I’ll give a general rather than a specific answer. The Great English Vowel Shift is a celebrated instance of a Chain shift, a sound change with impacts several sounds one after the other, as a kind of chain reaction. It helps when discussing vowel changes (which are particularly susceptible to chain shifts) to have a […]
If you’re detecting change with your eyes: New vocabulary, then semantic shifts in existing words, then syntax — particularly syntax of individual words. fun became an adjective within my lifetime. If you’re detecting change with your ears: all of the above, then maybe phonetics. But sound change is slower, socially and generationally stratified, and geographically […]
Me, personally? That the same changes happen, again and again, from language to language to language. The same grammaticalisations; the same sound changes; the same semantic changes; the same syntactic changes; the same metaphors. Which is little to do with Universal Grammar, and a lot to do with universals of cognition and articulation. Answered 2016-08-31 […]
From Nişanyan’s etymological dictionary of Turkish, and زور – Wiktionary , zor came into Turkish (and thence Greek) from Persian, not Arabic. And lots of languages either side of Persian and Turkish have picked it up. A single word for all uses of ζόρι in Greek, that Dimitris Sotiropoulos lists in his answer? No, but […]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_I_of_Greece#Macedonian_Front Not a question I know much about, but let me take a stab, and see if someone more knowledgeable corrects me. The Wikipedia article on Constantine I goes on to say: The capture of Thessaloniki against Constantine’s whim proved a crucial achievement: the pacts of the Balkan League had provided that in the forthcoming […]
Anon, I commend you on your initiative. I don’t commend you on your question topic tagging; hopefully you’ll get some responses better targeted than this now. Learn Python. Not because I have any love for Python. I’d be happy to chain Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum together: each other’s company would be punishment enough. […]
Several ways. Dimitra Triantafyllidou has already answered; I’ll answer as well, a little more schematically, but it’s essentially the same answer. Sound mergers in the language. meet and meat used to be pronounced differently [meːt, mɛːt]; now they’re pronounced the same, [miːt]. Sound un-mergers in the language—or at least, a spelling system out of sync […]
Neeraj Mathur is quite right: syllables, not letters. Some circumstantial evidence for this from Ancient Greek drama. When literacy was a very new thing, and the tools of grammatical analysis (such as words) were still not very popular. (https://www.quora.com/Could-sayi…): the differentiation between utterance and word was newfangled with the Greek sophists. Aeschylus avoids Euripides’ new […]
These answers are kinda converging. My answer is: What Brian Collins said—the vowel repertoire, plus the final consonants, and the nasals. There are nasals elsewhere, including Vulgar Latin; but the nasals are a huge part of the French stereotype. [hɔ̃.hɔ̃.hɔ̃] Grudgingly, I admit that the nasals are less critical than the other two. I hate […]
Yes, I’m going to have fun with this. First: HAH! You’ve outed yourself as a Modern Greek speaker, Anon OP! In ancient Greek, that would be ἀέναος σοφία. Compound adjectives used the masculine ending for the feminine; and αέναη is what you get when noone you know has been aware of Greek vowel quantity for […]