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When and how does semantics meets phonetics?
Good question, Anon!
By design, they’re not supposed to. Linguistics makes a point of segregating them hierarchically:
- Phonetics: how individual sounds work
- Phonology: how sounds are organised into meaningful contrasts as phonemes
- Morphology: how phonemes are organised into meaningful components of words as morphemes
- Lexicon: how morphemes are organised into meaningful words
- Semantics: how the meaning of those words works.
The hierarchies are more leaky than we would like; they are convenient abstractions. There can be leakage between them. But by asking for semantics to meet phonetics, OP, you’re asking for an awful lot of leakage.
The closest I can think of is morphophonemes, which leak between phonology and morphology. Plural -s, for example covers both [s] and [z]. The two are clearly different phonemes of English now (though they didn’t used to be). You could argue that the neutralisation of contrast between the two in that context means that there is a single morphophoneme at work, -S, spanning /s/ and /z/. Enough of that kind of thing happens, through diachronic leakage, that Morphophonology is a thing.
That’s a bridge between morphology and phonology, anyway.
EDIT: Forgot to put in another leak: Sound symbolism. Phonemes are associated with particular vague vibes of meaning, and accordingly get used with naming particular concepts. It’s vague, it’s infrequent, it’s not reproducible (little sounds little, but does small?), and linguists usually get away with ignoring it outside the most explicit instances, in onomatopoeia. But it is a leak of some meaning from semantic classes down to phonetics.
What are some of the limitations of truth conditional semantics?
Here’s another limitation: speech acts. A statement of how the world is (a declarative speech act) can be true or false. A command, a promise, or a performative statement (“I hereby declare…”) cannot meaningfully be true or false: it can only be felicitous or infelicitous (that is, appropriate).
Here’s yet another, which Gary Coen already offered: Sense is not denotation, and denotation does not match de dicto references. Statements about The President Of The United States may be now statements about Barrack Obama, but come January, they won’t be. Statements about Superman may be statements about Clark Kent, but you only know that if you’re Superman or the narrator.
Yeah, truth-conditional semantics is reductionist. It’s still a starting point, and a useful one: there’s a lot of sentences that it does work for.
Was Ionian the mother dialect of Herodotus?
Inasmuch as we can trust the ancient sources, Herodotus’ native dialect was Doric, and he may well have been a Carian speaker. As Wikipedia says, we can’t trust the ancient sources anyway: Herodotus
Herodotus wrote his ‘Histories’ in the Ionian dialect, yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda (an 11th-century encyclopaedia of Byzantium which possibly took its information from traditional accounts), Herodotus learned the Ionian dialect as a boy living on the island of Samos, whither he had fled with his family from the oppressions of Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia I of Caria. The Suda also informs us that Herodotus later returned home to lead the revolt that eventually overthrew the tyrant.
]However, thanks to recent discoveries of some inscriptions on Halicarnassus dated to about that time, we now know that the Ionic dialect was used there even in official documents, so there was no need to assume (like the Suda) that he must have learned the dialect elsewhere. Moreover, the fact that the Suda is the only source which we have for the heroic role played by Herodotus, as liberator of his birthplace, is itself a good reason to doubt such a romantic account.
Note that Kos, next door to Halicarnassus, was also Doric speaking; but Hippocrates of Kos also wrote in Ionic. The cultural prestige of Ionia is indeed a likelier explanation, and Wikipedia speculates that “Herodotus appears to have drawn on an Ionian tradition of story-telling, collecting and interpreting the oral histories he chanced upon in his travels.”
There was Doric literature too, but I don’t know of any early Doric literary prose.
How was Greek literature lost through time?
For documents to survive, they needed to be important enough to the copyists to keep recopying, as the technology of books was upgraded—from wax tablet to scroll to codex in capitals to codex in lower case. And they needed to be important enough to be copied multiple times, so that random destruction of books did not eliminate the last remaining copy.
