Author: Nick Nicholas

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

Why was literacy so low in the Ottoman Empire?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: History, Modern Greek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuz%C3%BBl%C3%AE Yes, Arabic script was a spectacularly bad fit for Turkish. But a more proximate reason, surely, was that mass literacy presupposes printing—and the Ottomans did not allow printing in a Muslim language. (They didn’t allow it in Christian Greek either, but at least Venetian printers were able to capitalise on that.) Global spread of […]

What does a French speaker from the Val D’Aosta region of Italy sound like?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

Ah, French in the Val d’Aosta. I don’t have a phonetic answer for OP. I do however have a sociolinguistic answer that I’m delighted to share, because I co-supervised an MA thesis on this subject. The facts are all from Genevieve Foddy (née Czarnecki). The snark is all mine. The indigenous language of the Val […]

How did terms such as stoicism and cynicism come to adopt totally different meanings from their original Greek definitions?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-17 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, English, Linguistics

Sorry to answer by reference to Wikipedia, but, well, I think the answers are all there. We have ancient philosophical schools. We have popularisations of what those ancient philosophical schools were about, in education and in all-round educated discourse. We have people repurposing those popularisations, to express commonplace attitudes. To the extent that the meaning […]

Do I hyphenate “upper middle class family”, if yes, then how?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-17 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics, Writing Systems

Yes, hyphenation is less fashionable than it used to be, and yes, people think that it is finicky to introduce a distinction between two levels of punctuation. But may the fire of a thousand Harts and Fowlers rain down on all respondents, for not one of them suggesting as an alternative something involving an en-dash: […]

How hard is for Greeks that speak Standard Modern Greek to understand Tsakonian?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-16 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Not mutually intelligible. At all. The bizarre thing with Tsakonian is: the non-core vocabulary, you can understand, because it’s pretty much the non-core vocabulary of Greek. Except you’ve got some quite massive regular sound changes to deal with, which were regularly applied even to modern loans. [ɣramatici] for example, “grammar”, ends up as [ɣramacitɕi]. But […]

Do people in the Near and Middle East still refer to Westerners as Franks?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-16 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks#Legacy In Greece: it was very much a mainstream term from Mediaeval times right through to the early 20th century. It was also used to refer to Greek Catholics; hence the classic song Frangosyriani “Catholic girl from Syros” (1932), from Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Catholic boy from Syros. The conflation of Western Catholics and Levantine […]

Why is an article inserted before a proper noun that has been qualified by an adjective?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-15 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Proper nouns in English are not normally qualified by adjectives; the adjective would be taken to be part of the proper noun (This is Lucky Phil). Some authors do qualify proper nouns with adjectives, although as this discussion notes (Adjective with proper noun), it is stylistically quite marked (“Stylistically, attributively modifying a proper noun isn’t […]

What language first introduced punctuation such as the period, comma, exclamation point, and question mark?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-15 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Mediaeval Greek, Writing Systems

See Punctuation on Wikipedia. David Crystal has a lovely book out on the history of punctuation: Making a Point. As Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer indicated, there were anticipations of punctuation for a while; the notion of systematically indicating pauses (period, comma) was a Hellenistic Greek invention, which became systematic in the late Empire. Punctuation as we […]

What happened to the Greeks of the Seleucid Empire?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-15 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, History

Where are the Seleucid Greeks? (InB4 Kalash people. We’re pretty sure they’re not Greeks.) One can only presume, they assimilated. The ruling class would have been Greek for a fair while; royalty certainly was. But there’s no reason to think the majority of Greeks didn’t intermarry. Not that we’d know much about it, because the […]

What can be lost in translation from ancient Greek?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-15 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

The allusions. Which are much more obvious in Ancient Greek, because it had several quite distinct literary dialects. If you want to allude to Homer, or to the tragedians, you can easily choose a word that occurs only in Homer, or a grammatical inflection that is antiquated. And literate Ancient Greeks were meant to be […]

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