Author: Nick Nicholas

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

What are some famous Greek sayings?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-13 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

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’ […]

Should primary and ESL teachers use an English alphabet that has the 44 or so phonemes that the language has?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Writing Systems

“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 […]

Do onomatopoeias have etymologies?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

It’s a very insightful question, OP. If an onomatopoeia is a completely transparent mapping of natural sound to human language, then it is an inevitability, and there’s no point attributing it to one coiner or another, one language or another: the onomatopoeia is just there, a sound ready for humans to imitate, and humans will […]

Did people in the first century have last names?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-13 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Culture, Linguistics

Romans had nomen and cognomen, which were inherited names like surnames. Greeks and Jews, like contemporary Icelanders, just had patronymics: John son of Zebedee. (See also the list of high priests of Israel.) Less often, they had nicknames indicating jobs or characteristics: Simon the Zealot, Judas of Kerioth, Jesus the Nazarene. In narratives, those distinctions […]

Is the theory that Hebrew and Arabic words descend or derive from Greek correct?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-12 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

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: […]

Is Serbo-Croatian a language?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-12 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

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 […]

Are there any Placeholder names we can use to represent different kinds of person?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-12 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics, Other Languages

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 […]

There are similarities in different words in languages. But the word for “2” is very similar in most of languages. Why this number is so special?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-11 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

To build on Matthew McVeagh’s answer and comment: Go to the renowned Zompist Numbers List. Two and Three, *duwō and *treyes, are reasonably similar across Indo-European. One gets conflated with Single/Same, *oynos / *sem, and ends up looking different. Four and Five have a *kw, which went different ways in different languages, and get affected […]

Latin: if there is no slang terminology utilized in it, how boring a language is Latin?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-11 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Latin, Linguistics

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”. […]

If having 2 words for same thing seems logical, then why have 2 meanings out of 1 word? That’s also logical, and why would this happened in a rich language like Arabic?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-11 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

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 […]

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