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Category: Linguistics
What is the Latin translation of “Even the dead have not seen the end of war”?
Ne mortui quidem belli finem viderunt. Answered 2017-04-26 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-Latin-translation-of-Even-the-dead-have-not-seen-the-end-of-war/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What is written on the Library of Celsus and is it still readable easily for a modern average Greek?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Celsus Well, there’s a whole bunch of writing on the Library. In order of size: The four statues: ΣΟΦΙΑ ΚΕΛΣΟΥ, ΑΡΕΤΗ ΚΕΛΣΟΥ, ΕΝΝΟΙΑ ΚΕΛΣΟΥ, ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΗ ΚΕΛΣΟΥ. “Wisdom of Celsus, Virtue of Celsus, Meaning of Celsus, Science [Knowledge] of Celsus”. False friend in “Science”, but no problem. The facade: I actually got this from a Google […]
What is the word for the thief in the every day language of your country and in the New Testament?
Ancient Greek made a distinction between thieves and robbers: kleptēs vs lēistēs or harpax. Both kleptēs and lēistēs are used in the New Testament; the men crucified with Jesus were lēistai. The Modern Greek vernacular had lost the word lēistēs, and had kept the word kleptēs (as kleftis) to refer to both thieves and robbers. […]
How many types of dictionaries are there?
Dictionary Typology This presentation offers the following typology of dictionaries: Bilingual/Multilingual (translating one language into another) Monolingual Synchronic (contemporary usage) Limited (a particular field, e.g. medical; a particular register, e.g. slang) General: Comprehensive (all of the language, multi-volume) or Standard (single volume, mostly for paedagogical use) Diachronic Historical (the historical paths that words have taken […]
What is the origin of the terms “Bourazeris” and “Vlamis”, obsolete from the 21st century Greek language?
The Triantafyllidis dictionary is online: βλάμης [vlamis] “blood brother” < Albanian vlam: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής. Obsolete, but certainly familiar from rebetiko and later songs. The 1951 song Παλαμάκια is probably the best known instance of the word—or rather, of its feminine vlamissa: μπουραζέρης [burazeris], variant μπραζέρης [brazeris], was not familiar to me, and is […]
What is your opinion on the unidirectionality hypothesis of grammaticalization?
I am much more of a functionalist than Daniel Ross and Brian Collins, so I am much more sympathetic to unidirectionality, and the fact that there are counterexamples does not bother me. It did bother Brian Joseph, who’s one of the big names against unidirectionality, and who also marked my thesis. He found it pretty […]
Is Sanskrit still spoken today?
By way of corroboration of Chandra Mohan’s answer to Is Sanskrit still spoken today?— The villages mentioned by others in their replies are just show pieces. They do use some Sanskrit in communication, which was taught to them by some activists, but I was given to understand that their vocabulary may not be more than […]
Which languages lend themselves particularly well for poetry?
They all do. And let me elaborate on that. For starters, there’s the element of formal craft in poetry, and there’s the allusive use of language in poetry. Both of them are essential. For allusiveness, what you need is a culture expressed through that language. All natural languages that people live their lives in are […]
What does the suffix “ostomy” mean?
stoma is Greek for mouth. –stomia is stoma plus an abstract noun ending: “-mouth-ation”. In medicine, a Stoma (medicine) is also a surgically made opening. So a colostomy is a surgical intervention creating an opening (a stoma, a “mouth”) in the colon: kōlo-stom-ia > colostomy, “colon-mouth-ation”. The Wikipedia article gives 16 other stoma operations. The […]
Why did the post-structuralists ignore linguists such as Chomsky, who is far more important than Ferdinand de Saussure?
I’m not convinced by Michael Minnich‘s account, which makes a French Swiss linguist a Teuton. But it is certainly true that poststructuralism, as a European invention, was always going to draw more inspiration from what was happening in the generation of the European linguists who had trained the first poststructuralists, than in what was happening […]