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Category: Linguistics
How did old linguists in a pre medical screening world manage to figure out phonologies so perfectly?
Articulatory phonetics was indeed done before Palatography. And not just by the Ottomans: the Korean script Hangul originated in articulatory phonetics, and for that matter both the Sanskrit grammarians and the later Graeco-Roman grammarians had pretty much had it figured out. And they could just as my students in first year were able to learn […]
What is the etymology of the ancient Greek word “Otis”?
Frisk’s etymological dictionary concurs with Frank Dauenhauer’s answer, that the bustard was called ōtis ‘one with ears’ (“from its cheek tufts or head? See Thompson, Birds”); thus also ōtos ‘scops owl’, from its ear tufts. If you go to A glossary of Greek birds : Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 1860-1948 Sir, p. 200, you’ll find he […]
Why do many languages have both grammatical genders and declensions?
Your insight is correct, Riccardo: declensions and genders are both classes of nominals. The difference in Indo-European is that gender, not declension, is what governs the agreement of non-nouns with nouns, while declension is how the morphology of nouns themselves works. So in Ancient Greek, gender only affects the ending of the noun in patches—a […]
How would modern Greek language sound to an Ancient Greek?
— … By the twin gods, Autolycus! —What then, O Charaxus? —Hear you what a curious speech it is, that this strangely dressed individual utters? —It is indeed passing curious. —Some words sound like words of our common Hellenic tongue. —Indeed so, O Charaxus. —Yet there is a harsh deficit of diphthongs in his speech. […]
Why is computer called υπολογιστής instead of κομπιούτερ in modern Greek?
Everyone else has said the ‘what’. As to the ‘why’: Formal Greek is resistant to Latin-based loans, and routinely translates them into Greek morphemes whenever it can. The resistance was always lesser in informal Greek, and in the last decade or so, the floodgates have opened up for technical terminology in English: Hellenic coinages often […]
How come the Hebrew words for 6 and 7 are so similar to their Latin counterparts, while the other digits aren’t even close?
There has been speculation that Indo-European borrowed its words for ‘six’ and ‘seven’ from Semitic, or that they reflect a common ancestral (Nostratic) element. Nostratic is not a mainstream theory, and there has also been significant scepticism about borrowing, especially if the Proto–Indo-European for ‘six’ is closer to *weḱs than *sweḱs. I’ll note that PIE […]
How is it possible that we perceive irony?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony Grice. Grice Grice Grice Grice Grice. Paul Grice did seminal work in the philosophy of language, on how we recover meaning from an interlocutor’s words. It is clear that we routinely understand more—or less—than what our interlocutor says. To make sense of this, Grice developed a notion of conversational implicature. This is what we […]
What’s the one-word translation of the word ‘cuckold’ in Greek, when the husband knows (and does not care) about his wife’s infidelity?
Huh. As it turns out, reading Cuckold – Wikipedia, there was an Elizabethan term for someone who was aware of being cuckolded, but cuckold wasn’t it: One often-overlooked subtlety of the word is that it implies that the husband is deceived, that he is unaware of his wife’s unfaithfulness and may not know until the […]
Why is aponeurosis named as such? I know the “apo” part. What’s the word root: “neurosis”?
To expand on Raul Hernandez’s answer: aponeurōsis = apo ‘away, from, of’ + neurōsis neurōsis = neuroō ‘to equip with sinews, to put strings on (a bow, a lyre)’ + –sis ‘nominalisation suffix, -ing’ neuroō = neuron ‘nerve, sinew’ + –oō ‘verb suffix, often factive: to make something be or have X’. So aponeurosis literally […]
Can I use word ‘ζωναρου’ in a Greek text for a female belt maker, or is zonarou idiomatic and maybe too demotic?
Ζωναρού would be the feminine of ζωναράς; that is the word for “belt-maker”, but it is far more common as a surname than as a profession. The feminine is grammatically correct, but you’re right, -ού feminines are now regarded as pejorative, because they are old-fashioned, and in olden times women either didn’t exercise professions, or […]