Subscribe to Blog via Email
March 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Category: Linguistics
Could someone who speaks Cypriot Greek tell what “λεγνά” is/are?
https://youtu.be/FhLRDY78B5U A2A, and I don’t speak Cypriot. Well, this is quite the puzzle. The lyric goes: Τ’ άι Φιλίππου δκιάβηκε, τζι ήρτεν τ’ άι Μηνά,τζι οι κορασιές παντρεύκουνται τζι αλλάσσουν τα λεγνά St Philip’s day is gone, St Menna’s day is here,and girls get married, and the slender ones change/and change the slender ones. I’ve […]
What forms the basis of the suffix used when describing which country someone comes from?
There are no rules, but there are trends. -ish is used for country names that the English would have been familiar with in the Middle Ages. -ese is used for country names that the English learned of via the Italians or Spanish. That includes East Asia. -(i)an is used as a default for new-fangled country […]
Which transliterated version of a surname sounds better, Potyomkin or Potemkin?
Yes, English routinely transliterates Cyrillic Ё as E. For that matter, Russian routinely writes Ё as Е. Our transliterations (and your default orthography) aren’t up to date with the last couple of centuries of sound change in Russian. Potemkin is the most familiar version to English-speakers, since “Potemkin village” is a well known expression (and […]
Trenchant
Not as recondite as some of the Magister’s lexical choices, but I just saw it today, and I see that he’s used it against me once: Michael Masiello’s answer to Can someone be intelligent and not agree with your political views? she [Irene Colthurst] is a fierce intellectual who writes trenchant, lucid, well-argued answers supported […]
If an Irishman moved to Greece and learnt to speak Greek, would he still have an Irish accent?
The folk musician Ross Daly is of Irish descent, and has lived in Crete for 35 years: He has a broad Cretan accent, and he has something non-Greek underneath it. But it’s subtle, and it’s not an Irish accent per se. At most, it’s a somewhat overcareful enunciation, and maybe, if you listen closely, some […]
What is the history of the Soviet Greek language?
Indeed, as Basil Lucas has noticed, I did look into the history of Soviet Greek a few years ago, although the primary research was hardly mine: it was the Greek historian Vlasis Agtzidis’. This is a summary of the history, although Basil’s answer gives plenty more detail (and so does my blog): The Greek spoken […]
What’s the history of monotonic Greek orthography (plus other things like the combined OY)?
Gott sei dank! This is going to be fun! Ligatures OK, I’ll dispense with the “other things” (ligatures) quickly, referencing my own page Other Ligatures There was a mess of ligatures in Greek typography up until the 18th century, because Greek typography was based on late Byzantine squiggle. (That’s why typographers sigh at what might […]
In the globalized digital world, how meaningful is the criteria of geographic proximity to define a sprachbund?
… A very good question, Clarissa! On the one hand, not much, because English is in every household, though the telly and the interwebs. Now, where to find evidence for this? Journalistic Greek is awash with ill-fitting calques from English, and syntactic loans and semantic field readjustments too, because the journalists spend their time reading […]
What English words of Greek origin don’t sound like they come from Greek?
Glamour, as a Scots mutation of Grammar, from the same Education = Witchcraft equation that gave us Grimoire. Diocese. I had no idea until a month ago that this is just dioikēsis “administration”. For more palatalisation catching me unawares: cemetery from koimētērion. Dram, and for that matter Dirham, as derivatives of drachma. Answered 2017-02-07 [Originally […]
By which languages was your native language influenced the most?
Modern Greek? In terms of vocabulary, Italian (including Venetian), but not by much; toss-up between Italian and Turkish. Then Latin, then French, then English. In terms of grammar, any significant influence was through the Balkan Sprachbund. A lot of the Sprachbund features originated in Greek (and we can tell through the history of Greek and […]