Russian: Addressing taxi/bus driver by “шеф”/”командир” – where does it come from? A taxi, and particularly a bus driver, is the “chief” or “commander” of a small mobile unit with a lot of “horsepower.” Such a driver is also responsible for the safety of several passengers. At least in New York City, this person is […]
Of course any Illuminati that you have in mind as relating to Ancient Greece will have precious little to do with the historical freethinkers of Bavaria. So in answering this question, I am safely untethered from historical fact, and find myself adrift in a world of which Meek Mill raps “I don’t have to join […]
-akis is the patronymic suffix used in Crete; it’s a diminutive, like most patronymics in Greek surnames are. The surname in Greek is Galifianakis Γαλιφιανάκης or Galyfianakis Γαλυφιανάκης; I see the upsilon surname much more frequently online (except with reference to Zach himself). Galifianos means “from Galifa”; there are references online to a Galifian carnival, […]
So, here’s the mainstream answer. 🙂 Greek had iota, eta, and upsilon as different letters, because they used to be pronounced differently: Iota was always an /i/ Eta was a long /ɛː/. In fact, in many archaic variants of the Greek alphabet, it was written as an epsilon /e/; that was the case in Athens […]
The most successful one has been Blissymbols; it was conceived of as an auxlang, but has it seen usage helping disabled children acquire language. The sample phrase on Wikipedia is: Person-1st Verb-feeling-fire Verb-legs house camera-move “I want to go to the cinema” Answered 2017-03-03 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Do-you-know-any-ideographic-conlang/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
The fact that you are Australian is significant here. Foreign languages are taught in school because foreign languages have been decided to be useful to a country’s citizens. They can be useful practically, or they can be useful culturally. Classical languages were initially taught because they are useful practically as well as culturally. Latin was […]
The analogy is not with juice as in orange juice, as suggested by Dobhran Black’s answer to Could someone tell how electric power resembles juice?. Clearly there’s an analogy with fluids to be made; but why juice and not water? Or quicksilver? Or blood? The analogy is with vital juices, a concept that was kicking […]
See Michael Moszczynski’s answer to How did the alphabet get its order? Who came up with the order of the alphabet? The first such language was Ugaritic, several centuries before Phoenecian. As Michael Moszczynski points out, two alphabetical orderings of Ugaritic survive, one via Phoenecian, and one via Ge’ez into Amharic. He concludes that, while […]
I’m not strong on cognitive linguistics, but it’s an intriguing A2A. What does it take for a word to become a conceptual metaphor? The meaning it expresses needs to be transferred to an analogous conceptual domain from its normal meaning; as a result of this, some of its meaning is preserved (the meaning that survives […]
I’m pretty much agreeing with Dmitriy Genzel’s answer: Dmitriy Genzel’s answer to How long would it take for English from anglophone countries to become separate languages?. If you look at my related answer to How long would it take an isolated group of people to develop what would be considered their own language?, you’ll see […]