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Category: Linguistics
Why do some Latin borrowings of Greek words ending in -ων end in -o (like Apollo), while others end in -on (like Orion)?
-o, -onis is the native Latin declension. –on, -onis is not native Latin, so it is a morphological import from Greek. So if it drops the -n, the word or name has been felt to be common or salient enough to be nativised as Latin. If it does not drop the -n, it is felt […]
Does the Greek language have a variety of regional dialects?
The outlier dialects, Tsakonian, Pontic, Cappadocian, Mariupolitan: not mutually intelligible, with Tsakonian clearly the furthest away. In terms of the Swadesh list (100 words), Tsakonian has 70% in common with Standard Greek. Cretan and Cypriot both have 89% words in the Swadesh-100. With dialect attrition, there are versions of Cypriot and Cretan that Athenians can […]
English (language): Why do we use the past tense to show our politeness?
To give a pragmatics answer to why you would use either a conditional model or a present model in questions, to begin with: In many cultures, and English is one, indirect requests are considered more polite than direct requests. An indirect request implies a direct request, but it gives the listener the (fictional) option of […]
How widely were German, French and English each used as languages of science in the Europe of the 19th and early 20th centuries?
Greek linguists at the time mostly did German, and some did French. Of the main antagonists, Psichari only wrote in French—but then again, he lived in France. Hatzidakis mostly wrote in German, though he could write in French if he had to. When I was studying in Greece, I heard distant echoes of a “German […]
How do you feel when a foreigner speaks in your local accent/dialect? Are you offended when a foreigner imitates your local accent?
Intellectually, I want to love it. Regrettably, being human, I freak out. Not much, just slightly, Uncanny valley-style. Ross Daly for example is an Irishman who has lived in Crete for four decades, and a practitioner of Cretan folk music (among others). Having gone to the Cretan highlands to learn Cretan music, he speaks Greek […]
What are dialectical, grammar or morphological, differences between modern Northern Greek and Southern Greek?
This graphic from Varieties of Modern Greek has been used around here before: The main difference is phonological. It’s one difference, but it’s a doozy (purple line): unstressed /e, o/ are raised to /i, u/, and unstressed /i, u/ are deleted. That makes Northern Greek sound at best silly to Southern Greeks (though their attempts […]
Why are “there” and “their” spelled differently, despite being pronounced the same way?
Cutting to the chase: The default answer is that English words are spelled differently because they used to be pronounced differently, just before English spelling was fixed in aspic with the invention of printing (inconveniently timed to partway through the Great English Vowel Shift). In Late Middle English, there was [ðeːɹ], which is not a […]
What does it feel like to speak an almost extinct language? Does one feel a responsibility to carry it on to future generations? Does one try to practice it and not forget it?
I’ll quote what someone else in that position said (originally posted about on my blog: .sig quoting Marcel Cohen, corrected; see also Language Regained). Marcel Cohen was a Jewish author writing in French. His first language was Judaeo-Spanish (aka Djudio, Ladino), which he barely remembered as an adult. As a one-off, he wrote a memoir […]
What is the difference in Greek between κοίταζε and κοίταγε?
In practice: none. κοιτάω and κοιτάζω both mean “to look”, and are just morphological variants—of a kind quite common in Middle Greek, as new present tenses were being reconstructed from aorists. (Both -αζω and -αω verbs could have -ασ- aorists; so working backwards, you could end up with either present tense.) There’s a slight register […]
How is rhyme used in different languages?
Sporadically in Classical Greek and Latin, as a rhetorical technique for both prose and poetry, rather than a basis of verse: Homeoteleuton. Systematically in Arabic and Chinese, but I don’t know much about them. In Europe, rhyme emerges as a structural feature of verse (as opposed to an occasional device) in the Late Middle Ages. […]