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Do linguistics departments normally include mostly women, gay men, vegans, and leftists?
Hahahahaha.
Well, let’s see.
Linguistics in the West appears to have broken down the barriers against women getting academic promotion relatively early, and the majority of enrolments at undergraduate level in my department were women.
I remember a male linguist (Newmeyer? Pullum?) citing approvingly a hotelier’s guide to the convention partying styles of various professions. Under Linguists, the guide allegedly said that they were relatively well behaved, and that they “brought their own women”. Those weren’t their own women, the writer pointed out. Those were themselves linguists.
There are unofficial uniforms and standards of dress and makeup in different disciplines here in Australia. I overheard a female prof once say “… You don’t think I put on too much lippie today, do you?” I also remember a girl stumbling into a tutorial, asking if this was Economics 201. We took one look at her—tailored suit, abundant makeup, power heels—and at us—jeans, no makeup, Doc Martens. No, this was not Economics 201.
There were gay men and women in our department; I’ve related elsewhere the tale of a male tutor who had a crush on me (Nick Nicholas’ answer to Would you want to see a list of everyone who has ever secretly had a crush on you?). I don’t know that linguistics disproportionately attracted them, but an Arts department would impose much less pressure on gay men to stay in the closet than, oh, I don’t know, Electrical Engineering.
There were vegans, and there were leftists, sure. Not many vegans, but certainly mostly leftists. Two factors there.
First, as has been discussed elsewhere here at length, academia tends to disproportionately attract public service-oriented over business-oriented minds, and that correlates with being left wing. That’s going to be even more the case in the humanities, which does not have a hard nosed practical utility, and which overrepresents those willing to scrutinise and question accepted authority.
Second, my department in particular was heavy on anthropological linguistics and fieldwork, in its general linguistics, and critical discourse theory in its applied linguistics. That’s not going to be the case everywhere; for general linguistics, it’s certainly not the case in Europe or much of America. But if your department is full of people who trot off to Boingo Boingo and spend three months with the locals (and end up called in as expert witnesses to defend their land title claims), don’t be surprised if a lot of them are going to be sympathetic to the dispossessed in general, and strive to be cultural relativists.
That occasionally erupted into disputes like whether Myanmar instead of Burma was really respecting the local practice or just a tinpot dictatorship, and whether cultural relativism really meant we should keep shtum about human rights abuses. But that was a debate within the left, as far as I could tell.
Yes, there were exceptions. Our best linguist was a Charismatic Anglican, who ended up becoming a pastor, and more recently an anti-Muslim polemicist. But I think it’s fair to say that the linguistics departments I’ve seen have been homes of bienpensant leftism. (The Charismatic Anglican did leave to become a pastor, after all.)
That’s not intrinsically a problem, it’s self-selection. But it is a bias to be aware of.
What is a fetish for being bitten called?
I draw attention to Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die? as my credentials for answering this.
Especially my line:
Is not knowing shit about Classical languages a prerequisite for sexologists?!
It is, and I’m not finding the bite fetish in Aggrawal’s exorbitantly misspelled listing of 500-odd paraphilias.
Dacnolagnophilia, “bite horny obsession” is somehow a word for lust murder. God knows why. Dacnomania shows up at least in Italian as obsessive biting. And if sexologists did know shit about Classical languages, the word for a fetish for biting would be dacnophilia.
A fetish for being bitten? Greek doesn’t quite do that with the one stem, but I would go sideways, and use dēctophilia, “love of biters”.
But neither dacnophilia not dectophilia seem to have been used by anyone. After all, not knowing shit about Classical languages is a prerequisite for sexologists…
EDIT: Alberto Yagos has it: Odaxelagnia – Wikipedia
From a stylebook perspective, what are the rules behind using asterisks and/or grawlixes to replace certain letters in curse words?
Unfortunately I don’t have style books to hand, but practice on this has varied in English. 100 years ago, the convention was to write only the first and the last letter of the obscenity, and to put dashes between them: d—d. The contemporary practices I have seen are to put ellipses between the first and last letter (f…k), to put asterisks between the first the last letter (f**k), and to put an asterisk in place of the first vowel (f*ck). The use of Random shift key symbols is a comic strip convention, and I have not seen it in books.
Of the three conventions, replacing just the vowel is a lot clearer, but for that reason if there’s more risk of offence, and I would regard it as more informal. Online, the norm I have seen is multiple asterisks. In newspapers, the norm I have seen is ellipses.
