Here’s another limitation: speech acts. A statement of how the world is (a declarative speech act) can be true or false. A command, a promise, or a performative statement (“I hereby declare…”) cannot meaningfully be true or false: it can only be felicitous or infelicitous (that is, appropriate). Here’s yet another, which Gary Coen already […]
Inasmuch as we can trust the ancient sources, Herodotus’ native dialect was Doric, and he may well have been a Carian speaker. As Wikipedia says, we can’t trust the ancient sources anyway: Herodotus Herodotus wrote his ‘Histories’ in the Ionian dialect, yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda […]
For documents to survive, they needed to be important enough to the copyists to keep recopying, as the technology of books was upgraded—from wax tablet to scroll to codex in capitals to codex in lower case. And they needed to be important enough to be copied multiple times, so that random destruction of books did […]
*shrug* Similar. 500 years of close coexistence and bilingualism (not that people can grok that now). Lots of food in common, with traffic in both directions, and different preferences of spices. Several common cultural practices, such as taking shoes off before going inside. Many, many formulaic expressions in common. Significant musical overlap: in some genres […]
Commonalities between Greek and Arabic? They belong to different language families—Indo-European vs Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Phoenecian); noone has proven a more distant relation between the two. The alphabet of both derives from Phoenecian; hence the similarity in letter names to this day. That also extends to Hebrew: […]
Greece was affected: in 1800 half the population of Crete was Muslim, and those were converts, not settlers from Turkey. There’s a very simple answer to why Greece, and much of the Balkans, did not have the same outcome as Syria or Egypt: Greece was conquered by the Ottomans. And the Ottomans had the Rum […]
Originally Answered: Why do British/ Irish/ Australians when singing have the same American accent as American singers? Brian Collins and Robert Charles Lee, I disagree. They do too. And I do have a tin ear, but I’m not the only one to think so: Non-American pop singers (e.g. New Zealanders) tend to subconsciously adopt an […]
An unfortunate number of coincidences. The coincidences all ended up converging in Sans Serif Latin script, because a vertical line is a simple thing, and any simplification of glyphs can’t get any simpler than a | . The letter I started as Phoenecian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodh, which did not look like a |: But by the time […]
I checked LSJ: no γεροκρ- anything. And there wouldn’t be: γερο- for “old” is Modern Greek, the Ancient Greek would be γεροντο-. I googled γεροκρονοληρος, as Dimitris Sotiropoulos suggested in his exchange with Konstantinos Konstantinides. The good thing about Google, is that it assumes you misspell things. So it tries taking words apart. I didn’t […]
No disagreement: it’s a reference to Ancient Greek pederasty. Being a classical reference, it would have a classicist, learnèd origin: it’s not a turn of phrase some random peasant on the Loire came up with. Aller se faire voir chez les grecs says that the expression is no early than the start of the 20th […]