Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 329 other subscribersDecember 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Category: Linguistics
What is the Greek word for heaven?
Ouranos for “sky, heaven”, and pre-Christian and proto-Christian notions of heaven. It’s what “Our father who art in Heaven” uses. And yes, that is the same word as Uranus; Uranus was the sky god. Once Christianity was entrenched, Heaven as in where the virtuous dead go is Paradeisos, Paradise, as it is in Catholic languages […]
Is the modern pronunciation of Greek accurate for koine?
It’s close. This is from memory, so I could be wrong in a couple of details. 1st century AD Koine was the same as Modern Greek in the following: Stress accent, not pitch accent Diphthongs pronounced as single vowels Most vowels with modern values Most consonants with modern values No aspiration It differs as follows: […]
Would the Byzantines have spoken Ancient Greek or something closer to modern Greek?
Modern Greek. Being literate in Greek has always meant being literate in Ancient Greek; so all our evidence of the vernacular is tainted, right up until the Cretan Renaissance (and there it’s tainted in a different direction, of conventionalised dialect). In the period between the Arab conquest of Egypt (when the papyri run out) and […]
Why do people say, “Call it pedophilia, not childlove” when the word “pedophilia” is Greek for “childlove”?
Just because two words have identical semantics, does not mean they have identical connotations. Pedophilia in modern society has extremely negative connotations. It didn’t have negative connotations when it was coined in Ancient Greece, because it was coined under different cultural norms. Words carry with them the connotations that a culture puts on them. Advocates […]
Do I need a good understanding of mathematics in order to excel at linguistics?
IMHO: for most disciplines no. Steve Rapaport has spoken on Applied Linguistics; but Applied Linguistics is a very different discipline to Theoretical/General. Phonetics is an experimental science, so you’ll need statistics there. Reconstructing in historical linguistics requires a degree of rigour and thinking in terms of rules which is a bit like maths, but only […]
What do you look like when you speak Ancient Greek (Koine) in Greece today?
How soon my fellow respondents forget Katharevousa. Just as well they do, too. Katharevousa (Puristic Greek), the project of purifying Greek of the last 2000 years of linguistic evolution, was a motley, incoherent, and rarely lovely thing. Some of its grammar was Attic, a lot more of it was Koine, and by accident it ended […]
Why is ‘pronounciation’ spelled as ‘pronunciation’ in English?
Brian Collins’ answer is impeccably correct for why pronunciation was not spelled pronounciation after the combination of the Great English Vowel Shift and Trisyllabic laxing (a long vowel three syllables back is shortened, as in insane ~ insanity). But all the answers aren’t really answering why pronunciation is still being pronounced pronunciation. Let’s look at […]
Is it true that some non-American children who watch American TV shows have adopted that accent?
My parents were first generation immigrants to Australia. My mother had no English when she came here. My father had high school English, but no Australian accent. My parents worked in their fish and chip shop attached to the house, so much of the daytime I was reared by Sesame Street; I interacted with my […]
What is the difference between Illocutionary act and Illocutionary force?
Per Illocutionary act and What is an illocutionary act? , it’s always been messy. One take is: The illocutionary act is a speech act: something that the speaker does by speaking. It often expresses an intention that the world matches what the speaker says—that their assertions are accurate, their promises sincere, their commands obeyed. But […]
What is the etymology of “archetypal”?
As the Googles will tell you, from Greek arkhetypon (ἀρχέτυπον): arkhē, meaning start, beginning, and typos, stamp, impression (originally: a blow). Literally: an initial stamp, an initial impression. And the meaning the word had was pretty close to “archetype” from the beginning: LSJ Adjective: “first-moulded as a pattern or model, archetypal”, used by Philo to […]