Why is standard Albanian language based on the Tosk dialect and not the Gheg dialect?
My answer is not ultimately different to User-13249930999434776143’s. (Vote #1: User-13249930999434776143’s answer to Why is standard Albanian language based on the Tosk dialect and not the Gheg dialect?) But it is a bit less nuanced.
Albanian is divided into Tosk dialect in the south, and Geg dialect in the north.
The standard language of Albania before WWII was Southern Geg, based on the dialect of Elbasan. Elbasan Geg was close to the Tosk/Geg border, so it was a dialect that could serve as a middle point between Tosk and Geg. And while Elbasan was not the capital of the country, it was culturally prestigious. In other words, the choice of Elbasan Geg was a good choice of standard dialect, as these things go.
The postwar standard was not Southern Geg. It was Southern Tosk. So it was not a middle point of Tosk and Geg; it was at the extreme of dialects spoken within Albania. And it wasn’t spoken anywhere massively prestigious: it was spoken in places near the southern border of the country, like Vlorë and Korçë and Gjirokastër.
Postwar Albania was ruled by Enver Hoxha and his fellow partisans.
Enver Hoxha was born in?
That’s right. Gjirokastër.
It really is as simple as that.
By the time the communist regime fell, Southern Tosk had been entrenched in Albania as the standard language for a generation, and there was no move to restore the prewar standard. The most telling development for me was seeing Kosovo, which is Northern Geg, adopt Standard Albanian—based a dialect as far from the local dialect as you can get without ending up in the Arvanite diaspora. And Aziz Dida’s answer to my question Is there interest in keeping Geg as the standard language of Kosovo? shows, that has proven somewhat challenging for Kosovars.
EDIT: Death by standardization, a Gheg drama by User-13249930999434776143 on albanophilia. Drop everything, and read it.
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 for “exotic language” was Boingo Boingo. “So if a form like X shows up in Boingo Boingo, that does not necessarily imply…” Clearly somehow the band name Oingo Boingo had worked its way into my subconscious.
So wouldn’t it be cool if some exotic language actually was called Boingo Boingo?
None is to my knowledge. But Kaugel language – Wikipedia is spoken by 77,000 people in Papua New Guinea. (Which, for Papua New Guinea, is huge.)
Now, I did not find out about Kaugel from Wikipedia. I found out about it, while working as a research assistant on a PNG phonological survey, from Ethnologue. Ethnologue is a splitter not a lumper, so it lists the dialects of Kaugel as separate languages.
Those dialects are Aua and Gawil.
Gawil is listed as a language in Ethnologue under its alternate name:
I rejoiced when I saw that listing. I had found my Boingo Boingo at long last.
What are the most prevalent Arvanite surnames in Greece?
I mean, I know of some Arvanite surnames, but rather than rack my brains, I’m going to go to this blog posts ΕΛΛΗΝΟ-ΑΡΒΑΝΙΤΙΚΑ ΕΠΩΝΥΜΑ and ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΕΠΩΝΥΜΑ ΑΡΒΑΝΙΤΙΚΗΣ ΠΡΟΕΛΕΥΣΗΣ, both drawn from the book Arvanites by Kostas Biris, and cite the surnames I’ve heard of. Not as scientific a method as you’d like, and probably not actually the most frequent ones; but it’s what you’re going to get from me.
- Ginis (Gjinj “John”)
- Gumas (James)
- Kalesis < kalesh “sheep or dog with black and white marks”
- Kanakis
- Katsanis < kacan “greedy”
- Kontos
- Kriekoukis < kryekuq “redhead”
- Vilaras “cloth seller”
- Mexas
- Buras < burrë “man, brave”
- Priftis “priest”
- Sklepas “lame”
- Latsis < llaci “apprentice builder”
- Liotsis < loçi “friend; fool”
- Lykourezos < lëkurenxirë “dark-skinned”
- Manesis < manesë “slow”
- Bithikotsis < bythë “bottom, arse” + Kotsis “Constantine”
- Dragas < dragë “avalanche”
Is it good to study modern Greek while learning Koine Greek?
I wouldn’t go so far as saying it would impede it, but you need to be careful. There will be false friends: words changed meaning from Koine to Modern. The drastic simplification of the grammar in Modern Greek will make you annoyed about having to learn more paradigms in Koine. I think, in many ways—particularly learning grammar and syntax, Modern Greek will be a distraction.
