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Category: Linguistics
Is djent an irregular verb?
Djent (which I hadn’t heard of coz I don’t get out much… … oh hang on, it’s the onomatopoeia! Djent djent djent. OK, carry on… ) could be a verb, sure. It’s English, we do that. We had a DJ here (the famous Molly Meldrum ) get in legal trouble 30 years ago, because he […]
What are the different fingers called in other languages and cultures?
Modern Greek: thumb: μεγάλο δάχτυλο “big finger” (vernacular) thumb: αντίχειρας “opposite to the hand” (formal) index finger: δείκτης “pointer” (i.e. index) (formal) middle finger: μέσος “middle” ring finger: παράμεσος “next-to-middle” little finger: μικρό δάχτυλο “little finger” (vernacular) little finger: ωτίτης “ear finger” (i.e. use to scratch the ear) (formal) … If you go online, you’ll […]
Does Monaco have its own language, or local dialect?
Yup. Close to the dialect of Genoa, which Monaco sits next to: Monégasque dialect. There’s been some promotion of Monegasque recently, but Monaco isn’t in the right part of the world for promoting small languages. The Duchy of Savoy (in the same general area, and homeland of Franco-Provençal/Arpitan) made French its official language three years […]
Is Greece more West or East?
Greece was an Eastern country in 1832, and has been telling itself ever since that it’s a Western country. (That’s what the Westerners were telling her too. At least, to her face.) By the 1990s, Greece was a Western country. But the Eastern roots are still there. When the switchover between East and West happened […]
What interesting differences would there be today if I went back in time to ensure that “-tion” words in English instead ended in “-tio”?
where the endings “-tion” and “-tio” both were in use. Alack, not so. The Latin ending is nominative –tio, genitive –tionis, dative –tioni, accusative –tionem, ablative –tione. That’s a pain, sure, but the common pattern is that the underlying ending seems to be –tion– (and that’s what you’d reconstruct the proto-Latin nominative as). The nominative […]
What is the plural form of the word “vertex”? Why is it irregular?
Vertices. Why? Because the word is straight of out Latin, and Latin has a lot of declensions that look weird from the perspective of English. In particular, the plural vertices suggests that the singular should be vertix, just like the singular of matrices is matrix. There are a lot of –ices plurals corresponding to –ex […]
History: During Alexander’s invasions, would his soldiers have found Old Persian or Indic to be somewhat familiar sounding given their closeness to Greek?
Good insight, Sabeshan. Probably. And they probably wouldn’t have cared. 300 BC was a good time to be doing historical linguistics. The Indo-European languages were a lot closer to each other back then than they are now. In fact, the only reason Indo-European was discovered and reconstructed when it was, was that we had 2000 […]
Since we say Slovenia, Serbia, and Croatia, then why do we say Czech Republic instead of Czechia?
I am going to regret wading into this. I am quite OK to say Czechia; then again, I have been exposed to languages that are quite OK to say Czechia (Tschechei, Tchéquie, Τσεχία, Ĉeĥio). So why the anomaly in English? It could be an endogenous reason—because Czechia doesn’t work for English speakers; or it could […]
Is degrammaticalization real?
Well. Grammaticalisation theory posits that there is a regular process in language of content words becoming function words and then bound morphemes. Opponents of grammaticalisation theory (e.g. Lyle Campbell, Brian Joseph) posit that grammaticalisation theory is not particularly meaningful if there are counterexamples (degrammaticalisation), whereby function words or bound morphemes become content words. Their ultimate […]
Is an accent sufficient in forming a dialect?
If the accent deviates only in intonation, probably not: intonations are difficult to capture schematically; and by the time you have a different intonation, typically there’ll be a whole lot of other differences anyway. If (as your question posits) you have only phonetic differences, but not phonological (so the same spelling system does just fine […]