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Category: Linguistics
euhemerism
Michael Masiello’s answer to Was God a person? No, but it is refreshing to see someone flirt with euhemerism on Quora. Euhemerism – Wikipedia Euhemerism is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhemerism supposes that historical accounts become myths […]
A Veridical harvest
Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui? has triggered this from me: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui? Esoteric does not just mean “obscure”, it means understood only by very few select people, who are initiated into knowledge. The Greek […]
Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui?
The true and honest and equitable answer is the Magister’s: Michael Masiello’s answer to Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui? Vote #1 Michael Masiello. Vote early and vote often. The petty and cavilling answer is mine. Others have gone part of the way there, but I’ll finish the task. […]
vertiginous
Michael Masiello’s answer to Why is it so hard for many to believe that the Earth and mankind were designed? If you can still believe in naive teleology after you read this essay by Stephen Jay Gould , try reading it again. And the panda’s thumb, I’m afraid, is the tip of a vertiginous iceberg. […]
Do you think there is a mother language for all the other languages?
Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are there so many languages in the world? Firstly, because we are not even sure that there was monogenesis of language. That is, we are not sure whether language originated in a single contiguous community of humans, or multiple communities. Myself, I suspect there was monogenesis, but that’s a hunch; […]
How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?
I’m not contradicting Warren M Tang (see Warren M Tang’s answer to How we can differentiate functionalists, cognitivists, and structuralists?), but let me try a different formulation. A functionalist explains language structures by appealing to the communicative function of those structures. (They do linguistics by metaphors.) A cognitivist explains language structures by appealing to general […]
In Christian historical movies, why aren’t the Romans speaking in Greek instead of Latin?
Because lots of Westerners know Latin (or at least know about Latin), relatively few Westerners know Ancient Greek, and Latin is the language Westerners associate with the Roman Empire. Having Greek spoken in a movie would really just confuse people, who’d expect the Romans in Palestine to be speaking Latin. That, and the logistics of […]
Why don’t current-day Yugoslavians speak a Latin-based language but Romanians do?
They did: Dalmatian language – Wikipedia Istro-Romanian language – Wikipedia Aromanian language – Wikipedia Megleno-Romanian language – Wikipedia What happened is quite simple: Slavic tribes moved into the area quite rapidly, between 500 and 800. Slavonic displaced Romance languages in most areas they moved into, with a few enclaves surviving. The real question is not […]
When was the first time that Chinese was translated into any Indo-European language, e.g. Latin, Greek, etc.?
There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled. Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the […]
Is language production very important in order to be good at reading comprehension in classical or biblical languages?
It certainly is not regarded by most language teachers as important. Latin and Greek prose composition, which required students to produce original text (even if as a pastiche of Thucydides or Caesar) was huge a century ago, and I get the impression is extinct now. There are some ancient Greek text books that trying to […]