Habib Fanny has just included inexorable in A few of my favorite words here, and I wondered to myself: has the Magister used one of my favourite words, which is related to inexorable but is even more emotive? Was there ever any doubt? Michael Masiello’s answer to What is importance of divine intervention in literature? […]
Gareth Jones asked me this at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Can fascism grow in Greece?, when I said that I don’t think so. I’m not in a good position to judge, and I’m actually answering this to prod some Greeks closer to what’s been happening into an answer. So, if they won’t vote in Golden […]
https://www.quora.com/How-did-you-learn-Klingon/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5 Oh, it’s a very good question, ’erIq qaDye qaH and raHul chabra qaH. Although it’s a question I did prompt. Let me clarify the question I prompted, because it may not be as obvious from the wording. Klingon is a made up language. Noone has ever spoken it fluently. All the records we have […]
Deadwood (TV series) is celebrated as being one of the most foulmouthed shows on cable TV. This was a conscious decision by the scriptwriters, to convey the impression that 1870s foul language would have had on its contemporaries. Because using actual 1870s foul language (which was blasphemous rather than scatological) would have sounded so anodyne […]
My top 3: Joseph Greenberg. The founding father. And very useful to get a sense of the kinda functionalist programme he had in mind. Bernard Comrie. Martin Haspelmath. Answered 2017-02-02 · Upvoted by Steve Rapaport and Eric Meinhardt [Originally posted on http://quora.com/If-I-want-to-work-in-linguistic-typology-which-linguists-should-I-read/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Tolis Malakos of London Metropolitan University wrote a very insightful piece on this in 2013: What does the rise of fascism mean for Greece and for Europe? Above and beyond that, turning to populist, authoritarian solutions when faith is shaken in bourgeois democratic politics is not an idiosyncrasy of Germans or Italians: it is human […]
It’s a someone idiosyncratic method, and while it worked for me in both Klingon and Lojban, I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for a natural language. I did lots of translating from English. Lots and lots of translating. With some experimenting, trying to work out what looked more fluent. (The question of what the hell fluency […]
I thank you for the question, ’erIq qaDye qaH! I’ll answer a bit more broadly than your details ask, but I may get a big vague; it was after all 20 years ago. I learned Klingon in 1994. I had enough arrogance and free time, that I knew I’d be the one to write the […]
It’s not an S, per se; you’ll usually see it as just a bar, or a semicircle. Zeibura S. Kathau unearthed an instance that looked like a capital omega. It’s an abbreviation marker: Ι͞Ϲ Χ͞Ϲ is an abbreviation of IHϹΟΥΣ ΧΡΙϹΤΟϹ. The convention is particularly prevalent for Nomina sacra, divine names and titles. Here’s Wikipedia’s […]
Modern Greek. I’m going to list indeclinable, straight iconic words, as opposed to the far larger set of inflected words with an onomatopoeic etymology (like zuzuni for bug or platsurizo for to splash). bam bang, dan ding dong, apsu < Turkish hapşu sound of sneezing, kix cough, xrats scratch, drin ring ring, ksu shoo, prits […]