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Category: Linguistics
Did George Michael speak Greek?
My father used to to work with a nurse who was from the same village as George Michael’s father. I asked him years ago, and he sneered that George Michael doesn’t know what Greek means. There’s also this: “Thank you… for thir-… twenty five… years.” Very halting, and no accent fluency. Comments in the YouTube […]
What are some examples of sentences that can be either Ancient Greek or Modern Greek?
Hm. No participles, no infinitives, no relativisers, no conditionals. Some conjunctions are the same, but you can already see we’re surrendering a lot of syntactic complexity to do this. No future or perfect, no unaccented augments, no datives, no prepositions with genitives (and the rest look different anyway), bits of the 1st and 3rd declensions […]
What unpopular opinions do you have about linguistics?
Not that controversial, but I think there’s a lot to be said for diachronic explanations of language, and the synchronic/diachronic distinction is somewhat artificial. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is functional grammar? will explain that a little bit: functional accounts are kind of diachronic to begin with (what function does this linguistic component serve in […]
What is functional grammar?
Vote #1 Trevor Sullivan: Trevor Sullivan’s answer to What is functional grammar? It’s the correct answer, but not defensive enough for my liking. 🙂 So treat this answer as a restatement of his. There are several ways of explaining why language is the way it is. Originally, the split was between diachronic and synchronic explanations. […]
If the word “homo religiosus” used by scholars mean a ‘religious human,’ what would be an equivalent Latin term for a “meaning seeking human”?
Homo significans, “human who makes meaning”, is already a well established expression. So is homo interpres, “interpreting human”, human who makes sense of things. You’re doing something more subtle: “seeking meaning in the universe, anticipating that there will be meaning”. It’s very close to homo interpres. But if you want to be more explicit: homo […]
Linguistically speaking, why is the relationship between the signifier and signified mostly arbitrary?
Vote #1 Michael Minnich: Michael Minnich’s answer to Linguistically speaking, why is the relationship between the signifier and signified mostly arbitrary? It brings up several pertinent reasons. My answer’s simpler: restricting ourselves to lexicon, non-arbitrary signifier–signified relations in a spoken language are going to be limited to referents that make a sound. Most verbs and […]
What are some strategies of anaphor binding/coindexation in languages and other strategies to resolve or compensate referent ambiguity?
I should know a good answer to this, as part of my apprenticeship (being a research assistant) was tracking referents in Acehnese discourse for Mark Durie. The obvious answers I think have already been given. Gender in all its manifold forms, extending to noun classes. Deixis. Politeness strategies and social deixis. Reflexives, including long-distance reflexives […]
What are the distorsions in the various (French, German, etc.) versions of the Erasmian Ancient Greek pronunciation?
Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching – Wikipedia Wikipedia enumerates English, French, German, Italian. I’ll list the pronunciations that I would deem wrong from the currently accepted reconstruction of Ancient Greek. I’m not even going to list the traditional distortions of Erasmian in English courtesy of the Great English Vowel Shift, and some bizarre notions […]
What does a linguist think of Albanian as he first starts to study it?
Vote #1 Sam Ahmed: Sam Ahmed’s answer to What does a linguist think of Albanian as he first starts to study it? As someone who’s both Greek and who was looking for things about the Balkan Sprachbund, I had the same reactions. With the added component of “… God, this is just like Greek” a […]
Why can’t we perceive onomatopoeia in other languages as easily as in our native language?
René Alix has basically covered it in his answer (Vote #1 René Alix’s answer to Why can’t we perceive onomatopoeia in other languages as easily as in our native language?) But there’s something that’s only implicit in René’s answer, that I’ll make explicit: No actual dogs really sound like that. And so you get the […]