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Category: Other Languages
Which language has the most beautiful name?
Oh, what is one’s standard for aesthetics when it comes to beauty? Tolkien’s? Tolkien’s make me want to slap him. “Ooh! Welsh! Ooh! Finnish! Ooh! Cellar door! Ooh! Arabic is so nassssty, my precious!! I’ll make the orcs speak it.” Pfft. I work on a more meta level. When I was lecturing, my coverall term […]
Is Classical Sanskrit the world’s first constructed language?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-Sanskrit-and-Prakrit/answer/Neeraj-Mathur-13 There’s a spectrum between conventionalised and artificial, and Sanskrit is somewhere along that spectrum. Specialists other than myself can answer better than I as to how artificial Sanskrit is. We have no idea how old the Aboriginal initiate language Damin is, and therefore whether it is older than Sanskrit or not. It is clearly […]
Which transliterated version of a surname sounds better, Potyomkin or Potemkin?
Yes, English routinely transliterates Cyrillic Ё as E. For that matter, Russian routinely writes Ё as Е. Our transliterations (and your default orthography) aren’t up to date with the last couple of centuries of sound change in Russian. Potemkin is the most familiar version to English-speakers, since “Potemkin village” is a well known expression (and […]
Why does reconstructed Proto-Indo-European seem so cumbersome to pronounce?
As ever, Daniel Ross’s answer is so thorough and well thought out (Vote #1 Daniel Ross’ answer to Why does reconstructed Proto-Indo-European seem so cumbersome to pronounce?), that it is embarrassing for me to attempt a better answer. In fact, I won’t: I’ll offer a worse answer, but one that is actually hinted at in […]
What are some (longer) words that appear or are considered false cognates, but which could plausibly be actual cognates?
My favourite example is Hawaiian meli “honey” and Greek meli “honey”. I have even seen a historical linguistics textbook say that’s a coincidence (Trask’s, I think.) It’s not a coincidence. The honeybee is not native to Hawaii. Honey is referenced in the New Testament. The New Testament needed to be translated by missionaries into Hawaiian. […]
What in your opinion is the ugliest/most unappealing script?
It’s a cute question. There are aesthetics to scripts. There has been a lot of aesthetic effort put in to the calligraphies and typographies of a lot of scripts. In fact, when I was perusing Omniglot, to find something that jumped out as ugly, I realised that the obvious candidates were minority—one-off scripts of small […]
Is Albanian a creole language?
*tosses head back chuckling* Ah, I know where this question comes from. I did a drive-by shooting in a comment thread, saying “no, Albanian is not a creole”. Fair enough that I should be asked why. A creole in linguistics is not just a language that you think sounds mixed. It has a specific meaning. […]
What does a linguist think of Albanian as he first starts to study it?
Vote #1 Sam Ahmed: Sam Ahmed’s answer to What does a linguist think of Albanian as he first starts to study it? As someone who’s both Greek and who was looking for things about the Balkan Sprachbund, I had the same reactions. With the added component of “… God, this is just like Greek” a […]
What is the twenty-third letter of the Latin alphabet?
I see what you did there, OP. Yes, the 23rd letter of the Latin alphabet depends on which version of the Latin alphabet you’re using: there’s no universal 23rd letter, because there’s no universal repertoire of Latin letters. Some languages have fewer letters than English. Some have more letters than English. Some languages count letters […]
Instead of creating Pinyin, why didn’t the CCP use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)?
Practical Roman alphabets do need to stick as close to ASCII as possible. Particularly before computerised typography, getting hold of letters outside the Latin-1 and Latin-2 repertoire (letters and standard diacritics) was painful, and you’d avoid it if you could. So if you had a choice between tʰiantɕʰi pu xao and Tianqi bu hao … […]