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Category: Linguistics
Updated post on “Why do English-speaking people not prefer to say natrium, silisium, kalium, and use other Latin names of elements instead?”
I have had an updated version of my old Quora posts Why do English-speaking people not prefer to say natrium, silisium, kalium, and use other Latin names of elements instead? and Where do the distinctive Greek names for chemical elements come from? published in Greek on Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, as Τα ελληνόψυχα χημικά στοιχεία, “Greek-souled […]
Updated post on “How are Rumi’s poems in Greek?”
I have had an updated version of my old Quora post How are Rumi’s poems in Greek? published in Greek on Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, as Τα ελληνικά ποιήματα του Τζελαλεντίν Ρουμί, “The Greek poems of Jalal ad-Din Rumi”.
Fifty shades of paraphilia, followup
My original post on the clumsy coinages of terms for paraphilias was a bit of careless venting on Quora, and did not bother researching the creation of the words too deeply. It was, as commenters at Nikos Sarantakos’ blog correctly identified, some xavales, “goofing off”. (Sarantakos did say when I sent him the post, “I […]
Updated post on “What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die?”
I have had an updated version of my old Quora post What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die? published in Greek on Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, as Οι πενήντα αποχρώσεις της παραφιλίας, “Fifty shades of paraphilia”.
Greek -eza ethnonyms
I’m sure someone somewhere has already written about this. In fact, I’m sure multiple people have. But I enjoy reinventing the wheel. (And getting inspiration from Quora, as well as Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, for articles here. My thanks to Evangelos Lolos for prodding me on this.) Modern Greek used to have a lot of ethnonyms […]
o-vocatives: Analogical Account, IV: What Henrich said
I’ve finally taken the time to read Günther Henrich’s 1976 thesis on the spread of the -o vocative and -o genitive in Greek. My blog series has been something like 15 pp written off the cuff, with minimal research. Henrich’s is 270 pp of meticulous historical and dialectal research. He has orders of magnitude more […]
o-vocatives: Analogical account, Part III
In the last few posts, I’ve worked through the analogies that have extended the o-vocative into proper names: M1–M5, O2–O6. There was to-ing and fro-ing, there was nebulous definition and redefinition of rules, there was a whole ballet of criteria. But the ballet orchestration can be formulated: the rules for the analogy are sweeping, even […]
o-vocatives: Analogical account, Part II
So far we have accounted for: M1: Bisyllabic common nouns that used to be third declension: ˈɣeros “old man”, ˈðjakos “deacon”. (Ancient ɡérɔːn, diákɔːn). M2: Bisyllabic truncated, informal given names: ˈɣjorɣos, ˈnikos, ˈðimos (corresponding to the formal forms ɣeorɣios, nikolaos, ðimitrios) “George, Nick, Dimitri” M3: The trisyllabic (truncated) name aˈlekos “Alec” O2: Bisyllabic formal given […]
o-vocatives: Analogical account, Part I
So we have the messy data on the distribution of the o-vocative in Greek. And we have the tools to try and make sense of that distribution, in terms of features that classes of nouns with the o-vocative have in common. We also, as it turns out, have an entire PhD thesis on the o-vocative: […]
How analogy works, and what analogy does
We have seen the data on the spread of o-vocatives in Modern Greek. I will post how I make sense of the data. But first, some preliminaries about analogy. How analogy works Analogy in language change takes a linguistic rule that applies to one word or paradigm or category, and starts applying it to another […]