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Category: Linguistics
Will languages other than English eventually die out?
I’m not as sanguine as other respondents on this. If history and human and society go on as they have done, then yes, there are centripetal and centrifugal pressures on language: communities want to be understandable within each other, but communities also want to sound distinct from each other. The community you identify with in […]
Why do some languages have translations for cities while others don’t?
Some other factoids from Greek: * Languages with inflectional morphology will tend to inflect town names, especially town names they care about, as Daniel Lindsäth correctly points out. Ancient Greek tended to do that a lot, though not universally, as you can see in the Geography (Ptolemy): most towns end up looking declinable, though some […]
With TV, radio, film and other forms of mass media will accents and dialects slowly die out or transform until there is just one national/non-regional dialect?
Certainly the trend in many countries is for dialects to die out, particularly countries with a strong centralising tendency in culture and education. Greece and France are very good examples of this. Even in England, what survives is more accents with some variant vocabulary than the full-fledged dialects of two centuries ago. Countries that have […]
How different are Cypriot names from their Turkish and Greek counterparts?
Greek Cypriot surnames are often patronymics, formed as the genitives of given names. Surnames are quite region-specific in Greek, so you can tell a Greek Cypriot surname: it’s the one *without* a suffix, like -opoulos, -akis, -idis, -ellis, -atos, etc. Greek Cypriots use a few more Ancient names than Greece Greeks, and a lot more […]
How different is the Ancient Greek language from the modern Greek language? Can any Greek-speaking people testify if they understand classical Greek of Homer, et al?
I understand most of what’s going on in the Gospels, though much more so with Mark and John than Luke and Paul. Some Attic texts (and the Byzantine texts emulating them) are a challenge, not least because of their abstruse syntax, but I still have a hazy notion of what’s going on. The syntax in […]
What other languages influenced Greek?
In terms of the usual interpretation of the question (what languages did Greek borrow words from), at different times Greek has borrowed words from: Persian (a small number) Latin (a fair few) Slavonic (surprisingly few) Albanian (surprisingly fewer) Aromanian (ditto) Catalan (one word, παρέα < pare(j)a) Romany (very few, although it is the go-to source […]
Aeolic θᾶς “until”
This is an RTFM question, and someone must have already worked out the answer to it; but that someone didn’t work out the answer to the question in the 19th century, which would have let me look up the answer easily online. I’m actually halfway hoping that a reader will find the answer in their […]
Dictionary Updates: Kriaras, Vol. XVII; Trapp, Fasc. VII
New volumes of Kriaras’ and Trapp’s dictionaries of Greek are out. Kriaras covers Vernacular Early Modern Greek, and Trapp covers (mostly learnèd) Late Mediaeval Greek, with some overlap. For background on these dictionaries—and on the coverages of the dictionaries of Greek in general—see my earlier post on Dictionary coverage of Greek. Trapp’s Dictionary, Fascicle 7 […]
The declension of -ευς: Ionic forward to Modern Greek
In the last (but one) post, we worked out a reconstruction of the -ευς declension, to the point that we could explain the Homeric inflections. Where we wanted to get to was not Homer, but Aristophanes’ Attic. But once we have the proto-forms in place, we can use sound change rules and analogy to explain […]
Tsakonian documentary
Thanks to my friend George Baloglou, I’m passing on this news item from in.gr, on a new documentary on Tsakonian. Translations mine. See also the documentary website. Documentary description from the 13th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival site: Α γρούσσα νάμου / Massimo Pizzocaro, Elisavet Laloudaki In the Eastern Peloponnese, in a remote region under the shadow […]