“44 or so”. And there’s your problem. English phonology trap bath palm lot cloth thought The vowels in Received Pronunciation group as: (tɹæp) (bɑːθ pɑːm) (lɒt klɒθ) (θɔːt) They group the same way in Australian English, though as (tɹæp) (bɐːθ pɐːm) (lɔt klɔθ) (θoːt) The vowels in General American, however, group as: (tɹæp bæθ) (pɑːm […]
Some highlights from List of Greek phrases. See the Wikipedia page for more detail and other phrases. ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω. Ageōmétrētos mēdeìs eisítō. “Let no one untrained in geometry enter.” ἀεὶ ὁ θεὸς γεωμετρεῖ. Aei ho theos geōmetreî. “God always geometrizes” αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν. aièn aristeúein. “Ever to Excel” γηράσκω δ᾽ αἰεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος. Gēraskō d’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
Placeholder name List of placeholder names by language The typical use in English of placeholder names for persons is to emphasise their random selection, or their representativeness. Hence the rich assortment of List of terms related to an average person, including J. Random Hacker for computing, Tommy Atkins for the British Army, or The man […]
A2A, because apparently I have a great big “kick me” sign on me. (Only joking, Snežana Đorić (Снежана Ђорић)… … or am I?) Look, my personal opinion, as a taxonomist of the world (a Lumper and not a splitter) , is to look at what used to be one language, turned into four over a […]
https://www.scribd.com/doc/309363407/Joseph-Yahuda-Hebrew-is-Greek-pdf Already posted this as a comment: … The business with Yahuda’s supposedly suppressed book is a longstanding urban legend in Greek nationalist circles (such as Davlos magazine). An urban legend uninformed by the existence of Worldcat: Hebrew is Greek (Book, 1982) [WorldCat.org] Hebrew is Greek. Or Amazon: Hebrew is Greek: Joseph Yahuda: 9780728900134: Amazon.com: […]
Quite apart from the sexual vocabulary noted by other respondents, Vulgar Latin, as we can reconstruct it from the Romance languages, had words we can only classify as slang. Such as testa “head”, which originally meant “pot”. Or caballus “nag” instead of equus “horse”. Or using manducare “to chew” instead of edere for “to eat”. […]
As Mohamed Essam has commented, linguists are reluctant to accept that there are ever absolute synonyms, precisely because that kind of redundancy isn’t really logical. Usually, there will be some slight nuance of difference between them; if not in their etymology, then in their social register, or their connotations, or even just their sounds. As […]
A2Q (as opposed to A2A) by Peter J. Wright. Are we including Greece in the Balkans for the purposes of this question? If so, the breakdown of dialects is pretty arbitrary, but the dialect groupings from Newton, which I accept, are: Peloponnesian–Ionian Northern Old Athenian (including Maniot and Kymiot) Cretan (including Cycladean) South-Eastern (including Cypriot) […]