Author: Nick Nicholas

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

What are the unusual punctuation marks in your language?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Writing Systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language Survey question, and I’m looking forward to someone bringing up the Amharic sarcasm mark. Greek punctuation functionally corresponds to English punctuation—mostly. Upper dot <·> corresponds to semicolon. In Ancient Greek typography, the upper dot is usually also used in the function of the English colon. Modern Greek typography uses the colon. Ancient punctuation had […]

Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, History, Modern Greek

To expand on Fey Lepoura’s answer to Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country? Historically, Greece contained a large number of ethnicities, and a large number of distinct cultures to go with those ethnicities: Greek Orthodox Catholic Muslim Turkish Arvanite Albanian (in the Northwest, mostly Muslim, but also Christian) Aromanian Megleno-Romanian Macedonian (Slavonic) Bulgarian Christian Muslim […]

How many types of dictionaries are there?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Dictionary Typology This presentation offers the following typology of dictionaries: Bilingual/Multilingual (translating one language into another) Monolingual Synchronic (contemporary usage) Limited (a particular field, e.g. medical; a particular register, e.g. slang) General: Comprehensive (all of the language, multi-volume) or Standard (single volume, mostly for paedagogical use) Diachronic Historical (the historical paths that words have taken […]

What is your opinion on the unidirectionality hypothesis of grammaticalization?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

I am much more of a functionalist than Daniel Ross and Brian Collins, so I am much more sympathetic to unidirectionality, and the fact that there are counterexamples does not bother me. It did bother Brian Joseph, who’s one of the big names against unidirectionality, and who also marked my thesis. He found it pretty […]

Are there similarities between Turkish and Greek Music?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

There are underlying similarities between Turkish and Greek music at a deeper level, and there are clear similarities between Greek pop and Turkish pop at a more proximate level. At a deeper level, the scales and instruments used by Turks and Greeks are related, through close to a millennium of coexistence. The tunings and modes […]

Which languages lend themselves particularly well for poetry?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-21 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages, Linguistics, Literature, Other Languages

They all do. And let me elaborate on that. For starters, there’s the element of formal craft in poetry, and there’s the allusive use of language in poetry. Both of them are essential. For allusiveness, what you need is a culture expressed through that language. All natural languages that people live their lives in are […]

Is Sanskrit still spoken today?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-21 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

By way of corroboration of Chandra Mohan’s answer to Is Sanskrit still spoken today?— The villages mentioned by others in their replies are just show pieces. They do use some Sanskrit in communication, which was taught to them by some activists, but I was given to understand that their vocabulary may not be more than […]

Why do I have to place an emphasis mark on some vowel in every Greek word on writing, even if the meaning might not even change if you just leave it?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Writing Systems

Well there’s the simple reason, and there’s the historical justification for it. The simple reason is: BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE RULES. 🙂 And if it were up to me, you’re not putting enough accents on Greek words. The blanket rule that all monosyllabic words are unstressed, whether they are function words or content words, does […]

Why did you think the Greek population disappeared so completely from Anatolia after the Ottoman conquest?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: History, Mediaeval Greek

To clarify what this question is likely talking about: We know that there was a continuous Greek presence in Thrace up to Constantinople, the Pontus (Black Sea), and Cappadocia, after the arrival of the Ottomans. We know that there was a substantial Greek population in Western Asia Minor in the 19th century, which is linguistically […]

What does the suffix “ostomy” mean?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

stoma is Greek for mouth. –stomia is stoma plus an abstract noun ending: “-mouth-ation”. In medicine, a Stoma (medicine) is also a surgically made opening. So a colostomy is a surgical intervention creating an opening (a stoma, a “mouth”) in the colon: kōlo-stom-ia > colostomy, “colon-mouth-ation”. The Wikipedia article gives 16 other stoma operations. The […]

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