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Category: Linguistics
The Greek word εὐγενής ‘noble’ comes from εὖ ‘good’ + γεν- ‘breed’, but where does -ής come from?
-ής, -ές is a suffix used to form adjectives. The entry on -ής, -ές in Smyth’s Grammar §858, reads (Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges): 5. ες (nom. –ής, –ές): primitive: ψευδ-ής false (ψεύδ-ω deceive), σαφ-ής clear, πρην-ής prone, ὑγι-ής healthy. Very common in compounds, as ἀ-σφαλ-ής unharmed, secure (ἀ-priv. + σφαλ- in […]
The Greek word genesis (γένεσις) has the root gen, but where does the suffix -esis come from?
Γένεσις /ɡénesis/ “Genesis, origin” consists of the verb root gen- “to originate”, and the ending -esis. The -εσις ending of Greek genesis has two components. The –sis component is a nominalisation, indicating the result of a verb. Cf. ly-sis ‘solution’ < lyō ‘solve’; gennē-sis ‘birth’ < gennaō ‘give birth’; pep-sis ‘digestion’ < peptō ‘digest’; theōsis […]
Why are “m” and “n” sounds often interchangeable and/or confused in the middle of words?
In the case you raise of count, this is simply Assimilation (phonology). It’s not that the m and the n are interchangeable, it’s that nt is easier to pronounce that mt, because both the n and the t are alveolar, so you do not have to move your tongue and lips between the two sounds; […]
Why has the word συγγεής two γ? I know it comes from σύν + γεν, and that later the ν disappeared, but why putting two γ? And why has the ν disappeared at the certain point in history?
Because Greek didn’t have an ŋ letter, although they knew that the sound existed. Phonetically, the final -n in prefixes was often assimilated phonetically to the following letter: syn ‘with’ + pathos ‘passion’ > sym-patheia ‘sympathy, compassion’ syn ‘with’ + labē ‘taking’ > syl-labē ‘syllable: sounds “taken together”’ syn ‘with’ + rhaphē ‘sewing’ > syr-raphē […]
How can this Rilke translation be improved?
So you seek to translate: Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinausUnter den großen Himmel treten. “I would like to step out of my heart,And go walking beneath the enormous sky.” I’ll start by putting in the missing accent marks 
ἐκ τῆς καρδίας βούλομαι ἐκβαίνεινὑπὸ τῷ μεγάλῳ οὐρανῷ βαδίζειν I am so, so not going […]
What were Noam Chomsky’s views on Panini’s Ashtadhyayi?
Complimentary, but not deep. The interwebs widely quote Chomsky saying in Kolkata, in a 10-minute speech in 2001, “The first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini’s grammar”: An event in Kolkata. Chomsky in fact already said that in the preface of Aspects in 1965: “a generative grammar, in essentially the contemporary sense of […]
Which programming paradigm is the most similar to human speech?
Well, let’s think this through. I count three programming paradigms from when I was studying computer science 25 years ago: functional, logical, and procedural. They correspond to three types of semantics: denotational, axiomatic, and operational. The first two are pristine and beautiful articulations of mathematics and logic, respectively. The last involves modelling the internal state […]
What is the origin of the scientific name of the apple tree “malus”?
This has been answered already, I’ll just answer it more anecdotally. Indo-European has two words for apple, that show up in different daughter branches: *h₂ébōl shows up in Germanic (… apple), Celtic, Balto-Slavic, and probably Hittite šam(a)lu- ‘apple tree’ *méh₂lom shows up in Greek (Doric mālon, Attic mēlon), Latin (mālum), Albanian (mollë), and Hittite maḫla […]
By what process(es) do complex inflection systems form in natural languages? What influences how they form?
There are languages with clean, atomic, nuggety units of meaning as separate words: isolating languages like Chinese and (mostly) English. There are languages with suffixes as well as words, where those suffixes are still, for the most part, clean, atomic, easy to detect, and easy to take apart: agglutinative languages like Turkish. And then you […]
What are some beautiful Greek names for a girl?
I’m going to go all contrarian like Evangelos Lolos did. Way too much antiquity here. Special shoutout to John Salaris, who also went with two overtly modern names: Panagiota (Greek equivalent of Madonna), and Argyro “Silver”. Those names ending in –o are particularly delicious. If they aren’t truncations of other names (Βαγγελιώ < Evangeline, Βαλάντω […]