The perishing of the great libraries of antiquity did away with a lot of unique copies of texts. So did the looting of Constantinople in 1204: there were a lot of heretical texts kept under lock and key at the Patriarch’s, which were lost forever.
So the data had to be actively maintained to be preserved. If it wasn’t, what we get is random bits and pieces from garbage dumps. That’s what we have of Sappho, for example. It’s why the only capital letter codices we have are luxury items, such as the illustrated Dioscurides or the Codex Argenteus. Each time the technology of books is upgraded, it’s effort to recopy the text, and effort is necessarily selective. And codices were always susceptible to becoming palimpsests, if noone found them interesting any more.
So what literature was prioritised for copying in Greek literature? The school curriculum. That means the top texts in Attic, the prestige dialect, and Homer, which was the foundation of Greek culture. It did not mean lyric poetry, which was in the wrong dialect and not fashionable. It did not mean Menander, because that was in Koine, and the monks did not get sitcoms anyway. It meant lots of Galen and Hippocrates, because they were of practical use. And it meant huge amounts of theology, because Christian monks were doing the copying.
And there was lots of accidental survival. We have double the Euripides that we have of the other dramatists, for example, because a volume of the collected works of Euripides accidentally survived.
How related are Turkish to Greek culture?
*shrug* Similar. 500 years of close coexistence and bilingualism (not that people can grok that now). Lots of food in common, with traffic in both directions, and different preferences of spices. Several common cultural practices, such as taking shoes off before going inside. Many, many formulaic expressions in common. Significant musical overlap: in some genres more than others, and church music was one of them.
Aziz Dida, as a neighbour of both our peoples, can see it clearer than both our peoples: they’re different, but only if you look closely.
Some of those cultural similarities aren’t even old. One that astonished me was reading a Turkish paper while waiting around a hamam. (I wasn’t the one in the hamam.) I don’t really know the language, but the look and feel, the cliches, the punctuation, the formatting… they were all recognisable from the Greek press. So too were the apartment buildings, down to the clunky old lifts. Those commonalities though is more about common cultural hegemony from an external source—in those cases, I’m guessing, pre-WWII France.
What are some similarities and common things that Greek has with Arabic?
Commonalities between Greek and Arabic?
They belong to different language families—Indo-European vs Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages, which also includes Hebrew and Phoenecian); noone has proven a more distant relation between the two.
The alphabet of both derives from Phoenecian; hence the similarity in letter names to this day. That also extends to Hebrew: aleph, alif, alfa.
A few loanwords from Phoenecian in Ancient Greek; like arrabon “pledge” (and later, engagement).
A few more loanwords from Hebrew into Koine, through Christianity, like satanas and amen.
A fair few loanwords from Greek into Arabic, via the transmission of the Classics and Greek science and mathematics.
A few loanwords from Arabic into Greek via contact during Byzantium. (e.g. magazi “shop”, maimu “monkey”).
A fair few loanwords from Arabic into Greek via Ottoman Turkish. e.g. musafiris < mısafır < mosâfer “guest”.
Pretty sure me “with” isn’t one of them. OTOH, me Albanian and Modern Greek are considered cognates.
Why wasn’t Greece ever islamified like Syria and Turkey?
Greece was affected: in 1800 half the population of Crete was Muslim, and those were converts, not settlers from Turkey.
There’s a very simple answer to why Greece, and much of the Balkans, did not have the same outcome as Syria or Egypt: Greece was conquered by the Ottomans. And the Ottomans had the Rum Millet. As People of the Book under a stable Ottoman realm, the Rum Millet were second-class citizens; but so long as they paid their taxes, they were largely left alone, and they had some degree of autonomy.
The more interesting question (which I don’t know the answer to) is not Why Greece or Serbia were not islamised, but why Albania and Bosnia were.
Why do we lose our accents when we sing?
Originally Answered:
Why do British/ Irish/ Australians when singing have the same American accent as American singers?
