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Category: Linguistics
What do modern Greek speakers think of the phonetics of ancient Greek as it is taught in textbooks and performed (in, say, readings of Homer)? Do they think these reconstructions are accurate? Why?
What do they think? *sigh* The students at the Classics Department in the University of Auckland have this channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/… In which they have published three recordings of pop songs sung in Ancient Greek, with Erasmian pronunciation. They are exceedingly clever renderings, both in translation and staging. Mama Mia even has a Sappho […]
What IT skills are useful or necessary for linguists and linguistics students?
What they said. For fieldwork, you get a flat-file database for organising your field notes and automatically generating glosses and dictionaries. (A relational database is overkill.) Toolbox (The Field Linguist’s Toolbox) and its predecessor The Linguist’s Shoebox from SIL International are the default tools. Databases are less useful than you might think, though I found […]
Is there a word which can be used to describe a pair of names which are different gendered variants of the same name?
It’s a fascinating question, and I don’t know that there is an existing word. Partly, that’s sexism, and partly, that’s the bias of historical linguistics in explaining derivation: Martina is the “feminine variant” or “feminisation” of Martin, and it doesn’t occur to people to describe the relationship of Martin back to Martina. In the rare […]
How would you describe your first or almost-native language to someone who doesn’t speak it?
Thx4A2A. I’ve already answered a related question from a linguist’s perspective: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What makes Modern Greek an interesting language to learn, from a purely linguistic point of view?. But this question really should be about a lay description. (But I can’t resist telling Ilir Mezini: it’s Albanian, missing half the letters, and […]
How many placenames have been Turkicised in Turkey?
If by Turkicised, OP, you simply mean “made to adhere to Turkish phonotactics, and often Vowel Harmony”, the answer is indeed most if not all. To add to Pierrick Jaouen’s examples, stin Poli (to the City) > İstanbul, is Nikea (to Nicaea) > İznik, Oinoë (mediaeval Greek /ynoi/) > Ünye, Ikonion > Konya, Kaisareia > […]
If a language dies does a culture die also?
Language is one of the primary vehicles of culture, and expressions of cultural distinctiveness. But it is not the only one. When a language dies, the language community has been linguistically assimilated into another community (assuming the community hasn’t been genocided). That is typically associated with cultural assimilation. But not always. As a counterexample to […]
Are there any scientific publications with swear words in them?
Well, there’s the classic ENGLISH SENTENCES WITHOUT OVERT GRAMMATICAL SUBJECTS by Quang Phuc Dong of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (pseudonym of James D. McCawley, 1967), and several others in that vein. But that’s linguists writing about swearing, not swearing per se. (There’s was quite a trend of little “who, me?” bombs in linguistic […]
In Modern Greek, is there any difference between “I have said” and “I have been saying”?
έχω πει, the perfect tense, is only used in perfective contexts (completed actions); so you can’t use it for “I have been saying”. You will use the imperfect, έλεγα, for that. So Greek makes no distinction between “I was saying” and “I have been saying”. The English “I have been saying” looks like it’s both […]
Why are there relatively few personal names shared between Indo-European languages?
Brian is of course correct that naming simply isn’t as stable as, say, the Swadesh-100 list of core vocabulary, or for that matter syntax (VSO, SOV, SVO). Things change much more quickly now than they used to, so you could object to Brian’s example. In English, the most popular names change radically every couple of […]
Why is the Greek letter phi translated into English as “ph” and not “f”?
Because when Latin started transliterating Greek, φ was still pronounced as /pʰ/: a p followed by an h. The shift of /pʰ/ to /ɸ/ to /f/ occurred later (the first evidence for it, Koine Greek phonology notes, is from Pompeii.) Answered 2016-07-22 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Why-is-the-Greek-letter-phi-translated-into-English-as-ph-and-not-“f”/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]