Author: Nick Nicholas

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

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, […]

Do modern Greek people feel that Istanbul/Constantinople belongs to them?

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

27 followers. A lot of people are waiting for an answer to this question. I’ll bite. With the initial note that this is a different question from Do Greeks want to recover Constantinople? I’m not necessarily the best person to be answering this: I lived in Greece in the 80s, before the thawing in relations […]

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), […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  • Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Join 329 other subscribers
  • August 2026
    M T W T F S S
     12
    3456789
    10111213141516
    17181920212223
    24252627282930
    31