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Category: Linguistics
What are some funny Greek swear words that are not offensive?
This question has been sitting lonely in my in-queue for a very very long time. In order to address it, I have seen fit to google a couple of funny swear words, and I came across this delightful thread: melontikos ploiarxos . Someone on that education forum was graduating from a maritime college, and asking […]
Are there certain types of words that humans remember far easier than others?
Shulamit Widawsky is right about the emotive loading of words affecting their memorability. In the specific context of dirty words, you may well have been highly motivated to learn them. (There’s always keen motivation to learn dirty words in foreign languages, as evidenced here on Quora.) If you were strongly motivated and were delighted by […]
Do some incorrect or imprecise terms stick just because English language hasn’t better options?
Never, never, ever underestimate the power of inertia. In the instance you cite, of sex addiction vs compulsivity: the distinction is itself fairly new, and the use of the description to describe the patient has not yet stabilised, because the notion of compulsion as a medical condition has not been pervasive. So there’s a huge […]
Does the Greek word for Palaces, Megara, come from the Aramean word Magharat or Zagharat “caves”?
Maybe. There is a plural megara word in ancient Greek, which means “a kind of crypt into which live pigs were thrown during the Thesmophoria festival”. This is related by both Chantraine and Frisk to Hebrew me‘ārā “cavern”, meaning it is Semitic (in all likelihood), and thus related to Arabic Magharat. The singular megaron “hall” […]
Linguistics: Why do interjections differ?
Because, contrary to what you might think, interjections are not always pure spontaneous exclamations from deep in the neural cortex, that are universal to all humans. A few are; as I noted in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are there any short expletives that sound the same in different languages? Nick Enfield [Page on sydney.edu.au] (who […]
Why is the word “the” declining in English?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cthe%3B%2Cc0 The drop is indeed puzzling, but unlike Brian Collins I don’t think it reflects an actual change in English usage (such as the perishing of the encyclopaedic the—that wouldn’t make that much of a dint). I also don’t think Second Language Learner English would make such a dint. It’s about the representation of texts […]
Was Ionian the mother dialect of Herodotus?
Inasmuch as we can trust the ancient sources, Herodotus’ native dialect was Doric, and he may well have been a Carian speaker. As Wikipedia says, we can’t trust the ancient sources anyway: Herodotus Herodotus wrote his ‘Histories’ in the Ionian dialect, yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda […]
What are some of the limitations of truth conditional semantics?
Here’s another limitation: speech acts. A statement of how the world is (a declarative speech act) can be true or false. A command, a promise, or a performative statement (“I hereby declare…”) cannot meaningfully be true or false: it can only be felicitous or infelicitous (that is, appropriate). Here’s yet another, which Gary Coen already […]
When and how does semantics meets phonetics?
Good question, Anon! By design, they’re not supposed to. Linguistics makes a point of segregating them hierarchically: Phonetics: how individual sounds work Phonology: how sounds are organised into meaningful contrasts as phonemes Morphology: how phonemes are organised into meaningful components of words as morphemes Lexicon: how morphemes are organised into meaningful words Semantics: how the […]
Why was a Greek city with the name Mαρωνεια written Marogna in Latin and not Maronia?
As far as I can tell, you are referring to Maroneia in Thrace, and the rendering Marogna appears in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854) Maroneia is reckoned among the towns of Macedon. The modern name is Marogna, and it has been the seat of an archbishopric. Cramer (1828) also gives the name […]