Was Newspeak inspired by Esperanto? We know what Orwell was satirising, and why he was annoyed with Esperanto. Don’t worry about it. Orwell was if anything more annoyed with Basic English, and would likely be annoyed with any conlang. (One of the examples he gives in Politics and the English Language is from a text […]
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shart Thanks for A2A… I think. From Fecal incontinence – Wikipedia, the closest I’m seeing is fecal leakage. But that doesn’t have the implication of controlled but misconstrued bowel movement that a “shart” has. Googling is not yielding a more formal term. Answered 2016-12-24 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Is-there-a-clinical-term-for-a-shart/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Under the millet system, which is still recent memory in former Ottoman countries, creed was the determinant of identity. If you were Orthodox you were Rum/Romios, if you were Muslim you were a Turk—no matter what your ethnicity, and what your main language was. So a Greek Cypriot that converted to Islam 200 years ago […]
The definitions offering are actually missing something here: A clichéd expression is an expression that was figurative or otherwise had rhetorical potency—but which has become deprecated by stylists in a language community, because they value novelty and freshness over familiarity and conventionality in discourse. This is a cultural judgement, and one that English-language culture in […]
I finally worked this out, by reading half of Ancient Greek accent – Wikipedia. (Reading the other half confirms it, but I’m still proud of myself.) The answer is: the second element if acute, the first if circumflex. Let’s take this slow. The explanation of the distinction between acute and circumflex in the Wikipedia article […]
To expand on Edmond Pano’s answer: Indo-European languages are not all that similar to each other. That’s why it took so long to establish the family. (It was much more obvious in Classical times, but people in Classical times weren’t paying attention.) The level at which laypeople can tell similarities is at the branch level. […]
Start with Byzantium: Orthodox Christianity was the state religion, and heterodoxy was deemed treason. Jews and Muslims were tolerated in Byzantine Law as second class citizens; heretical Christians got the sword. In the Ottoman Empire, that continued with the Rum millet: Greek Orthodoxy defined the nation of Romans, which was considered to include Greeks. Catholicism […]
Feh. Screw that guy. I wrote why on my website, something like 20 years ago (ignore the update date): Anti-Chomsky: English. I was somewhat aghast around 2000, when David Horowitz got in touch with me, asking for permission to quote me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about him. (Chomsky, I mean. But […]
This won’t be good, for the reasons Alberto Yagos said. The Greek for bit is: Bit – Βικιπαίδεια. Of course. There is a Hellenic coinage recommended by the Greek Standards Organisation: δυφίο dyphio[n], from dyo “two” and psēphion “digit”. The Ancient Greeks didn’t do portmanteaux, which is what this is; but if you want a […]
As I groused at Brian Collins in his answer: it’s always political. Scripts are bound to identity, and the major vehicle of identity in our age is the nation-state. So scripts that are tied up with the nation-state as emblematic—say, Greek or Thai—aren’t going away in a hurry. Minority scripts in a country have been […]