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Category: Linguistics
What is Yahweh’s name (Hebrew) translated into Ancient Greek?
There was a taboo on saying YHWH out loud in Hebrew, and that extended to other languages; so yes, the Septuagint rendered YHWH as Kyrios, the Lord, just as Jehovah (when Christians rediscovered YHWH) comes from YHWH with the vowels of Adonai. Now, Jehovah has come into Modern Greek as Ιεχωβάς, /iexovas/. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for […]
Why do many European languages use the same word for “morning” and “tomorrow”?
Brian Collins says “Probably because the protolanguage did not distinguish between those forms.” Actually, Brian has sketched the answer in his response, but the foregoing isn’t quite it. Indo-European languages often use notions of “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early” interchangably. The Ancient Greek for “tomorrow”, aurion, is cognate to the Lithuanian aušrà “dawn”; and the Ancient […]
How does Turkish sound to non-Turkish speakers?
https://youtu.be/iJZxmfhcSn0 Originally Answered: What does Turkish sound like to foreigners? Like French with a /ɯ/ in it. I was about to say “and without the annoying mumbling”; but, having been to Istanbul: Like French with a /ɯ/ in it. I do actually like the sound of it. (Although as a Greek I’m not allowed to […]
What are the differences between cypriot accent and greece accent?
I’m not going to do this question justice. Phonological differences in the dialect that carry across to the accent: Lots of /n/s that have dropped off in standard Greek, and longer [n]s than in standard Greek. So it sounds nasal: not French, nasal vowel nasal, but lots of nnnns nasal. The Greek counterpart of the […]
What is the Greek word for actor?
Modern Greek: like everyone else said, ηθοποιός. In Ancient Greek this meant “character-building”. The modern meaning came about because plays can be character building, I suppose, but I can’t find out when the meaning shift happened. Pretty sure it’s very recent. The word is from katharevousa. The old vernacular word is θεατρίνος, which is still […]
Why is there a ‘d’ in the word fridge but not in the word refrigerator?
Allow me to write a more general answer. The phonotactics of a language, and the conventions of its spelling, can lead speakers to expect letters to be pronounced differently in different contexts—for example, at the start or at the end of a word. Truncation, in words like (re)frig(erator), takes a sound from the start or […]
What is the etymology of the Russian word vishnya (cherry)? There seems to be a connection to the Turkish word.
The answers given here have opened up a secondary conundrum. It’s uncontroversial that Turkish got the word from Bulgarian. The controversy is whether the Slavic word came from Greek, the Greek word came from Slavic, or the similarity is a coincidence. The Greek word could easily have come from Bulgarian; and if it’s a Slavic-wide […]
How does Hungarian sound to someone who doesn’t speak it at all?
One of my favourite pastimes when I was younger was to channel-surf to SBS (the multi-cultural broadcaster), and try and guess the language being spoken in the movie I’d landed halfway through. The rule of thumb I’d worked out is, if they sound Turkish and look Swedish, they’re Hungarian. Answered 2016-04-12 · Upvoted by Jácint […]
Why does Basque sound like Spanish despite Spanish being linguistically closer to French, Persian and Hindi?
The Greek spoken in Southern Italy sounds like it’s spoken by the Mario brothers. The Greek spoken in the Ukraine sounds soaked in vodka. And when I’m not in Greece, my dentals become alveolar: I sound like a caricature of “Uncle Nick from America”. Basques live in Spain. The grammar has remained impervious to contact, […]
How come that the term “Pharaoh” ends with H in English and with N in many other languages [(like: Faraon, Firaun (in different languages)]?
A most excellent question, Aziz! I don’t have the complete answer, but googling gets what seems to be most of it. The original form, per Pharaoh, ends in a vowel. Hieroglyphics pr-3, Late Egyptian par-ʕoʔ, Greek pharaō /pʰaraɔ́ː/, Hebrew פרעה (parʿōh), Latin pharaō. The Greek word pharaō is indeclinable, but it does have a variant […]