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Category: Linguistics
How many countries in the world say “Tata” when you say bye. And how did that happen?
It’s almost a word when we were kids. It is a word from when you were kids. It originated as a “nursery word”, as the OED puts it (i.e. baby talk), meaning both “good bye” and “walk”: 1823 S. Hutchinson Let. Sept.–Oct. (1954) 261 Baby I believe has not learnt any new words since Mrs […]
Why are most poems written with rhymes?
As Jakobson once said, though artlessly,poetry claims th’ axis of combination. The repertoire of sounds, in crafty array,are how the Muse stakes her signification.Without form woven in sonority,poetry loses its essential claim:ends up as prose with gilded metaphor,but does not merit the enchanter’s name. The Homeoteleuton as a devicewas known to Greeks as such a […]
How different are the dialects of your mother tongue within your country?
How does one measure it? I’ve already responded to something similar: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does the Greek language have a variety of regional dialects? and Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which of the Greek dialects sound harsh to a standard Greek speaker? The most deviant “dialect” of Greek, Tsakonian, is not mutually intelligible with Greek, […]
Should “Türkiye” become the official name for country of “Turkey” in English language?
Yok, Mehrdad dostum. İstemiyorum. Assimilating country names into a target language is something I have a lot of affection for. I don’t regard it as disrespectful, but as familiarising; I regard the alternative as exoticisation. I get greatly annoyed when I hear Greeks speak of themselves in English as Hellenes, or refer to Hellas. We […]
What is the best way to say “innovative agile support” in Latin?
Remixing the others’: Ut succurramus innovantes agiliter: To support by agilely innovating. Answered 2016-12-11 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-say-innovative-agile-support-in-Latin/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Could someone into Greek Orthodox Christianity define “καθωσπρεπισμός”?
Like Dylan Sakic, I’d need a lot more context, but here’s a stab. Καθώς πρέπει is a calque of French comme il faut, “as it should be done”. It refers to social propriety, observing social etiquette, but it has an intense connotation of hypocrisy and stuffiness; it’s the kind of thing that “bourgeois” gets inevitably […]
How did the surname “Featherstonhaugh” get its completely unintuitive pronunciation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featherstonhaugh Not getting an answer online, or in Patrick Hanks’ The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland . I do get this from Wells, J. C. (2000), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary: Odd pronunciations of proper names – examples: there are four recorded pronunciations of Featherstonhaugh: /ˈfɛð ərst ən hɔː/ (Featherstonhaw) /ˈfiːst ən heɪ/ […]
Is pronunciation speed a meaningful feature when discussing languages?
I don’t know that this has really attracted the interest of typologists, though I’m happy to be corrected. The phonologist I used to work for as a research assistant was considering writing an article, comparing the speed of newcasts, but I don’t think he went ahead with it. I think the impression we have that […]
Is it possible for a person to acquire a written language as their native language?
Hello all the good people, Clarissa and Audrey and Brian. I was going to join in to your discussion under Brian’s answer, but it didn’t head in the direction I was hoping. Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller, who are the deaf–blind people Brian alludes to, communicated through finger spelling, read Braille, and wrote. Must have […]
Can learning Modern Greek be helpful for studying philosophy?
I dearly, earnestly, ardently want you to learn Modern Greek for the pop culture. But don’t do it to help you with Ancient Greek philosophy. You’ll trip over more false friends than you can shake a stick it. Meanings and connotations of words have changed over the millennia, and nowhere is getting the precise connotations […]