Author: Nick Nicholas

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

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 […]

How do I address strangers in Australia?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-25 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Other respondents have covered this well (which is a benefit of me putting off replying to A2A’s!) I’ll just add some metacommentary. People of Quora who get me in their feed because they like me or something: do read the other responses. The egalitarian ideal of Australia is that we address each other as mate, […]

If programs can be written in sonnets, why not in Klingon letters?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-24 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_language) Of course they can: var’aq – Esolang. A programming language using Klingon vocabulary. Of course, the pIqaD (see Klingon alphabets) does not have an official Unicode encoding: the ostensive reason is that Klingonists don’t actually use the pIqaD. The gossip is that the German arm of the ISO vetoed it, for fear of bringing […]

Why does no one put a period after the P in R.I.P.?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Writing Systems

Clearly not noone; but there is a global movement in English away from using periods in abbreviations and acronyms—hence RIP rather than R.I.P. The intermediate form R.I.P looks odd for a reason—why keep some periods in an acronym and not others? But the motivation for it is that abbreviations have been dropping their final period […]

What are the meanings of lyrics to the Greek song “To Prosfigaki”?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

Το προσφυγάκι – Μέλκον Μάρκος – Στίχοι, Video – kithara.to Translating from the site: Year of composition: 1950 Singing and Oud by Marko Melkon. The recording was made in the USA around 1950. The song melody follows the Hicazkâr Makam scale, which corresponds to the byzantine Plagal Second Mode. Besides the oud, there is a […]

What are some unexpected or unknown benefits from learning Esperanto?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

If you immerse yourself in early Esperanto literature (before World War II), you end up learning a lot about Mitteleuropa high culture—and indirectly, a fair bit of German. There’s a lot of Heine, and a lot of emulating of Heine. Esperanto poetry is also a whole lot more formalist than English-language poetry (another Mitteleuropa thing), […]

Do languages evolve from conversations, scripts or a combination of scripts and spoken words?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

If by scripts you mean “written texts” (and if you do, it’s a misleading way of saying it), languages evolve mostly through the spoken word. However, peculiarities of written registers can influence how people speak—for example, the reemergence of /t/ in often, or the influence of Classical Arabic on the spoken Arabic variants. Written language […]

Does Old English have enough vocabulary for writing a diary?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Yes, but you will need some word coining for modern references to actually come across as Old English. (If you’re going to be dropping in unassimilated modern words all the time, you might as well be writing modern English. You won’t have the look and feel of Old English.) Strongly recommend you look at the […]

Which English words and expressions have a different meaning in Indian English? For example, the word propose is used in India in a way that never existed elsewhere.

By: | Post date: 2016-09-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Fellow Quorans of India, there’s a surprising omission in this list, which I’ve seen repeatedly on Quora, and indeed on Ravi Indra’s answer to this question: https://www.quora.com/Which-Engl… In India Z alphabet is pronounced as (Zed) but for others it is (zee) Alphabet is used in the subcontinent, where the rest of the English-speaking world uses […]

Are all English periphrastic constructions (e.g. the present perfect) instances of grammaticalization?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-22 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Yes to what Clarissa Lohr said, and no to what Darius Vukasinovic said. (You still at Monash, Darius? I live in Oakleigh.) An auxiliary verb is by definition a grammaticalisation, since it is no longer a content word. I have spoken does not have much to do with possession, I will speak does not have […]

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