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Category: Linguistics
How do I translate these sentences into Latin?
This is parasitic on Alberto Yagos’s answer. Would be nice if we could call these collaborative answers! Don’t let your dreams be memes. Alberto is more than right to call memes graffiti. So: Ne tibi fiant spes inscriptionum res. Let not your hopes be the subject matter of graffiti. Not… great, not at all. If […]
What are some (longer) words that appear or are considered false cognates, but which could plausibly be actual cognates?
My favourite example is Hawaiian meli “honey” and Greek meli “honey”. I have even seen a historical linguistics textbook say that’s a coincidence (Trask’s, I think.) It’s not a coincidence. The honeybee is not native to Hawaii. Honey is referenced in the New Testament. The New Testament needed to be translated by missionaries into Hawaiian. […]
What origin does the last name Gargasoulas sound to you?
Ah yes. Dimitrious “Jimmy” Gargasoulas, man who two days ago stabbed his brother for being gay, drove off with his pregnant girlfriend hostage, did donuts in the central intersection of the Melbourne CBD, then sped off with the cops in pursuit, and plowed into a shopfront, leaving four dead and tens injured. 2017 Melbourne car […]
How do linguists determine whether a language is agglutinative or it has postpositions?
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Urdu/Postpositions Well, let’s generalise the question (though I don’t know Urdu well enough). This is not going to be a complete answer btw, and I’ll ask for help from others. What is the difference between a preposition and a prefix, or a postposition and a suffix? That one is a word, and the second is […]
During antiquity, did anyone in Greece or Rome recognize similarities between Greek and Latin languages and hypothesized relationships between them?
Yup. Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek/Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek is a paper on that. And Are there any accounts of the Romans realizing linguistic similarity between Latin and Germanic languages? • /r/AskHistorians is a Reddit thread of it. The locus classicus is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but the idea was doing […]
What does “copped a serve” mean and what is the origin of the expression?
Vote #1 Danya Rose, who as far as I know has the right answer. Danya Rose’s answer to What does “copped a serve” mean and what is the origin of the expression? To my astonishment, OED does not have the phrase. It does have related phrases under cop, v. 3: “to capture, catch, lay hold […]
Why are irregular “to be”s quite different?
The reasons for the striking irregularities of the copula verb in Indo-European are addressed in Did the present indicative forms of the Latin verb “esse” evolve from two different roots? As those answers show, the Proto-Indo-European verb was in fact almost regular. But there is a broader question of why the copula in particular is […]
How has the word “pou” (που) been used in Greek, historically, throughout the various dialects?
God bless Khateeb, he’s actually asking me what I found in my PhD. Without me bribing him. And I’ve forgotten to reupload my thesis; Khateeb, remind me to do it if I haven’t done it in the next week. There will be some jargon here, but I’ll try to keep it high level. που (< […]
How can I become a field linguist and/or a historical linguist?
First part, you get the PhD. Margaret FalerSweany has got that covered. Expect to have to do at least one postdoc too. Now the fun part. How do you become an academic. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree? Did you run into any unexpected issues? Apart from […]
What is a four-tined fork called if a three-tined fork is a trident? Serious and not so serious answers welcomed!
quadrident. 3780 hits on Google. Here’s a commercial instance: IMERSION – Underwaters sports – SPEARFISHING SPIRIT The Coralign brand has a large variety of differents accessories tridents and quadridents to fit the threaded 6 X 100 shafts. Answered 2017-01-17 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-a-four-tined-fork-called-if-a-three-tined-fork-is-a-trident-Serious-and-not-so-serious-answers-welcomed/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]