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Category: Linguistics
What is the best way to learn to speak Greek fluently?
There’s the generic answer: the fine old Greek saying, Η μισή ντροπή δική σου, η άλλη μισή δική τους. “Half the embarrassment is yours, the other half is theirs.” Yes. They will think you sound ridiculous, no fear of that. They will also be hugely impressed (especially if they’re in the Greek diaspora), and will […]
Which formerly Ottoman-occupied peoples understand “s–tir” today?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/siktir OP noted that there were many answers already stashed away under What does Siktir (سیکتیر) means in Persian? I’ll paste here the comments that Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I left there for Greek. Some quite obvious parallels with Albanian and Romanian, as reported by Aziz Dida and Diana Crețu. Nick: In Greek it just means […]
Why aren’t more people using machine learning on historical linguistics?
Please God no. For the sentiment this proposal awakens in the soul of historical linguists, refer: xkcd: Physicists Plenty of people use machine learning on historical linguistics. They usually end up being picked up by science reporters, getting all the publicity that historical linguists don’t. And when they do, historical linguists roll their eyes, and […]
Why is an Acadian French accent considered funny compared to Quebecois French, which also has a funny accent?
Answer written with no knowledge of Acadien French other than that gathered through episodes of Acadieman. Remember. Dialects never sound funny because of something intrinsic to the local phonetics. It’s always political. It’s always about the relative prestige of the speakers. And it’s not about how dialects are supposedly ill-lettered corruptions of the pristine standard […]
In Koine Greek, what is the difference between the perfect tense and the aorist tense?
Ancient Greek has four past tenses; Modern Greek has two, and an auxiliary formation for the other two. The tenses differ in aspect. The imperfect emphasises that the past action was ongoing or continuous. The perfect emphasises that the past action is now complete. The main reason for doing that is, as Konstantinos Konstantinides points […]
Can modern day Greeks understand and read ancient scriptures in ancient ruins (Like this one?)
Variant of what the others have said. Ruins featuring Roman era Koine? There’ll be some faux amis, but the alphabet shape is recognisable, the grammar and vocabulary you can cope with if you’re educated. Ruins from 500 BC? The alphabet shapes vary from city to city; the ancient dialects can be very different from Attic. […]
What does the Greek word παράκλητος (paráklitos) mean? What was the original Aramaic/Hebrew word?
I’ll add to the other answers there’s a subtle nuance in paráklētos. A nuance so subtle, you’ll most often see it discussed in explanations of paráklētos, and the evidence for the distinction can be shaky. Paráklētos follows the pattern of preposition + verbal adjective; it literally means “by-called” (hence, helper or advocate, some you call […]
What is the etymology of Gylippus? It has to do with horses, but what else?
Γύλιππος (Gýllipos) in Gerhard Köbler’s site is all I get, and all it says is “origin unclear”. It does indeed look like a compound of gyl– and hippos “horse”. There is no gyl– word in attested Greek. There are the diminutives gyl-arion and gyl-iskos referring to kinds of fish; and there is the noun gylios, […]
Could Google Translate maintain a central codex “language” therefore bypassing artifacts that come from English-as-central-language issue?
Google Translate, like many machine translation projects, does not maintain [math]n^2[/math] language pairs when adding languages to its bank; it appears to maintain just n:English mappings—so that a translation from, say, Greek to Persian is pretty clearly via English as an interlanguage. That is a clear scalability issue, if you’re going to maintain the number […]
Does your language misuse grammatical case or gender to make a rhetorical point?
I’m glad you asked, OP. Language is a system, as the structuralists of yore argued. And if there is a paradigm of cases, then people will exploit choices in the paradigm to communicate different kinds of meaning. Even when those choices should be grammatically incorrect. The example I have in mind is from Modern Greek. […]