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Category: Linguistics
What does the name “Teah” mean?
*Looks at profile of OP Tia, hoping for a hint* … You’re Australian, and in fact live on the same train line as me (my wife used to live in Berwick). Well, shit, Teah, that doesn’t help me at all. You’re Australian, so that name could be from anywhere. 🙂 Let’s think. Names ending in […]
What is the translation of the inscription outside Phanar Greek Orthodox College?
Πατριαρχικὴ Μεγάλη τοῦ Γένους Σχολή. αωπ.The Patriarchal Great School of the Nation. 1880. (ου is written as the ligature ȣ.) More prosaically, it is now known in English as Phanar Greek Orthodox College, and in Turkish as Özel Fener Rum Lisesi. It was established in 1454 and was the premier institute for schooling of Greek […]
Why is the Icelandic language more linguistically conservative than other Germanic languages?
Our guesses: Language change is quicker in places where there are a lot of people, lots of social difference, and a lot of traffic. Lots of people generate more random linguistic variation; lots of social difference generates more deliberate linguistic variation; lots of traffic helps idiosyncratic distinctions that one person comes up with propagate. Iceland […]
How would a society work if everyone was deaf?
Imagine a world in which humans didn’t have Electroreception. None of that electric frisson you get when a predator lurks outside. No ability to use your body as a compass; why, the number of humans that would get lost on hikes! No ability to tell what’s in front of you just by its capacitance or […]
In Greek, what does the suffix -or mean?
–tōr is an agent suffix: Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges (misscanned) a. The primary suffixes τᾱ, τηρ, τορ, τρο, ευ, denoting the agent or doer of an action, are masculine. … 3. τορ (nom. -τωρ): ῥή-τωρ orator (ἐρέω shall say, ἐρ-, ῥε-), εἴ-ρη-κα have spoken, κτίσ-τωρ founder (κτίζω found, κτιδ-), σημάντωρ commander […]
Why do some words come across as more clichéd than others?
Most metaphors, we’d like to assume, were new once. (Likely not all of them: cognitive metaphor is tied up with cognition.) Some new metaphors, or figurative speech, or just plain collocations, become popular. Others do not. Some of those popular collocations become so popular, they become entirely conventional and characteristic of a genre. And in […]
What is the word to call the husband in your country’s language?
Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”. Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark. You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between […]
Is there a region in Canada where they have adopted the southern accent?
Not that I know, but there’s a region of the South that does a stereotypically Canadian thing. The stereotypically Canadian thing is Canadian raising: pronouncing the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ as /ɐɪ/ and /ɐʊ/ before voiceless consonants. It’s the thing that Americans make fun of, by saying Canadians say aboot instead of about. Canadian raising […]
What does the inscription SOEGENG RAWOHIPOEN mean? Which language is it in?
Thank you Google RAWOHIPOEN SOEGENG. As Daniel Lindsäth pointed out, SOEGENG is Indonesian. When you google SOEGENG, you get Sugeng, which reminds me that Indonesian used to be spelled more Dutch than it is now, including using oe. I also realised that the SOEGENG comes first, the writing forms an arc. SOEGENG RAWOH IPOEN. Switch […]
What is the future of Machine Translation?
So… lemme get this straight. A guy who was worked for Google Translate is A2A’ing someone who did a couple of graduate courses on Machine Translation 20 years ago? Once again, Adam, you flatter me. We agree, and I defer to your superior expertise; I’ll just, eh, restate what you said. Machine Translation is AI-hard: […]