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Category: Linguistics
How can a taboo word show friendliness or intimacy when it is inappropriate?
Appropriateness is always relative. We might like to think that there are universal norms applicable to all people and all situations. It simply does not work like that. Profanity signals intimacy, because it presupposes a level of trust that the addressee will not take offence, and it situates the interlocutors as both being rebels against […]
Is there an upper bound to the amount of words a language will realistically contain?
If a language is agglutinative, or has a halfway decent derivational morphology, you can keep making up words based on other words for as long as you like, and those words will be perfectly acceptable. So there is not much of a limit. There is a limit in how many building blocks of words (morphemes) […]
Where does the Greek quote “βίᾳ ἤρχεσαν οἱ τριάκοντα τῶν Ἀθηναίων και τὸν δῆμον ἤδη κατελελύκεσαν” come from?
The quote as given does not appear in the Ancient canon, or even the Mediaeval canon. Nor in fact does the phrase βίᾳ ἤρχεσαν “they had ruled with force”. The phrase is a little odd; it’s very much a tendentious summary of what happened in Athens with the Thirty Tyrants, which would be out of […]
Why don’t most Modern English speakers rhyme “thou” with “you”?
From OED, the dialectal survivals like Yorkshire thaa reflect unstressed variants of thou (which were short); thou is a long vowel that has gone through the Great English Vowel Shift—just as house has an /aʊ/ vowel, and is still pronounced huːs in Scots. The irregularity is you, and apparently the yow pronunciation was around in […]
Will the Greek understand what the words “philistine” and “spartan” mean in the figurative context, in Greek?
I’m reiterating what my fellow Greeks are saying, but to be really really explicit: The metaphorical meaning of Philistine (Φιλισταίοι) to mean someone anti-intellectual is absent from Greek. The typical words would be άξεστος “uncouth”, χωριάτης “peasant”, (learnèd) άμουσος “un-Mused, alien to the muses”, (Turkish) χαϊβάνι “animal”. Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής says that άμουσος = […]
What is the word similar to “Bingo” or “Hallelujah”, used by Greeks, in modern Greek?
To add some further nuances: When an interlocutor has finally understood something we’ve been hinting at—one of the contexts “Bingo!” is used in English—Greek uses α μπράβο! “Ah, well done”, with the emphasis on the “ah”. Kind of like “there you go”. More exasperated variants of “finally! at last!” (Dimitrios Michmizos’ answer) are έλεος! “Mercy!”, […]
Why were the Ionian Greeks called the Ionians Greeks when the Sea of Ionia is on the other side of Greece?
To elaborate on Niko Vasileas’ answer and Michael Anderson’s answer: Nominative Iōn, Genitive Iōn-os, Adjective Iōn-ikos or Iōn-ios refers to the tribe of Ionians. Adjective Iŏn-ios refers to the sea, and is traditionally derived from the lover of Zeus, Io (mythology): Nominative Iō, Genitive Ious < *Iŏ-os. Io, transformed into a cow, is supposed to […]
How come does is not pronounced as /doʊs/?
If you want to make sense of English vowel pronunciation, Middle English phonology – Wikipedia is always a good place to start. Do had a long ō. (As it still does, allowing for the Great English Vowel Shift.) The Middle English 3rd person of do was dōeth, if the verb was a main verb, and […]
What was Socrates’ original word for marrying?
Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue? Two sources named: John Uebersax’s answer to Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue? Diogenes Laertius, […]
Are Ancient Greek ο declension masculine and α feminine the most perfect declensions?
Fascinating question. I mean, adjectives and nouns have declensions, and so do articles and pronouns. If an article is going to have a declension, better it have a declension that’s strongly associated with genders (since gender signalling is a core function of adjectives), than the third declension, which did not differentiate masculines and feminines. The […]