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 […]
Glamour, as a Scots mutation of Grammar, from the same Education = Witchcraft equation that gave us Grimoire. Diocese. I had no idea until a month ago that this is just dioikēsis “administration”. For more palatalisation catching me unawares: cemetery from koimētērion. Dram, and for that matter Dirham, as derivatives of drachma. Answered 2017-02-07 [Originally […]
… A very good question, Clarissa! On the one hand, not much, because English is in every household, though the telly and the interwebs. Now, where to find evidence for this? Journalistic Greek is awash with ill-fitting calques from English, and syntactic loans and semantic field readjustments too, because the journalists spend their time reading […]
I should know the answer to this, being one of them. But it’s actually reasonably hard to introspect this, especially as the novelty of Greek Australians has long since worn off. I’m going to offer some stereotypes, but as I often do with this kind of question, I’m hoping for someone to step in with […]
I find this fascinating. You may not find this fascinating. It involves Greek music of the 40s. I’ve been listening to Dalaras’ 1980 recording of wartime rebetika. I realised that one of the songs, Haidari, I had already heard before, and loved it. It’s a chilling song about someone about to be executed, in the […]
Corroborating Anestis Samourkasidis’ answer: Vote #1 Anestis Samourkasidis’ answer to When did Greeks as a people adopt surnames?. If you peruse Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire part I, you will see sporadic surnames in the 7th and 8th century; e.g. I PBE: Ioannes 9 : Ἰωάννῃ σπαθαρίῳ, τὸ ἐπίκλην Στρούθῳ “John the spatharios [military office], […]
Remember when Dennis Miller was commentating the NFL, and peppering his commentary with obscurity after obscurity, and a panoply of blogs popped up to offer exegesis to the befuddled masses? This here blog may be that for the Magister, and I don’t want the Magister to start getting all self-conscious about his recondite lexis. Don’t […]
As other respondents have said, (a) it depends, and (b) they do. Reflecting on the Asian Australians I’ve known in the past thirty years: People who’ve come off the boat naturally aren’t going to have an Aussie accent. Duh. Although I’ve spoken of a counterexample here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who are some people you […]
http://nacloweb.org This is a more general question: why would linguistic Olympiads and competitions in general use for their puzzles real, non-obscure languages, which someone among the the contestants may already know? I know nothing about NACLO in particular, and I will offer some speculation which I still think relevant. Oversight: “meh, noone will know Turkish”. […]
I think I get your question. Is the etymology of etymology subject to the Etymological fallacy? The etymological fallacy is a genetic fallacy that holds that the present-day meaning of a word or phrase should necessarily be similar to its historical meaning. This is a linguistic misconception, and is sometimes used as a basis for […]