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Category: Linguistics
What is one random thing you like about Albania?
The way familiar words (Greek or Turkish) look in Albanian. xham. suxhuk. trëndafill. And the word you just gave me: sufllaqe. Answered 2016-07-02 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-one-random-thing-you-like-about-Albania/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
How did USA end up with quite a few distinct dialects and Australia end up with more or less one, given their similar colonial pasts?
Speaking Our Language by Bruce Moore, Oxford University Press 2008, explained the homogeneity of Australian English as follows—as I summarised it in History of Australian English on my Hellenisteukontos blog: Moore puts forward the formation of an Australian English as a dialect koine in Sydney, within two generations of settlement, and then diffusing out of […]
What does ‘Ζωή μου, σᾶς ἀγαπῶ.’ mean?
I’ve actually been puzzled by this myself. I mean, I know the answer, obviously. It’s a politeness plural, patterned after French Vous (and Early Modern English you). And it’s been mainstream in Greek since the 19th century, although Greeks in practice avoid out when they can—because to them it’s much more about distance than respect. […]
What is the variation in the Greek pronunciation of ντ, μπ, γκ?
In brief: The prenasalised pronunciation is older, as the spelling shows. There are dialects that prenasalise and ones that lose the preceding nasal. E.g. Cyprus for the former, Crete for the latter. Within Standard Modern Greek, prenasalisation has been associated with Puristic Greek, and un-prenasalised stops are becoming more common in casual speech; there are […]
Why do some Australians have accents similar to the English while others sound more like Crocodile Dundee?
I’m sure I’ve already answered this more fully elsewhere on Quora, but: The distinction in Australian accents has historically been much more about class than region; the three distinctions identified 50 years ago were Cultivated Australian, General Australian, and Broad Australian. Cultivated Australian was pretty much the same as British Received Pronunciation, except that its […]
What are the earliest documented texts in Albanian?
This came out of an exchange I had with Kelvin Zifla, over at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why do I experience a profound feeling when I read and understand old writings of my mother language? It involves correcting Wikipedia, though I’m not bothering to just yet. There are three definite oldest attested texts in Albanian. […]
What does Hortalotarsus mean in Latin or Greek?
No explanation offered in the original paper On Hortalotarsus skirtopodus, a new saurischian fossil from Barkly East, Cape Colony, though the author does indicate it was all about the distinctive Tarsus (skeleton) (back of the foot). Nothing in Massospondylus, the accepted family name for the dinosaur. The Spanish Wikipedia on Hortalotarsus offers “tarsus of a […]
If atom is Ancient Greek for uncuttable, what is Ancient Greek for divisible?
Democritus was going with the notion that, if you kept cutting a substance in half (as Dimitra Triantafyllidou explains the verb), an atom is where you got to when you couldn’t split it any more. tmētos and a-tomos are both adjectives derived from different variants of temnō “cut, split”. There is no adjective *tomos “cuttable” […]
How do you translate the word ‘dreamer’ in Greek?
This couldn’t be another Google Translate question from… …. yes! Anon! Strikes again! ονειροπόλος. Which actually originally meant interpreter of dreams. The Triantafyllides dictionary Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής says the meaning switch is via French rêvasseur—which implies, at least, that this Homeric word was reimported into Modern Greek, incorrectly, to fill a gap identified by […]
Why does the Greek language sound like Spanish?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MxbBaVK1KKk Originally Answered: Why do Spanish and Greek sound so similar? OP is right, and Joseph Boyle gets it, while Yiannis Tsiolis and Eve Vavilis are in fact being misled by already knowing Greek. (Ditto Laura Hale for already knowing Spanish, porque tiene una mujer española). The question can’t be answered by someone who already […]