I can think of two high-level benefits, though:
- If you’re coming to Koine already knowing Classical Greek, Modern Greek is a very useful antidote: it reminds you that Koine wasn’t a corruption of the ancient language, but an evolution whose endpoint you can see in the Modern. (Robertson’s exceedingly chatty grammar of New Testament Greek appeals to Modern Greek a lot.)
- And: Modern Greek is a living language. So was Koine, and so was Ancient Greek, but because they’re not living now, Modern Greek can help remind you that Koine, too, was a language spoken by real human beings, who walked the earth on two legs.
I heard that old languages didn’t have future tense, and that it developed only in younger languages. Is this true? Why would that happen?
We know that the ancient Greek future tense suffix –s– is derived from an Indo-European desiderative suffix –sy-. In other words the suffix that already in Homeric Greek meant “I will” is derived from a suffix that I originally meant “I want to”, and that in fact independently survived in Ancient Greek with that meaning (khe-sei-ō “I want to take a crap”).
By the way, you know what the future tense I will derived from in English, right? That’s it. It used to mean I want to.
Similarly, the Latin future suffix –b– can be explained through the Proto-Indo-European verb for to be, becoming a suffix and attaching to a verb. I am to go.
Sound familiar?
But the fact that the ancient Greek or Latin future suffix is an innovation does not mean that Indo-European did not have a means for expressing the future. It may have been a different suffix. It may have been a different auxiliary verb. It may have been a circumlocution, like using the adverb soon or tomorrow.
Latin had a future tense. It has disappeared without a trace in Romance languages, which instead use a suffix based on have. Language churns, and we believe language churned in the same way 5000 years ago. The fact that the Romance future suffix is an innovation does not mean Latin did not have a future suffix of its own.
How would you translate Rilke’s line “du musst dein Leben ändern” into an appropriate Ancient Greek dialect?
Ah, Desmond. I wade in where fools fear to tread, but better a fool than noone.
The point of the line “You have to change your life” is that the sculpture is so strikingly beautiful, it forces someone to change their life.
Well, let’s assemble our building blocks.
δεῖ σε τὸν βίον “it is necessary that you… life”
δὴ “then, at that point” or οὖν “so, therefore”: Classical Greek would want to know what this sentence has to do with the foregoing text.
ἀλλάξειν “change (perfective)”, or ἀλλάσσειν “keep changing”. But you know, ändern “to otherise” makes me think of another verb:
ἀλλοιώσειν “to other (perfective) = to alter, to change”, or ἀλλοιοῦν “to keep altering”. The verb ἀλλοιόω can have a negative connotation, particularly in Modern Greek—to adulterate, to alter from what it is supposed to be. But it doesn’t have to, and I like that it’s not just changing, but making it something different.
So I’ll put together this Attic: δεῖ σὲ δὴ τὸν βίον ἀλλοιοῦν. “Then you have to be altering your life.”
What’s the right dialect? I’d think Doric rather than Aeolic, it’s not really personal sentiment but monumental sentiment.
And I think in Doric that ends up as: δεῖ τὲ δὴ τὸν βίον ἀλλοιῶν.
But I wade in where fools fear to tread, and I’d like to hear from others who aren’t guessing. Including what you’d come up with, Desmond!
EDIT: After discussion with Neeraj Mathur and Desmond in comments:
δεῖ δὴ τὲ τὰν ψυχὰν ἀλλοιῶν.
δή was misplaced, and ψυχή in Homeric Greek did not yet mean “soul”; even if it had, it’s appropriate here.
recidivist
https://www.quora.com/api/mobile…
The Magister:
True. But should you forgive the recidivist seven times? Nay, verily, seventy times seven.
Recidivist… what a woody-sounding Masiello Mega Word!
Recidivism (/rᵻˈsɪdᵻvɪzəm/; from recidive and ism, from Latin recidīvus “recurring”, from re– “back” and cadō “I fall”) is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they had either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or had been trained to extinguish that behavior. It is also used to refer to the percentage of former prisoners who are rearrested for a similar offense.
The term is frequently used in conjunction with criminal behavior and substance abuse. (Recidivism is a synonym for “relapse”, which is more commonly used in medicine and in the disease model of addiction.
The “plain English” synonym is “repeat offender”. But the Latin has the advantage of being derived from “fall”, as in “fall off the wagon” or “falling into sin”. And recidivism applies more generally than just the legal system; in the comment’s context, it really was about sin.