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Category: Linguistics
Has emergence of case system ever been observed?
Though it doesn’t look like Indo-European case, serial verb constructions have ended up turning into case markers. An instance is Chinese ba, which is primarily the verb “take”, but which has started to act like an accusative marker: “I take spear look” > “I ACC spear look”, I pick up the spear to look at […]
What is the degree of intelligibility between Standard Modern Greek and Cretan Greek?
I’ve done the Swadesh list lexicostatistics: 89 of 100 core words, which is comparable to Russian and Ukrainian. (I get the same figure for Cypriot.) Mutually intelligible, but just. Much more now that the dialect is dying out. I was exposed to the dialect 30 years ago when it wasn’t doing as badly; so I’m […]
Where did the word Nemesis originate?
Online Etymology Dictionary Nemesis, “Greek goddess of vengeance, personification of divine wrath,” from Greek nemesis “just indignation, righteous anger,” literally “distribution” (of what is due), related to nemein “distribute, allot, apportion one’s due”. Goes on to note that the word is cognate to German nehmen “take”. Conceptually, Nemesis is the same notion as one’s “lot” […]
Is there any NLP tool that can extract affix and stem of English words?
Yes, the Porter Stemmer is the most popular approach by far. See A survey of stemming algorithms in information retrieval for a survey, nltk.stem package for NLTK implementations, and Porter Stemming Algorithm for Porter’s own description of it. There are tweaks of it around, but noone has gone for anything different; and English being the […]
What is language?
Originally Answered: Hah. Having lectured Intro To Linguistics, I should be able to come up with a definition without going to Wikipedia. Ok: a language is a system of signs that are associated with meaning, and which can be combined to express more complex meanings. That doesn’t limit language to spoken languages, hearing languages, or […]
What is the most difficult non-English tongue twister you know?
A couple from Modern Greek: Μια πάπια μα ποια πάπια. mja papja ma pja papja. “A duck, but which duck?” Surprisingly difficult. Άσπρη πέτρα ξέξασπρη κι απ’ τον ήλιο ξεξασπρότερη. aspri petra kseksaspri c ap ton iʎo kseksasproteri. “White stone, utterly white, even more utterly white than the sun.” Ο παπάς ο παχύς έφαγε παχιά […]
Is the Modern Greek letter beta (Ββ) pronounced “b” or “v”?
To make explicit what others are hinting at: it is pronounced /v/, but is often transliterated as /b/ for consistency with ancient Greek. You won’t see it with modern names, but you may see it library catalogues, for example, which often use the same transliteration for ancient and modern Greek. And if a name is […]
What are languages you can understand even though you never learned them?
I have high school French, self taught Latin, and Esperanto. I’ve never studied Italian, but between working in an Italian languages department, exposure to classical music, and some guesswork, I’ve actually had basic Italian conversations while in Italy. Answered 2016-03-03 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-are-languages-you-can-understand-even-though-you-never-learned-them/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What is the etymology of the word “egotism”?
ego + ism is just about the complete story, but not quite. ego + ism = egoism. In fact, when French coined the word in 1755 (Online Etymology Dictionary ), they coined it as égoisme; and when Greek took the word in from French, they kept it as εγωισμός. But someone somewhere early on found […]
How do you say swear words in Greek?
With gusto? *Look at his stats* *Finds that his most popular answer ever is Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean?* *Breathes in* Let’s go with Lenny Bruce’s 9 dirty words, the predecessor to George Carlin’s Seven dirty words . ass κώλος. Cognate with colon. Is used for both arse and […]