Category: Language

Greek uses French names for Latin letters, because French was the prestige Latin alphabet language: “Vitamini Ah, Vitamini Beh, Vitamini Seh” (to use fauxnetics). Or least, they did. You will of course hear a lot more English names of Latin letters now in Athens, I expect. Answered 2017-01-18 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-do-languages-that-use-other-scripts-call-each-letter-of-the-Latin-alphabet/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]

For my part, because all the smart kids in my school did two languages, instead of one language and Art. As you can see from Gallery of Awesomery, not doing Art has paid off. In the eighties, the two main languages being taught in Australia were still French and German, which was a cultural inheritance […]

When I was 12, I found in my local library a copy of Brush up your pidgin. It’s a textbook of Tok Pisin, the pidgin of Papua New Guinea, played for laughs. It is hardly a serious textbook: the protagonists are a clueless British missionary and his sex starved wife, the Tok Pisin is respelled […]

Ah, an utterly unscientific survey on Scottish accents. I find Scottish accents sexy. I find Glaswegian accents unintelligible and sexy. Taggart was a formative experience in my upbringing. For years, I’d imitate him picking up the phone: Halloo! Thes ez Tahghaghrt! … Whü?! Answered 2016-12-09 · Upvoted by Steve Rapaport [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-do-you-think-of-the-Glaswegian-accent/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]

The Jahwist, as in the hypothesised earliest source document of the Torah? I’m dismayed to find from Wikipedia that the documentary hypothesis is now falling apart, and increasingly scholars think there was no one unitary Jahwist document. Doesn’t matter to me if the Jahwist was a bunch of bits; that bunch of bits is still […]

OP, get a hold of Frisk’s and Chantraine’s etymological dictionaries of Ancient Greek. Which may or may not currently be at archive.org—although they are both under copyright, so of course, you should be going to your local university library instead. Hēlios is simply a reflex of the Indo-European word for Sun, via proto-Greek *sāwélios. See […]

The best saying of Ancient Greek ever comes from the very end of Ancient Greek. When Julian (emperor), last Roman advocate of paganism, was asked what he thought of Christianity, he said: ἀνέγνων. ἔγνων. κατέγνων. It’s a truly magnificent pun. Literally, it means: I up-knew, I knew, I down-knew. “To up-know” is the Greek for […]

An interesting question, Anon. Denotation means many related things, in different disciplines, and in all of them, I believe the answer is no. Denotation is a not a sufficient prerequisite for knowledge. Going through Denotation: In linguistics and semiotics, knowing the denotation/sense of a word is knowing only a narrow subset of its meaning: you […]

I’m going to continue with James Cottam’s coinage, done in comments to James Cottam’s answer to Does this made up Latin/Greek word, Vitaemedology, make sense for the following phrase “The study of careers for doctors.” iatrurgology ἰατρουργολογία. Doctor work-ology. But let’s see what others have to say… Answered 2016-09-14 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-made-up-Greek-term-could-be-used-for-this-pretend-medical-speciality-The-study-and-exploration-of-careers-for-doctors/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]