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Category: Linguistics
Is Yiddish a Semitic or a Indo-European language?
The answer has been given by Anthony Thompson’s answer and Chrys Jordan’s answer. I’m going to spell out a bit more the general principles at work. Fitting language history into a tree structure requires some simplifying assumptions. In particular, you have to be able to assume that a language has a single parent proto-language (otherwise […]
What are some of the must know linguistic theories for any linguistics student?
Add to Andrew Noe’s answer: For historical linguistics, Uniformitarianism. (Yes, I know the link describes the geological version of that hypothesis.) The notion that human language in the past worked pretty much the same way as human language works now. For structuralism, as an underpinning of how we do linguistics in general: the Arbitrariness of […]
What sounds in your language do foreigners find hard to pronounce?
For Modern Greek, the following sounds are cross-linguistically rare, and certainly rare among European languages: ɣ ~ ʝ: γάμος, γέρος x ~ ç: χάμω, χελιδόνι ɟ [the palatalised allophone of ɡ]: αγγίζω ð, θ: δέντρο, θάμνος r: ρέμα (people really don’t deal well with trills) Initial clusters like ks, ps, vl, vr, ðr, ðj, ɣl, […]
What would a living natural language that couldn’t change or evolve look like?
Well, what drives language change? Whatever needs drive language change would not be met by such a language. And speakers of such a language would get very frustrated. They’d be bored to death with each other. A major driver is the pursuit for novel and vivid ways of expressing a concept. You would not have […]
Who faces more difficulty, a Greek who reads the original Koine New Testament or an English speaker who reads the works of Shakespeare?
How on earth do we quantify this? Especially given (a) we read Shakespeare in modernised orthography; (b) we ignore the pronunciation differences, unless we’re tuning in to Ben Crystal for Reconstructed Shakesperian, and Randall Buth for Reconstructed Koine; (c) there is huge stylistic disparity in the New Testament: Mark is much easier to read than […]
Why do I not appear to have a regional accent?
Without knowing anything whatsoever of your circumstances, OP, I’ll guess you’ve picked up some supraregional dialect koine somehow. Like, I dunno, RP, or whatever has replaced RP in England these days. It’ll have a lot to do with your upbringing and your socialisation, as others have said. This kind of accent mixup is very commonplace […]
Why do many people say that Koine Greek is close to Modern Greek and distant from Attic, while grammatically it seems to be very close to Attic and still some significant distance away from Modern Greek?
Well has Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer put it: Is the glass half-full or half-empty? Here’s some ways in which Koine is closer to Modern Greek: Phonetics: there’s lots of disagreement about precise dates, but in lower-class Koine, potentially as few as two sounds were left to change over between Koine and Modern Greek, ɛ > i […]
Do you, as a Greek, think that Brazilians cannot pronounce Greek correctly? See my comment.
Yiannis Tsiolis’ answer nails it: There are three “components” in to verbalising a language. One is the correct pronounsiaton of vowels and consonants, the other is the correct intonation but the most important is how well you know the language (vocabulary, grammar, syntax, catchphrases). Unless one can copy all three there is hardly a chance […]
English spelling is infamously irregular. Is it possible for it to branch into several categories (e.g., Germanic spelling, French spelling, Greek spelling, etc.)?
Yes indeed. Bear in mind in particular that Greek and Latin fall under the rules of Traditional English pronunciation of Latin. (Greek is almost always borrowed into English via Latin; but there are late exceptions like kudos, not †cydus.) Those rules are not the rules of French words in English. For example, final –e in […]
How did the Byzantine Empire named the Mediterranean Sea?
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium confirms John Bard’s answer: As late as the 4th C., the Mediterranean continued to be an “inner sea,” totally surrounded by the territory of the Roman Empire. It was the only sea for Greeks, the esō thalassa [internal sea] (Aristotle) as opposed to the exō thalassa [external sea] or ocean; […]