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Tag: morphology
Verb-Verb dvandva compounds and γαμαοδέρνουλας
In the last post, I showed that the slang.gr coinage γαμαοδέρνουλας made an odd choice in its first stem, using /ɣama-/ instead of /ɣam-/ as the stem—although Modern Greek speakers would typically interpret /-a-/ as part of the verb inflection. You can interpret /-a-/ as part of the stem, but the interpretation is novel and […]
The wrong vowel in a Modern Greek compound
This post is about an obscene compound of Modern Greek, made up on slang.gr, and how it clearly violates a rule of compounding, by including what looks like a piece of inflection in the first half of the compound. The follow-up post is on how verb–verb and verb–noun compounds work in Modern Greek, and why […]
Everywhere, Down Under, and Neo-Kantian Language Morality
This is kind of a lazy post, but commenter Panjomin wanted my verdict on how proper Greek the words ολούθε “everywhere, all over” and χάμω “on the ground” are. I’m a remarkably poor pick to pass such verdict, my sense of the language being blunted from not living there, and being brought up in the […]
Chantakites: Linguistic analysis
As I promised, I’m going to walk through the linguistic particularities of Manuel Chantakites’ letter. This is pretty usual in the philological editions of Early Modern texts: there’ll be a couple of pages in the preface enumerating linguistic oddities, working their way up from phonology through to syntax (and not getting far beyond syntax, or […]
Comparison, TLG BC and AD: log-likelihood
Helma Dik left a comment on my post on comparing TLG AD and BC through Wordle, suggesting I use Dunning’s Log-Likelihood measure of differential word frequencies in corpora, as Wordled by Martin Mueller. That lets you work out what the real shifts in frequency are, rather than trying to eyeball them through the aggregate word […]
Comparison, TLG BC and AD
In the previous post, I used Wordle to illustrate stop words in Greek (and, by the by, the exponential distribution of function words following Zipf’s Law). After getting rid of a whole bunch of stop words, I ended up with a Wordle of the lemmata of the TLG:But I stopped short of making sense of […]
Wordle and Greek stop words
Some of you may be familiar with Wordle, an online tool which displays the words in a text with different sizes, depending on their frequency. Wordle is a convenient tool for seeing what the frequently mentioned concepts are in a text, so it gets a fair amount of use in blogs. It’s the same concept […]
Heracleses of the Crown
I don’t want to get into the habit of retweeting what other bloggers say, it was annoying enough when Instapundit and Atrios started doing it. I also don’t want this blog to get *too* Classicist-friendly, because there’s plenty of Modern Greece stuff to talk about that has nothing to do with The Antick Burden. But […]
A mutant optative in Galen
I feel guilty, on occasion, that I blog about soft linguistics here—language and identity, spelling conventions, linguistic geography—at the expense of hard linguistics: phonology, morphology, even *shudder* syntax. It’s easy to post about diglossia, because it’s fun social stuff that everyone has an opinion about; it’s much harder to get worked up about optatives. Because […]
Your Fractal Analysis of Esperanto does not add up
This is a blog on the Greek language. That is why it is called Hēllēnisteúkontos, “From the guy who has been a scholar of Greek”. But I arrogate the right to post here about other linguistics stuff that I find of interest. I have a below-the-fold arrangement, so you can bypass it easily. This post […]