Author: Nick Nicholas

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

What was the profession of 1st Greeks who arrived in Australia and became famous for that?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, History, Modern Greek

You’ve read something somewhere, OP, I can tell, but I’m at a loss about where. The answer, pace Romain Bouchard, is not in Wikipedia, but I don’t remember it. Let me try and reconstruct it. The big Greek migration wave into Australia was in the 1950s–70s. The stereotype was milk bar owner (= grocery story) […]

Does your language misuse grammatical case or gender to make a rhetorical point?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

I’m glad you asked, OP. Language is a system, as the structuralists of yore argued. And if there is a paradigm of cases, then people will exploit choices in the paradigm to communicate different kinds of meaning. Even when those choices should be grammatically incorrect. The example I have in mind is from Modern Greek. […]

Could Google Translate maintain a central codex “language” therefore bypassing artifacts that come from English-as-central-language issue?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Google Translate, like many machine translation projects, does not maintain [math]n^2[/math] language pairs when adding languages to its bank; it appears to maintain just n:English mappings—so that a translation from, say, Greek to Persian is pretty clearly via English as an interlanguage. That is a clear scalability issue, if you’re going to maintain the number […]

Why did the Byzantine record the name of Osman Ghazi as Otoman?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

Here’s some data, from Gyula Moravcsik’s Byzantinoturcica, a dictionary of all Turkic names and words that ended up in Byzantine Greek. The names are in roughly chronological order. Osman is named as: Atman (George Pachymeres, Nicephorus Gregoras) Atouman Atoumanos Atoumanes (Notitiae Chronicae, Chronicon Turcorum) Otmanos Otmanes (Hierax, Chronica Minora) Otoumanos (Chalcocondyles) Othmanos Othman Otthmanos Otthmanes […]

What’s the Latin translation of “Fun or money? (I’ll work for one or the other; optimally, both)”?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Latin, Linguistics

Pro ludo aut pro lucro? Pro alterutro laboro; pro utroque malim. Alberto Yagos? Answered 2016-09-26 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Whats-the-Latin-translation-of-Fun-or-money-Ill-work-for-one-or-the-other-optimally-both-”/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]

What is the etymology of “Laconia”?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

Well, Chad Turner, Frisk and Chantraine are on the internet… Frisk (Lakōn): Krahe, in Indogermanische Forschungen 57:119, relates the name as suspected Illyrian to Lacinium, a promontory in Southern Italy, and Juno Lacinia. Chantraine (Lakedaimōn): Etymology unknown. There have been unsuccessful attempts to use the gloss in Hesychius “lakedama: bitter water made in the sea […]

What is the difference between Cretan, Cypriot, Asia Minor (mostly Lydian and Trojan), Mycenaean, Classical, Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Modern Greeks?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Culture

Different regions and/or time periods of Greek culture. Not all of them involving ethnic Greeks. Mycenaean: Greek culture of 1500–1200 BC. Associated with the site of Mycenae. Cretan: Culture of Crete. No timeframe. Initially non-Hellenic. Cypriot. Culture of Cyprus. No timeframe. Initially non-Hellenic. Rhodian. Culture of Rhodes. No timeframe. Asia Minor. Culture of Asia Minor. […]

What is some good Greek music for people that smoke weed?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

Lots of the Rebetiko tradition of music is to do with hashish, if that helps. This song in particular references gambling rather than hash, but it certainly sounds like it’s performed under the influence, and it’s hypnotic in its simplicity. Recorded by Yannakis Ioannidis with Manolis Karapiperis on bouzouki, New York, 1928. Τούτοι οι μπάτσοι, […]

No, not, never, negative, nein, neither, nope, non, none, nix, nuh-uh, nil. What’s with “N” and so much negativity? Who cursed this poor letter?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

The negativity all comes from the simple fact that *ne is proto–Indo-European for not. Follow me down Wiktionary, the free dictionary, won’t you? no: < Old English nā, nō < Proto-Germanic *nē < PIE *ne not: < Middle English noght < Old English nāht ‘nothing’ < nōwiht ‘not anything < ne + āwiht ‘anything’ < […]

How did countries get their English names?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Depends. Recent country names are carried across from whatever the country is calling itself, without much alteration: Bhutan, Nepal, Senegal, Angola. Neighbouring countries that England had close contact with traditionally would have the most diverse names—mainly based on what those countries called themselves, but looking Germanic, and not made to be consistent. Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, […]

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