Drop everything you are doing, and upvote Joachim Pense. Vote #1 Joachim Pense’s answer to My native language is English, but it seems that more inflected languages are widly more complex. Does every language really have equally complex grammar? There are some bad answers here, and some good answers here. There’s a progression of sophistication […]
Yes, English routinely transliterates Cyrillic Ё as E. For that matter, Russian routinely writes Ё as Е. Our transliterations (and your default orthography) aren’t up to date with the last couple of centuries of sound change in Russian. Potemkin is the most familiar version to English-speakers, since “Potemkin village” is a well known expression (and […]
There are no rules, but there are trends. -ish is used for country names that the English would have been familiar with in the Middle Ages. -ese is used for country names that the English learned of via the Italians or Spanish. That includes East Asia. -(i)an is used as a default for new-fangled country […]
http://vocaroo.com/ I have recorded a couple of passages I have read out in Esperanto, but why not a new one. Klingono, from Neciklopedio, the Esperanto version of Uncyclopedia. Vocaroo | Voice message Well, that was fun! My Esperanto has a mercilessly Greek accent, with no variation in vowel length or quality. In theory, that is […]
https://youtu.be/FhLRDY78B5U A2A, and I don’t speak Cypriot. Well, this is quite the puzzle. The lyric goes: Τ’ άι Φιλίππου δκιάβηκε, τζι ήρτεν τ’ άι Μηνά,τζι οι κορασιές παντρεύκουνται τζι αλλάσσουν τα λεγνά St Philip’s day is gone, St Menna’s day is here,and girls get married, and the slender ones change/and change the slender ones. I’ve […]
Not as recondite as some of the Magister’s lexical choices, but I just saw it today, and I see that he’s used it against me once: Michael Masiello’s answer to Can someone be intelligent and not agree with your political views? she [Irene Colthurst] is a fierce intellectual who writes trenchant, lucid, well-argued answers supported […]
The folk musician Ross Daly is of Irish descent, and has lived in Crete for 35 years: He has a broad Cretan accent, and he has something non-Greek underneath it. But it’s subtle, and it’s not an Irish accent per se. At most, it’s a somewhat overcareful enunciation, and maybe, if you listen closely, some […]
Gott sei dank! This is going to be fun! Ligatures OK, I’ll dispense with the “other things” (ligatures) quickly, referencing my own page Other Ligatures There was a mess of ligatures in Greek typography up until the 18th century, because Greek typography was based on late Byzantine squiggle. (That’s why typographers sigh at what might […]
Indeed, as Basil Lucas has noticed, I did look into the history of Soviet Greek a few years ago, although the primary research was hardly mine: it was the Greek historian Vlasis Agtzidis’. This is a summary of the history, although Basil’s answer gives plenty more detail (and so does my blog): The Greek spoken […]
You merit of me, Anya of Lincoln, an answer with a gem in it. A shard of Sappho, perhaps. But that was in my thirties. An artfully naive ballad of Heine’s. But that was in my twenties. The children’s poetry of C. J. Dennis. I remember the LP I somehow got of him when I […]