Brian Collins and Robert Charles Lee, I disagree. They do too. And I do have a tin ear, but I’m not the only one to think so:
- Non-American pop singers (e.g. New Zealanders) tend to subconsciously adopt an American accent in singing. Is this observed in languages other than English as well?
- Why do many British singers sound American when they sing?
And I reckon it’s a genre effect. Pop/rock is American, so non-Americans sing like the Americans they’re emulating. John Williamson (singer), by contrast, does Australian Country with some overt Australian nationalism; and his vowels are, well, True Blue Aussie:
TISM were suffused to the gills with in-joke references to Australian culture. I got into them when I left Australia, out of nostalgia. I agree you wouldn’t mistake them for Americans, but those are not Australian vowels either, and there’s more rhotic action there than there should be. Because they were doing genre.
The two alt-rock bohemian self conscious hippie drongo skip bastard Aussie bands I loathed growing up were Frente! (with exclamation mark!) and Ratcat. The reason I loathed them, apart from being alt-rock bohemian self conscious hippie drongo skip bastards, was that they were among the first Australian acts to make a point of singing pop with an Australian accent:
Sod off, alt-rock bohemian self conscious hippie drongo skip bastards. Give me the grunge stylings of Silverchair any day.
With a mumbly Seattle accent: just right for a bunch of teenagers from Newcastle NSW.
Why are uppercase i, lowercase L and the number 1 similar looking?
An unfortunate number of coincidences. The coincidences all ended up converging in Sans Serif Latin script, because a vertical line is a simple thing, and any simplification of glyphs can’t get any simpler than a | .
The letter I started as Phoenecian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodh, which did not look like a |:
But by the time the Greeks were done with it, it did (from: Archaic Greek alphabets):
There was no number 1 or lowercase l back then to cause trouble.
The number 1 actually went a curious journey from Indian to Arabic to European numbers, as summarised in 1 (number):
So: ⼀ to १ to ۱ to 1.
Simplify the Devanagari or Roman serifed glyph, and you get the Arabic and Roman sans serif glyph: a vertical line. The vertical line ended up ambiguous in Arabic with alef, too: ا ۱.
The lowercase l did in fact emerge out of capital L, by shortening the bottom of the L in Rustic capitals. As you can see (source: History of the Latin alphabet), the history of <I> and <l> has been an attempt to fix the resulting ambiguity, including different sizing, serifs, and tittles. The distinction between capitals and lowercase was more pronounced in mediaeval script than after the invention of printing, so I/l wasn’t as much of a problem back then.
Does word gerokronoliros (γεροκρονόληρος) contain non-Greek (borrowed) elements? What is its meaning and etymology?
I checked LSJ: no γεροκρ- anything. And there wouldn’t be: γερο- for “old” is Modern Greek, the Ancient Greek would be γεροντο-.
I googled γεροκρονοληρος, as Dimitris Sotiropoulos suggested in his exchange with Konstantinos Konstantinides.
The good thing about Google, is that it assumes you misspell things. So it tries taking words apart.
I didn’t guess what κρονόληρος means, which does me no honour, because when you see it in context, it is obvious. (And god knows Dimitris dropped enough hints, in his Quora Jeopardy!)
Used by Plutarch to refer to an “old twaddler”, a foolish old man. From Kronos, Cronus (Roman Saturn), father of Zeus and a proverbially old god; and λῆρος, (originally) “gaudy”, (eventually) “delirious, silly”. (Modern Greek speakers will recognise it in παραλήρημα, “babbling, nonsense”.)
The etymology of λῆρος is uncertain, but it may derive from a Boeotian word for a gold ornament on women’s tunics.
So: “delirious Saturn”, of a foolish old-timer.
Now. Dimitris reports that:
It was in a phrase with a Description for a neighbor in the village
So what is a modern Greek prefix doing on a word used by Plutarch?
Someone in your village in Greece, Dimitris, had a classical education.