Author: Nick Nicholas

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

What are some (longer) words that appear or are considered false cognates, but which could plausibly be actual cognates?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-22 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Other Languages

My favourite example is Hawaiian meli “honey” and Greek meli “honey”. I have even seen a historical linguistics textbook say that’s a coincidence (Trask’s, I think.) It’s not a coincidence. The honeybee is not native to Hawaii. Honey is referenced in the New Testament. The New Testament needed to be translated by missionaries into Hawaiian. […]

How is a sign identified as a letter, a picture, and a number?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Writing Systems

For pictures, we hope for extreme iconicity. Writing systems often originate in pictures, but end up looking quite abstract and conventional. That applies even to Chinese. So if you have a lot of symbols, and only a few of them look like animals, you can conclude that the ones that look like pictures really are […]

How do I translate these sentences into Latin?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Latin, Linguistics

This is parasitic on Alberto Yagos’s answer. Would be nice if we could call these collaborative answers! Don’t let your dreams be memes. Alberto is more than right to call memes graffiti. So: Ne tibi fiant spes inscriptionum res. Let not your hopes be the subject matter of graffiti. Not… great, not at all. If […]

What origin does the last name Gargasoulas sound to you?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-21 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Ah yes. Dimitrious “Jimmy” Gargasoulas, man who two days ago stabbed his brother for being gay, drove off with his pregnant girlfriend hostage, did donuts in the central intersection of the Melbourne CBD, then sped off with the cops in pursuit, and plowed into a shopfront, leaving four dead and tens injured. 2017 Melbourne car […]

How do linguists determine whether a language is agglutinative or it has postpositions?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Urdu/Postpositions Well, let’s generalise the question (though I don’t know Urdu well enough). This is not going to be a complete answer btw, and I’ll ask for help from others. What is the difference between a preposition and a prefix, or a postposition and a suffix? That one is a word, and the second is […]

During antiquity, did anyone in Greece or Rome recognize similarities between Greek and Latin languages and hypothesized relationships between them?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Latin, Linguistics

Yup. Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek/Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek is a paper on that. And Are there any accounts of the Romans realizing linguistic similarity between Latin and Germanic languages? • /r/AskHistorians is a Reddit thread of it. The locus classicus is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but the idea was doing […]

Ancient Greek transliteration: why does the letter κ become c, and the letter υ become y?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, English, Writing Systems

Vote #1 Amy Dakin: Amy Dakin’s answer to Ancient Greek transliteration: why does the letter κ become c, and the letter υ become y? Bear in mind that K was imported into Latin from Greek, but it was a something of an affectation. It was never used seriously, so it was never going to be […]

Why are irregular “to be”s quite different?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-19 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

The reasons for the striking irregularities of the copula verb in Indo-European are addressed in Did the present indicative forms of the Latin verb “esse” evolve from two different roots? As those answers show, the Proto-Indo-European verb was in fact almost regular. But there is a broader question of why the copula in particular is […]

What does “copped a serve” mean and what is the origin of the expression?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-19 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Vote #1 Danya Rose, who as far as I know has the right answer. Danya Rose’s answer to What does “copped a serve” mean and what is the origin of the expression? To my astonishment, OED does not have the phrase. It does have related phrases under cop, v. 3: “to capture, catch, lay hold […]

Do Greeks get offended when someone calls them Grecian?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-19 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

There was a bit of merriment when George W Bush used the word. I actually don’t know whether Greeks in Greece know about the oddity of “Grecian”. My take, as someone bicultural: it’s not offensive, it’s just archaic; so seeing it in live use is puzzling. Because it’s archaic, I’m led to wonder whether I’m […]

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