Author: Nick Nicholas

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

Do Australians cringe when non-native English speakers attempt to learn the Australian accent?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-02 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

What Christine Leigh Langtree said: Vote #1 Christine Leigh Langtree’s answer to Do Australians cringe when non-native English speakers attempt to learn the Australian accent? I’ll add that most dialect speakers dislike their accent being mimicked, not just Australians; I know I resented the hell out of 1960s Greek comedies’ bad imitation of Cretan. If […]

Are Greeks truly “western”? How can they be western if they are orthodox? In that case, why aren’t the other orthodox countries considered western?

By: | Post date: 2017-01-02 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

Originally Answered: How western is the republic of Greece and its locals? Vote #1 Goru Yamato: Goru Yamato’s answer to Are Greeks truly “western”? How can they be western if they are orthodox? In that case, why aren’t the other orthodox countries considered western? Μπράβο σας, Γιαμάτο-σάμα! I’ll just add that the struggle between the […]

What is the timeline of the Greek breathings?

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

I’ve written a fair bit up about this at http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… . All secondary research, but it’s secondary research that seems to have been cited at Wikipedia. Your timeline is right: There was a distinct heta letter for /h/, which looked like H, but it was not used in all locations. There was an innovation in […]

What are some common and popular Greek beverages?

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

Coffee: Turkish coffee (renamed Greek coffee) for the older generation Frappé coffee for the younger generation Instant coffee (“Nes”) as a lighter, more western option Variants such as Vienna Coffee for a night out Nursed for hours at a café First beverage at home in the morning Herbal teas Sage, Camomile, Nettle Drunk when you’re […]

How is the enmity between Greece and Albania different to that between Greece and Turkey?

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

I’m going to speak from a Greek perspective, and I hope that Turks and Albanians will weigh in. The hostility between Greece and Turkey is very old, and definitional to their identity. They came to regard each other as the Primordial Enemy. (Hence the immortal line on Ekşi Sözlük: “The good old days, when Greece […]

Is use of diminutives that lost their diminutive meaning a common phenomenon in the development of languages?

By: | Post date: 2016-12-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

I believe it is (add Russian, bigtime), but I’ve just gone through half a dozen historical linguistics textbooks, and it’s not discussed separately in any of them. I was even struggling to find a good term describing this phenomenon: lexicalised diminutives I guess is the best. The problem is that semantic change is massively variegated, […]

Ancient Greek: where is a “w” sound used in Greek?

By: | Post date: 2016-12-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvVWiDsPWQ OK, Nick wading in. Like James Garry and Robert Todd said: the digamma, ϝ, is an archaic letter of Greek, pronounced as /w/. It is present as a sound in Linear B, and it survived into Aeolic, but it did not survive into the other *written* dialects of Greek. We know it was there […]

What unpopular opinions do you have about linguistics?

By: | Post date: 2016-12-30 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Not that controversial, but I think there’s a lot to be said for diachronic explanations of language, and the synchronic/diachronic distinction is somewhat artificial. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is functional grammar? will explain that a little bit: functional accounts are kind of diachronic to begin with (what function does this linguistic component serve in […]

What are some examples of sentences that can be either Ancient Greek or Modern Greek?

By: | Post date: 2016-12-30 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Modern Greek

Hm. No participles, no infinitives, no relativisers, no conditionals. Some conjunctions are the same, but you can already see we’re surrendering a lot of syntactic complexity to do this. No future or perfect, no unaccented augments, no datives, no prepositions with genitives (and the rest look different anyway), bits of the 1st and 3rd declensions […]

Is the Ancient Greek contribution to Western civilization overstated?

By: | Post date: 2016-12-30 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Culture

Whensoever you get a silly-looking premiss, think harder. 🙂 It’s a very good question, Habib le toubib. I mean, in one way, of course not, Western civilisation started with the Greeks, and throughout the renaissance, it kept checking back with the Greeks, to see whether they were Doing It Right. But on the other hand, […]

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