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Category: Linguistics
What is the root of word “Havales”, denoting in Greek, “spending time, having fun”?
A magnificent resource I have just stumbled on, in seeing if someone has already answered this question (do I look like a Turcologist to you?) is tourkika.com. An online Turkish grammar resource for Greek learners of the language, with lots of etymology for loan words into Greek. The etymology… is enlightening. Χαβαλές – havale. From […]
Did people in the first century have last names?
Romans had nomen and cognomen, which were inherited names like surnames. Greeks and Jews, like contemporary Icelanders, just had patronymics: John son of Zebedee. (See also the list of high priests of Israel.) Less often, they had nicknames indicating jobs or characteristics: Simon the Zealot, Judas of Kerioth, Jesus the Nazarene. In narratives, those distinctions […]
Do onomatopoeias have etymologies?
It’s a very insightful question, OP. If an onomatopoeia is a completely transparent mapping of natural sound to human language, then it is an inevitability, and there’s no point attributing it to one coiner or another, one language or another: the onomatopoeia is just there, a sound ready for humans to imitate, and humans will […]
What are some famous Greek sayings?
Some highlights from List of Greek phrases. See the Wikipedia page for more detail and other phrases. ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω. Ageōmétrētos mēdeìs eisítō. “Let no one untrained in geometry enter.” ἀεὶ ὁ θεὸς γεωμετρεῖ. Aei ho theos geōmetreî. “God always geometrizes” αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν. aièn aristeúein. “Ever to Excel” γηράσκω δ᾽ αἰεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος. Gēraskō d’ […]
What decides if a word is easy to learn due to similarity with a known one?
It’s an interesting question, OP. I wonder whether too much similarity will make a word less easy to learn, not more, due to the potential for confusion. There can’t be a categorical difference for when a word switches from similar to dissimilar. It’s not like a distance of 3 means similar and a distance of […]
What is the definition of allophone, what is the relationship between allophones and free variation?
Phonemes are groupings of phones (different sounds), which language speakers treat as equivalent. The phones that are variants of the same phoneme are allophones of the phoneme. Normally, the distribution of allophones depends on their context: there is a rule, based on surrounding phonemes, which determines whether one allophone or the other is used. If […]
Would a language borrow from another language a word with which it already has homophonous words in itself?
Yes, it would. I’m not going to bother with examples other than grave (Germanic: tomb; French: serious). It is a common perception that language change is driven by trying to avoid ambiguity. In fact, language has an astounding tolerance for ambiguity, because context usually takes care of it. Instances where words change in order to […]
Are there any Placeholder names we can use to represent different kinds of person?
Placeholder name List of placeholder names by language The typical use in English of placeholder names for persons is to emphasise their random selection, or their representativeness. Hence the rich assortment of List of terms related to an average person, including J. Random Hacker for computing, Tommy Atkins for the British Army, or The man […]
Is Serbo-Croatian a language?
A2A, because apparently I have a great big “kick me” sign on me. (Only joking, Snežana Đorić (Снежана Ђорић)… … or am I?) Look, my personal opinion, as a taxonomist of the world (a Lumper and not a splitter) , is to look at what used to be one language, turned into four over a […]
Is the theory that Hebrew and Arabic words descend or derive from Greek correct?
https://www.scribd.com/doc/309363407/Joseph-Yahuda-Hebrew-is-Greek-pdf Already posted this as a comment: … The business with Yahuda’s supposedly suppressed book is a longstanding urban legend in Greek nationalist circles (such as Davlos magazine). An urban legend uninformed by the existence of Worldcat: Hebrew is Greek (Book, 1982) [WorldCat.org] Hebrew is Greek. Or Amazon: Hebrew is Greek: Joseph Yahuda: 9780728900134: Amazon.com: […]