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Category: Linguistics
Do I hyphenate “upper middle class family”, if yes, then how?
Yes, hyphenation is less fashionable than it used to be, and yes, people think that it is finicky to introduce a distinction between two levels of punctuation. But may the fire of a thousand Harts and Fowlers rain down on all respondents, for not one of them suggesting as an alternative something involving an en-dash: […]
How did terms such as stoicism and cynicism come to adopt totally different meanings from their original Greek definitions?
Sorry to answer by reference to Wikipedia, but, well, I think the answers are all there. We have ancient philosophical schools. We have popularisations of what those ancient philosophical schools were about, in education and in all-round educated discourse. We have people repurposing those popularisations, to express commonplace attitudes. To the extent that the meaning […]
Do people in the Near and Middle East still refer to Westerners as Franks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks#Legacy In Greece: it was very much a mainstream term from Mediaeval times right through to the early 20th century. It was also used to refer to Greek Catholics; hence the classic song Frangosyriani “Catholic girl from Syros” (1932), from Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Catholic boy from Syros. The conflation of Western Catholics and Levantine […]
How hard is for Greeks that speak Standard Modern Greek to understand Tsakonian?
Not mutually intelligible. At all. The bizarre thing with Tsakonian is: the non-core vocabulary, you can understand, because it’s pretty much the non-core vocabulary of Greek. Except you’ve got some quite massive regular sound changes to deal with, which were regularly applied even to modern loans. [ɣramatici] for example, “grammar”, ends up as [ɣramacitɕi]. But […]
What are major languages which declined/extinct during Turkification of Anatolia?
All the answers posted are very good, and a more substantial contribution than I will make. I agree that in all likelihood, by the time the Seljuks came to town, the indigenous Anatolian languages were long gone, and it was all about the retreat of Greek and Armenian. But I was A2A’d. So I’ll talk […]
What can be lost in translation from ancient Greek?
The allusions. Which are much more obvious in Ancient Greek, because it had several quite distinct literary dialects. If you want to allude to Homer, or to the tragedians, you can easily choose a word that occurs only in Homer, or a grammatical inflection that is antiquated. And literate Ancient Greeks were meant to be […]
Why is an article inserted before a proper noun that has been qualified by an adjective?
Proper nouns in English are not normally qualified by adjectives; the adjective would be taken to be part of the proper noun (This is Lucky Phil). Some authors do qualify proper nouns with adjectives, although as this discussion notes (Adjective with proper noun), it is stylistically quite marked (“Stylistically, attributively modifying a proper noun isn’t […]
Did Hebrew affect all languages in the world? If so, is it the only language that affected all languages?
… The only wide-ranging influence of Hebrew I can think of is In the variants of languages that are spoken by Jews: Yiddish, Ladino, Judaeo-Greek, Judaeo-Persian, Judaeo-Arabic… for all I know, Judaeo-Chinese. In the church register of languages impacted by Christianity. And not a lot of words there. Amen, Satan and Sabbath are probably the […]
Is it correct that the word “Dune” comes from a very old Greek root?
A dune is a heap of sand. We can track it to Gaulish *dunom. Maybe. A θίς can be a heap of several things, including sand. A relation between the two has been suggested, but it’s not certain. To quote Frisk: No satisfactory explanation. Wackernagel compares Old Indic dhíṣṇya– ‘situated on a knoll’, ‘knoll strewn […]
What is the Latin translation of “healing is not linear”?
I’ll take a different template, with Alberto Yagos’ as an inspiration. When Ptolemy I asked if there were any shortcuts for plodding through the Elements, Euclid supposedly said, “there is no royal road to geometry”: Euclid – Wikiquote The first Latin translation of the quote is Non est regia ad Geometriam via. Non est regia […]