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Category: Linguistics
Since Cyamites is probably an epithet for Hades, could the scythe/sickle be the meaning of the digamma missing from his name?
As OP clarified elsewhere, the prevalent account for the name Hades is that it originally had a digamma in it, and meant Unseen: Hades – Wikipedia. Ἀϝίδης A-wídēs > Ἀΐδης Ā-ï´dēs > ᾌδης Ā´idēs. The archaic wid– stem for ‘see’ is the same as the stem vid– in Latin, and wit in English. (The terms […]
How different do dialects of the same language feel to you?
I was brought up in Crete. I read Cretan Renaissance literature as an adult, and was taken aback at the notion that the kinds of conceit you might find in Shakespeare (common Italian antecedents) were being expressed in the language my grandmother used to yell at her chickens. Greece is a country run on the […]
How do I search in the dictionary for the Ancient Greek verb υφηιρειτω?
Well, you could go to a morphological analyser of Ancient Greek, type in the word, and see what comes out. Such as morpheus on Perseus, or the other offshots of morpheus publicly available, or the subscription only variant of morpheus that I worked on for thirteen glorious years at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, before my […]
I recently reread Jack London’s “White Fang” and noticed the phrase “not for nothing” therein. Where did that phrase originate?
Jack London’s example, as usage in What does “not for nothing” mean?, is: “Not for nothing had he been exposed to the pitiless struggles for life in the day of his cubhood, when his mother and he, alone and unaided, held their own and survived in the ferocious environment of the Wild.” Note that this […]
What does “not for nothing” mean?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=not%20for%20nothing&defid=4426994 Contra the other two answers here, “not for nothing, but” is indeed used, as Urban Dictionary defines it, as a hedge. It is in fact a verbal tic of Aaron Sorkin’s that drew attention through its overuse on The West Wing: Inside Aaron Sorkin’s Brain, Sorkinisms II: Not for Nothing. Most famously in the […]
How can I connect between the phonetic and the words meaning?
It’s a pillar of semiotics that you can’t: Ferdinand de Saussure’s renowned Arbitrariness of the Sign (Arbitraire du Signe). Sound symbolism is an exception to the Arbitrariness of the Sign, and it’s an exception that Saussure was aware of, and addressed (see http://personal.bgsu.edu/~dcalle… quoting his Course): it’s a marginal exception, and as signs become conventional […]
How can we determine how old a dialect is?
Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which language is older, Persian or Arabic? There’s no such thing as an older language. Similarly, there is no such thing as an older dialect. Sure, for example, the English of England has been spoken in the same place for 1500 years. But the English of America retains a bunch of […]
How is it determined that an ancient language had pitch or stress or tone accent?
In the case of Ancient Greek, it’s actually quite straightforward: We know that words had accents, because the ancients made up signs for accents. Words having accents is the norm in language anyway. We know that normally only one syllable per word had an accent, because that’s how the ancients wrote their accents. At the […]
What do the accents (acute/grave/circumflex) of Ancient Greek sound like?
From what we can work out, including the evidence from the ancients, and as consolidated on Ancient Greek accent – Wikipedia: If the syllable was short: an acute meant High pitch, and a grave meant Low pitch. (In reality, it meant neutral pitch.) If the syllable was long, break the syllable up into two Morae. […]
What is the etymology of “Pyramus”, the name of the famous mythological character?
I looked up Dr. W. PAPE’s Woerterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen. Dritte Auflage neu bearbeitet von Dr. Gustav Eduard BENSELER. Vierter Abdruck. Braunschweig, 1911, the big old Greek dictionary of proper names. It brings up the Byzantine authorities’ guesses, and they lean towards ‘wheat’. The Etymologicum Magnum says that the river Pyramus was so called διὰ […]