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Category: Other Languages
Linguistically speaking, are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian different languages or dialects of a modern Norse language?
There’s one hiccup which I’m surprised other respondents have not brought up, Habib le toubib. There are two standard languages of Norway, and a mess of dialects in between. Norway used to be ruled by the Danish. The official language of Norway at the time it gained independence, Bokmål (“Book Language”), has been uncharitably described […]
Among languages that presently use a non-Roman script, which are most likely to romanize in the coming decades?
As I groused at Brian Collins in his answer: it’s always political. Scripts are bound to identity, and the major vehicle of identity in our age is the nation-state. So scripts that are tied up with the nation-state as emblematic—say, Greek or Thai—aren’t going away in a hurry. Minority scripts in a country have been […]
Why is Albanian so different from other European languages?
To expand on Edmond Pano’s answer: Indo-European languages are not all that similar to each other. That’s why it took so long to establish the family. (It was much more obvious in Classical times, but people in Classical times weren’t paying attention.) The level at which laypeople can tell similarities is at the branch level. […]
What is your favourite word in Turkish?
Hello, komşu [neighbour] here. It’s a risky question to ask a Greek, because the Turkish that has ended up in Greek is not quite the Turkish of Turkey (let alone the Azeri of Iran and Azerbaijan). Superficially because it’s Balkan Turkish and not Anatolian Turkish; that’s why every Greek ever will say kardaş for ‘brother’ […]
Are there some Latin alphabet languages except for Latvian that change personal names when translating to their language and why don’t others do that?
Refer to the related question What non-Roman scripts keep foreign words in Roman? You ask which Latin alphabet languages do transliterate, and why more Latin alphabet languages don’t transliterate. I know Czech does (right, Zeibura S. Kathau), but it is indeed the case that most Latin alphabet languages don’t, and certainly any that do are […]
If somebody with no Arpitan heritage wanted to learn the Arpitan language, which dialect of Arpitan would you recommend that they learn?
All other things being equal, I’d be heading for a dialect that has had significant literary production (so you can find things to read in Arpitan), and a dialect that still survives to at least some extent (so you can at least theoretically find someone to talk to in it). I’m biased, as my bio […]
Which language is older, Persian or Arabic?
Mehrdad, unlike the other respondents, I will disappoint you with a meta-answer. But it is the truer answer. There’s no such thing as an older language. Let me transpose the question to Iberia. People often say, “Woah, man, Basque is like, the oldest language in Europe, man! It’s like, as old as the Cro-Magnon!” That’s […]
How did you learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, and how long did it take?
Two or three lectures spent on understanding the axes of the IPA charts: place of articulation, manner of articulation; vowel height, frontness, and rounding. A round of the class all calling out the cardinal vowels in unison. /iiiii eeeee ɛɛɛɛɛ æææææ, uuuuu ooooo ɔɔɔɔɔ ɑɑɑɑɑ/. I got to make my first year students do that, […]
Why is there no Unicode Italic H?
Because it was already created elsewhere, as U+210E PLANCK CONSTANT ℎ. Unicode will not differentiate between the symbol for the Planck Constant, and a mathematical italicised lowercase h (which is what the Planck Constant is). Every character has a story #20: U+210e (PLANCK CONSTANT) Answered 2016-12-07 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Why-is-there-no-Unicode-Italic-H/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What is your opinion on eurasiatic and nostratic theory?
In my last lecture of Historical Linguistics, I brought in a guest lecturer, a fellow PhD student, who was an ardent Nostraticist. I hadn’t discussed Nostratic with him for years. To my astonishment, I watched him recant Nostratic right before my eyes. And the way he did it was by making fun of Starostin et […]