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Category: Linguistics
Do Greeks who came from Turkey in 1960 have a different accent?
1960 in the question certainly alludes to Istanbul Greeks. There has been minimal attention paid to the dialect of Constantinople/Istanbul, because it was an urban dialect, and historical linguists were interested in the countryside, as more archaic material: Constantinople itself had all unstressed vowels, like Southern Greece, and unlike the villagers of Thrace, who reduced […]
What is the right way to say “congratulations” in Greek?
Sofia Mouratidis is right. She’s also right in the formal synonyms, and in one of the informal synonyms. I’ll add a second informal synonym: συγχαρίκια. Amusingly (to me anyway), the original meaning of συ(γ)χαρίκια is “congratulatory gift”. When you brought someone good news, they were expected to reward you with a synkharikin. In fact, before […]
What did your language sound like 500 years ago?
https://www.quora.com/What-did-your-language-sound-like-1-000-years-ago OP, following up on Nick Nicholas’ answer to What did your language sound like 1,000 years ago?. Modern Greek 500 years ago sounded, well, pretty much like an archaic dialect of Modern Greek. In many ways, there’s much more variation between dialects than between 500 year old Greek and Greek now. The Cypriot of […]
What does Georgian sound like to foreigners?
What Sven Williams said. I have listened along to Chakrulo, that greatest of Georgian songs, with the transliterated lyrics; and I just could not hear the crunchy clusters. In fact, I’m going to do the same with some lyrics I just found: Hai, Khidistavs shevkrat piroba,chven gakhvdet ghivdzli dzmaniachaukhtet Mukhran Batonsa.Tavs davangriot bania! Hai, hai, […]
What is the correct pronunciation of dysania? I have found it in three references and all three listed different pronunciations.
Peter J. Wright is correct that it is [dɪsˈeinia], but doesn’t explain why. And I knew he was right, but I also confirmed that the first -a- in the Greek word ἀνία is short. So is the first -a- in the Greek μανία. So why is it a long a? Traditional English pronunciation of Latin […]
Has e-mail, Twitter and texting caused people to forget or ignore the rules of grammar and punctuation?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/do-commas-still-matter/2016/10/04/afed2c72-8a74-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?utm_term=.a1a2edc54a4c&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1 Read less Lynn Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) and more David Crystal (Making a Point)! (That was a genius move of Profile Books, btw: to publish both the Punctuation Panic book, and its Refutation.) As Crystal argues compellingly, Internet and SMS discourse don’t make people forget the rules of formal punctuation they have been […]
How widespread among languages the usage of the word for “where” as a general relative pronoun (meaning persons or objects)?
That would be the standard modern Greek relativiser I did my PhD on, in fact. Add Hebrew ašer > še, Bulgarian deto. Anon (you didn’t need to Anon this time, Anon), I can rule out Albanian: që in standard Albanian, çë in Arvanitika are not locative. Answered 2016-10-04 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/How-widespread-among-languages-the-usage-of-the-word-for-where-as-a-general-relative-pronoun-meaning-persons-or-objects/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
How has pronunciation vs written form evolved in the History of English? Why is it so confusing, to the point that you have spelling contests?
Up until the late Middle Ages, English spelling (at least, as we reconstruct it) is not that bad. It is internally consistent, and, importantly, it varies from region to region, because they actually spoke different dialects from region to region. Yeah, the mute final <e> was an annoying way to indicate that a vowel was […]
Were all books of the New Testament written in perfectly correct Koine Greek?
Revelation is notorious for its grammatical errors; google Revelation and Solecism (fancy Greek for “bad grammar”) or Barbarism (fancy Greek for “L2 Greek”). You’ll see lots of attempts at explaining it, from the straightforward “he barely spoke Greek” to “he was cutting and pasting bits of the Septuagint without adjusting the grammar” to “there’s a […]
What did your language sound like 1,000 years ago?
Greek: 1000 years ago, the language was already Early Modern Greek. Unfortunately, we have very very very few records of the vernacular to sift from, out of the archaic Greek everyone was writing. We have the Bulgarian Greek inscriptions from 1200 years ago, but by 1000 years ago, the Bulgars were using Slavonic. We have […]