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Category: Other Languages
Why do most modern Persian books and sites use the Naskh font instead of the traditional Nastaʿlīq font?
Khateeb, I have no idea, but I can surmise based on: The Death of the Urdu Script – ali eteraz – Medium Nastaʿlīq script – Wikipedia If your technology is handwriting, it doesn’t particularly matter whether your writing is vertical or horizontal, or a mix of both. If you’re writing online in 2017, and you […]
Is Sanskrit still spoken today?
By way of corroboration of Chandra Mohan’s answer to Is Sanskrit still spoken today?— The villages mentioned by others in their replies are just show pieces. They do use some Sanskrit in communication, which was taught to them by some activists, but I was given to understand that their vocabulary may not be more than […]
Which languages lend themselves particularly well for poetry?
They all do. And let me elaborate on that. For starters, there’s the element of formal craft in poetry, and there’s the allusive use of language in poetry. Both of them are essential. For allusiveness, what you need is a culture expressed through that language. All natural languages that people live their lives in are […]
How many letters does Unicode currently include in the Latin script, no matter the language, but ignoring upper vs. lower case differences?
Latin script in Unicode – Wikipedia As of version 9.0 of the Unicode Standard, 1,350 characters in the following blocks are classified as belonging to the Latin script Let’s remove the uppercase letters; and that leaves us with your answer. From eyeballing: 26+30+128+104+14*8+12+12+67+26 = 517 That leaves 833. If I’m wrong, I’m not wrong by […]
Why don’t current-day Yugoslavians speak a Latin-based language but Romanians do?
They did: Dalmatian language – Wikipedia Istro-Romanian language – Wikipedia Aromanian language – Wikipedia Megleno-Romanian language – Wikipedia What happened is quite simple: Slavic tribes moved into the area quite rapidly, between 500 and 800. Slavonic displaced Romance languages in most areas they moved into, with a few enclaves surviving. The real question is not […]
When was the first time that Chinese was translated into any Indo-European language, e.g. Latin, Greek, etc.?
There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled. Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the […]
In your country, what are high-prestige and low-prestige languages for L2 speakers?
Thirty years ago, the most popular languages to learn at school in Australia were those that have inherited prestige from Britain: French, with German a somewhat distant second. They are being overtaken now by Spanish and Chinese and Japanese, but they remain entrenched, particularly in elite schools. The French lecturers I use to hang out […]
How did the world’s major countries all conform to using first and last names from an early era?
Surname – Wikipedia Surnames seems to have been invented independentishly in Europe at a similar time: they were reintroduced after the Roman three-way names fell out of use in the West. From Wikipedia, I see it’s a messy web of transmission. Wikipedia suggests (not very loudly) that the Modern Western notion of surnames was transmitted […]
Why doesn’t Mongolia use the Uighur script again and leave out Cyrillic?
Read the fine print of the caption in the image of what Wikipedia would look like in Mongolian script, at Mongolian script – Wikipedia. Mongolian Wikipedia preview. A representation of what mn.wiki would look like if Mongolian script support was properly implemented. Mn.wiki already exists, but support has not been implemented. Not all text is […]
Do “lëkurë” and “leder” have any link with each other?
The Albanian lëkurë means ‘skin, bark’. The German Leder means ‘leather’. Consulting Vladimir Orel’s Albanian Etymological Dictionary: lëkurë ‘skin, bark’ < *lauk-urā lakur ‘naked’ < *lauk-ura In both cases, *lauk– is derived from Indo-European *leuk̂- ‘to shine, to be white’. German Leder, English leather < Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/leþrą < Proto-Indo-European *létrom ‘leather’. From The Oxford Introduction to […]