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Category: Linguistics
What are some similarities and common things that Greek has with Arabic?
Commonalities between Greek and Arabic? They belong to different language families—Indo-European vs Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Phoenecian); noone has proven a more distant relation between the two. The alphabet of both derives from Phoenecian; hence the similarity in letter names to this day. That also extends to Hebrew: […]
Does word gerokronoliros (γεροκρονόληρος) contain non-Greek (borrowed) elements? What is its meaning and etymology?
I checked LSJ: no γεροκρ- anything. And there wouldn’t be: γερο- for “old” is Modern Greek, the Ancient Greek would be γεροντο-. I googled γεροκρονοληρος, as Dimitris Sotiropoulos suggested in his exchange with Konstantinos Konstantinides. The good thing about Google, is that it assumes you misspell things. So it tries taking words apart. I didn’t […]
Why do we lose our accents when we sing?
Originally Answered: Why do British/ Irish/ Australians when singing have the same American accent as American singers? Brian Collins and Robert Charles Lee, I disagree. They do too. And I do have a tin ear, but I’m not the only one to think so: Non-American pop singers (e.g. New Zealanders) tend to subconsciously adopt an […]
What can be most easily seen that change is constantly going on in a living language?
If you’re detecting change with your eyes: New vocabulary, then semantic shifts in existing words, then syntax — particularly syntax of individual words. fun became an adjective within my lifetime. If you’re detecting change with your ears: all of the above, then maybe phonetics. But sound change is slower, socially and generationally stratified, and geographically […]
What caused the English Great Vowel Shift?
I’ll give a general rather than a specific answer. The Great English Vowel Shift is a celebrated instance of a Chain shift, a sound change with impacts several sounds one after the other, as a kind of chain reaction. It helps when discussing vowel changes (which are particularly susceptible to chain shifts) to have a […]
How did certain words become homonyms?
Several ways. Dimitra Triantafyllidou has already answered; I’ll answer as well, a little more schematically, but it’s essentially the same answer. Sound mergers in the language. meet and meat used to be pronounced differently [meːt, mɛːt]; now they’re pronounced the same, [miːt]. Sound un-mergers in the language—or at least, a spelling system out of sync […]
How would I go about making a Latin translator website?
Anon, I commend you on your initiative. I don’t commend you on your question topic tagging; hopefully you’ll get some responses better targeted than this now. Learn Python. Not because I have any love for Python. I’d be happy to chain Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum together: each other’s company would be punishment enough. […]
Is it possible to translate the word zori/zor/زور , that exists in Greek & Persian, with ONE English word?
From Nişanyan’s etymological dictionary of Turkish, and زور – Wiktionary , zor came into Turkish (and thence Greek) from Persian, not Arabic. And lots of languages either side of Persian and Turkish have picked it up. A single word for all uses of ζόρι in Greek, that Dimitris Sotiropoulos lists in his answer? No, but […]
What are the most fascinating things you’ve learned studying linguistics?
Me, personally? That the same changes happen, again and again, from language to language to language. The same grammaticalisations; the same sound changes; the same semantic changes; the same syntactic changes; the same metaphors. Which is little to do with Universal Grammar, and a lot to do with universals of cognition and articulation. Answered 2016-08-31 […]
What do we call the process of creating all of the possible morphological extractions of a given word?
In traditional grammar, this is conjugation for verbs, and declension for nominals; both are limited to inflectional morphology. Answered 2016-08-30 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-do-we-call-the-process-of-creating-all-of-the-possible-morphological-extractions-of-a-given-word/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]