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Category: Linguistics
Is there a word for “time travel” using Greek or Latin parts of speech?
The Modern Greek for “time travel” is the unimaginative calque Ταξίδι στο χρόνο (“travel in time”). It does indeed use the chronos word; but taxidi is a mediaeval word which now means “travel, journey” (originally, it was “expedition”). Star Trek was originally rendered in Greek as Ταξίδι στα Άστρα “Journey to the Stars”. For a […]
To which extent was Greek a spoken language by the native population in the early Greek state in 1823?
Let’s take the Greek State as 1832, when it had fixed boundaries. I’m also going to use the pre-2010 Prefectures of Greece to break down the area of the new State. We know that Arvanitika was spoken widely in the new Greek state. We know that many who fought in the War of Independence were […]
What is the difference between athematic and irregular verbs?
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/byti I’ll answer this for Greek. Irregular verbs are really irregular, to the extent of suppletion between different persons, and all sorts of other shenanigans. Thematic and athematic are two different classes of regular verb. The athematic class is smaller, and has more core vocabulary verbs, so we presume it to be older; it’s like […]
Is it possible for a dialect to be agglutinative but for the “base” language not to be?
Yes, my fellow respondents have rightly raised the definitional issues that would give one pause about agglutinativity. I’m going to be less scrupulous. The difference between fusional, isolating and agglutinative languages is a significant typological difference—although of course, as with anything typological, there are shades of grey that it ignores, and square pegs that it […]
What are some common words between Italian and Greek?
There’s a substantial number of Italian loanwords in Modern Greek. Many of those loanwords are specifically from Venetian, rather than Tuscan Italian, because a large part of Greece was under Venetian rule for centuries. (And a large number of Greek islands were ruled by other Northern Italian republics.) Italian was also the language through which […]
What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die?
Vote #1 Vicky Prest: Vicky Prest’s answer to What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die? No, seriously. Because this answer is just pedantic commentary on her answer, from someone who knows too much Greek, and can look up words on Wikipedia: List of paraphilias – Wikipedia. Symphorophilia. Literally, “misfortune-love”. Not […]
Would modern Greek speakers understand Longus, Daphnis, and Chloe in original Greek?
I’ve written a couple of answers where I’ve translated Classical Greek using only my knowledge of Modern Greek—although I was being overly permissive about understanding Classical grammar. So. Daphnis & Chloe, 2.5. https://msu.edu/~tyrrell/daphchl… Thereupon, he burst into loud laughter with a voice unlike that of a swallow or nightingale or swan. At the same time, […]
Which languages helped you more in learning Modern Greek?
I’m a native speaker, but I’ll venture this. Joachim Pense correctly said Classical Greek—and he also said that if you don’t already know Classical Greek, it is something of a detour. Knowing any language which has taken a lot of vocabulary from Classical Greek—meaning all Western European languages other than Icelandic—will help the vocabulary—but less […]
How can a software engineer get into computational linguistics?
You need programming chops, though nothing too flash and algorithmic. You need to be across regexes. You need to pick up some linguistics, but honestly, not as much as you might think. You certainly don’t need formal syntax or phonology. You will need to know what morphology is, especially if you’ll be working on languages […]
How different is the syntax of English (in the last three centuries) from those of ancient Greek or katharevousa?
The “last three centuries” gives me pause. Syntactically, there have been changes from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek, and in fact Katharevousa is closer to Modern than Ancient Greek, though it did pick up nesting articles inside articles (“the of the meeting chairperson”). But in the big picture typologically, they’re all pretty similar: free (pragmatically […]