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Category: Linguistics
Why do Greek people call their grandmothers “Yaya”?
Because that’s the Modern Greek word for grandmother. 🙂 The Triantafyllidis dictionary gives a shrug for the etymology: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής λ. νηπιακή: γιάγια και μετακ. τόνου για προσαρμ. στα άλλα ανισοσύλλαβα ουσ. Baby talk: yáya and accent shift to adapt to other imparisyllabic nouns Babiniotis’ dictionary gives the same shrug. The motivation is […]
Will synthetic language speakers realize how inconvenient their mother tongues are after studying some analytic language?
Sure, I did. But I’m a linguist, so I don’t count. 🙂 Not that agglutinative/flexional is the same thing as analytic/synthetic, but Esperanto did spoil me for language learning in my teens, and I have read a Turkish grammar just for aesthetic enjoyment. And the most joy in the historical grammar of Greek is tracing […]
Why do the same letters in English have radically different pronunciations in different words?
There are, not so much rules, but tendencies for why letters are pronounced so crazy-different in different dialects of English, and so differently from Early Middle English. Unfortunately you need to go through a lot of historical phonology to make sense of it. Fortunately Wikipedia has a decent summary of both the historical phonology, and […]
Why does the word ‘correlation’ have two r’s?
The Latin prefix for “with” was con-, but like other Latin prefixes, its final consonant changed to match the following consonant. So com-pare, col-late, cor-rupt. The prefix in- does the same: im-port, il-literate, ir-relevant. Now, another variant of con- was co-, before h and vowels: co-herent, co-agulate. English generalised this version of the prefix into […]
What is the etymology of the name suffix “maus” seen in the name “Oenomaus”/Oenamaus” where the prefix “oeno” stands for “wine”?
The book reviewed here: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.07.58 proposes μέμαα, μέμονα “lust for”, “be eager”, “rage”. (The verb is related to mēnis, the rage of Achilles.) So, “striving for wine”. The book is about poetic etymologies, so it’s not clear to me this would be a linguistically correct derivation; but looks like it’s right, […]
What was the characteristics of the Greek dialects that were once spoken in western Anatolia?
I assume OP is asking about the West Anatolian dialects of Modern Greek, not Ancient Greek. 1. Not studied enough. 2. Not old. Pontic and Cappadocian are relic dialects, cut off from the rest of Greek for a millenium, and they are both archaic in phonology and morphology, and influenced by Turkish to a great […]
Evolutionary changes often hold improvements out of natural selection. Does the memetic evolution of languages hold any improvements, and if so, in what sense?
Very, very good question, and I don’t know if I will answer it satisfactorily. Yes, language evolves, and yes, particular features of language are “naturally selected” because they count as an improvement. The catch is that humans have conflicting criteria for what is desirable in human language. These seem to result in an equilibrium: languages […]
Do languages other than Turkish have intensified adjectives? How are these intensified adjectives constructed? I am especially interested in the case of Japanese.
http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/intadjlist.htm To add to Achilleas Vortselas’ answer for Greek, The prefix παν- “all” is another intensifier, which was also in use in Ancient Greek. So πάμμαυρος “all-black” (which is not ancient), παμμάταιος “all-vain” (which is). Greek also has superlative adjectives (so μαυρότατος “blackest”). And a colloquial (negative) intensifying prefix is in fact… καρα-, which is […]
What does the Portuguese language sound like to foreigners?…
In my considered opinion, Portuguese sounds like a drowsy headcold. I randomly surveyed a representative sample of objective language critics (my wife), and have the additional answer “tongue-twisted”. Answered 2015-12-18 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-does-the-Portuguese-language-sound-like-to-foreigners/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What does the Lord’s Prayer really say in the original Greek?
Like a lot of Ancient Greek verbs, aphiēmi has an impossibly broad range of meaning. Literally, it means “send from”. If you look at the range of meanings in LSJ (which is Classical Greek rather than Biblical Greek, but that helps us avoid the temptation of theologically influenced glosses), you’ll find: I. send forth II. […]