Author: Nick Nicholas

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

Why do many languages have both grammatical genders and declensions?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Your insight is correct, Riccardo: declensions and genders are both classes of nominals. The difference in Indo-European is that gender, not declension, is what governs the agreement of non-nouns with nouns, while declension is how the morphology of nouns themselves works. So in Ancient Greek, gender only affects the ending of the noun in patches—a […]

What is the etymology of the ancient Greek word “Otis”?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

Frisk’s etymological dictionary concurs with Frank Dauenhauer’s answer, that the bustard was called ōtis ‘one with ears’ (“from its cheek tufts or head? See Thompson, Birds”); thus also ōtos ‘scops owl’, from its ear tufts. If you go to A glossary of Greek birds : Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 1860-1948 Sir, p. 200, you’ll find he […]

How did old linguists in a pre medical screening world manage to figure out phonologies so perfectly?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

Articulatory phonetics was indeed done before Palatography. And not just by the Ottomans: the Korean script Hangul originated in articulatory phonetics, and for that matter both the Sanskrit grammarians and the later Graeco-Roman grammarians had pretty much had it figured out. And they could just as my students in first year were able to learn […]

Tear it down, Elias!

By: | Post date: 2017-07-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

Contemplating the follies of Quora, as I am wont to do, is an often dispiriting exercise. An Existentialist Parable, as I have called it. An exercise that can made one go all nihilistic. I’m already warning friends to intervene if they find me muttering “Tear it down, Elias!” To help them do so, I need […]

Why is computer called υπολογιστής instead of κομπιούτερ in modern Greek?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Everyone else has said the ‘what’. As to the ‘why’: Formal Greek is resistant to Latin-based loans, and routinely translates them into Greek morphemes whenever it can. The resistance was always lesser in informal Greek, and in the last decade or so, the floodgates have opened up for technical terminology in English: Hellenic coinages often […]

What is the difference between Rum, Urum and Yunan, and Yunanistan?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-22 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

Rum < Roman is the traditional Ottoman designation for Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, inherited from the self-description of the Byzantine Empire, and it continues to be the Turkish designation for ethnic Greeks, living in Turkey and Cyprus. Urum is a variant of Rum, and is used as the self-designation of several Turkic speakers […]

How would modern Greek language sound to an Ancient Greek?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

— … By the twin gods, Autolycus! —What then, O Charaxus? —Hear you what a curious speech it is, that this strangely dressed individual utters? —It is indeed passing curious. —Some words sound like words of our common Hellenic tongue. —Indeed so, O Charaxus. —Yet there is a harsh deficit of diphthongs in his speech. […]

Why is aponeurosis named as such? I know the “apo” part. What’s the word root: “neurosis”?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-21 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

To expand on Raul Hernandez’s answer: aponeurōsis = apo ‘away, from, of’ + neurōsis neurōsis = neuroō ‘to equip with sinews, to put strings on (a bow, a lyre)’ + –sis ‘nominalisation suffix, -ing’ neuroō = neuron ‘nerve, sinew’ + –oō ‘verb suffix, often factive: to make something be or have X’. So aponeurosis literally […]

What’s the one-word translation of the word ‘cuckold’ in Greek, when the husband knows (and does not care) about his wife’s infidelity?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-21 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Huh. As it turns out, reading Cuckold – Wikipedia, there was an Elizabethan term for someone who was aware of being cuckolded, but cuckold wasn’t it: One often-overlooked subtlety of the word is that it implies that the husband is deceived, that he is unaware of his wife’s unfaithfulness and may not know until the […]

How is it possible that we perceive irony?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-21 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony Grice. Grice Grice Grice Grice Grice. Paul Grice did seminal work in the philosophy of language, on how we recover meaning from an interlocutor’s words. It is clear that we routinely understand more—or less—than what our interlocutor says. To make sense of this, Grice developed a notion of conversational implicature. This is what we […]

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