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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A magnificent resource I have just stumbled on, in seeing if someone has already answered this question (do I look like a Turcologist to you?) is tourkika.com. An online Turkish grammar resource for Greek learners of the language, with lots of etymology for loan words into Greek. The etymology… is enlightening. Χαβαλές – havale. From […]
I’ll take a different template, with Alberto Yagos’ as an inspiration. When Ptolemy I asked if there were any shortcuts for plodding through the Elements, Euclid supposedly said, “there is no royal road to geometry”: Euclid – Wikiquote The first Latin translation of the quote is Non est regia ad Geometriam via. Non est regia […]
A dune is a heap of sand. We can track it to Gaulish *dunom. Maybe. A θίς can be a heap of several things, including sand. A relation between the two has been suggested, but it’s not certain. To quote Frisk: No satisfactory explanation. Wackernagel compares Old Indic dhíṣṇya– ‘situated on a knoll’, ‘knoll strewn […]
Yes, it would. I’m not going to bother with examples other than grave (Germanic: tomb; French: serious). It is a common perception that language change is driven by trying to avoid ambiguity. In fact, language has an astounding tolerance for ambiguity, because context usually takes care of it. Instances where words change in order to […]
Phonemes are groupings of phones (different sounds), which language speakers treat as equivalent. The phones that are variants of the same phoneme are allophones of the phoneme. Normally, the distribution of allophones depends on their context: there is a rule, based on surrounding phonemes, which determines whether one allophone or the other is used. If […]
It’s an interesting question, OP. I wonder whether too much similarity will make a word less easy to learn, not more, due to the potential for confusion. There can’t be a categorical difference for when a word switches from similar to dissimilar. It’s not like a distance of 3 means similar and a distance of […]