Author: Nick Nicholas

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

Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-11 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

The true and honest and equitable answer is the Magister’s: Michael Masiello’s answer to Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui? Vote #1 Michael Masiello. Vote early and vote often. The petty and cavilling answer is mine. Others have gone part of the way there, but I’ll finish the task. […]

Why don’t current-day Yugoslavians speak a Latin-based language but Romanians do?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-10 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

They did: Dalmatian language – Wikipedia Istro-Romanian language – Wikipedia Aromanian language – Wikipedia Megleno-Romanian language – Wikipedia What happened is quite simple: Slavic tribes moved into the area quite rapidly, between 500 and 800. Slavonic displaced Romance languages in most areas they moved into, with a few enclaves surviving. The real question is not […]

In Christian historical movies, why aren’t the Romans speaking in Greek instead of Latin?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-10 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Latin, Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

Because lots of Westerners know Latin (or at least know about Latin), relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek, and Latin is the language Westerners associate with the Roman Empire. Having Greek spoken in a movie would really just confuse people, who’d expect the Romans in Palestine to be speaking Latin. That, and the logistics of […]

How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-10 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

I’m not contradicting Warren M Tang (see Warren M Tang’s answer to How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?), but let me try a different formulation. A functionalist explains language structures by appealing to the communicative function of those structures. (They do linguistics by metaphors.) A cognitivist explains language structures by appealing to general […]

Do you think there is a mother language for all the other languages?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-10 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are there so many languages in the world? Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities. Myself, I suspect there was monogenesis, but that’s a hunch; […]

When was the first time that Chinese was translated into any Indo-European language, e.g. Latin, Greek, etc.?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-09 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Literature, Other Languages

There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled. Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the […]

What do Greeks think of the song of Çelo Mezanit?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-09 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kachak Greeks don’t know the song. Most Greeks barely know about Chameria. And nationalist Greeks who know how the song has become a rallying point for Çam identity may well react with hostility. God knows I read a couple of shitfights on YouTube. But given the translation and someone who’s not nationalist (e.g. Dimitris Almyrantis: […]

Have you ever created your own language?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-09 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

Yup, around 10. Set in Liliput, because I’d just read Gulliver’s Travels, and accompanied by some map drawing. Inspired by the Latin textbooks I was poring over, and it had a hell of a lot of declension tables. And diacritics. El Glheþ Talossan-level diacritics. Coz they’re k00l. It wasn’t full, because I don’t think I […]

What are the purposes of doing a research study on how dialects impact gender?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

As Joe Devney said, depends on the study, but I have a fair guess. That would be gender, presumably, as in grammatical gender, in those languages that have them. The wording would then presumably be something more like how does assignment of entities to particular genders vary from one dialect to another within the same […]

Is language production very important in order to be good at reading comprehension in classical or biblical languages?

By: | Post date: 2017-04-08 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

It certainly is not regarded by most language teachers as important. Latin and Greek prose composition, which required students to produce original text (even if as a pastiche of Thucydides or Caesar) was huge a century ago, and I get the impression is extinct now. There are some ancient Greek text books that trying to […]

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