul. Some Attic texts (and the Byzantine texts emulating them) are a challenge, not least because of their abstruse syntax, but I still have  a hazy notion of what’s going on. The syntax in […]

How different are Cypriot names from their Turkish and Greek counterparts?

By: | Post date: 2015-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Greek Cypriot surnames are often patronymics, formed as the genitives of given names. Surnames are quite region-specific in Greek, so you can tell a Greek Cypriot surname: it’s the one *without* a suffix, like -opoulos, -akis, -idis, -ellis, -atos, etc. Greek Cypriots use a few more Ancient names than Greece Greeks, and a lot more […]

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