Author: admin

Irish, especially before the mid-20th century spelling reforms, quite possibly; its marking of slender vs broad consonants is still pretty baroque even now. It led to the following comment on the Lojban mailing list in 1993 by And Rosta:

“Some of the English might say that the Irish orthography is very Irish. Personally, I have a lot of respect for a people who can create something so grotesque.”

Oh, and that’s with reference to the new spelling.

The old spelling was an accretion of dialects and obsolete pronunciations, on top of the lenitions and palatalisations and mutations of Celtic, that led to entertainments like this:

Irish orthography – Wikipedia

old spelling new spelling

beirbhiughadh — beiriú

imthighthe — imithe

faghbháil — fáil

urradhas — urrús

filidheacht — filíocht

Even if pronunciation was recoverable from the spelling (which I’m not sure about), teaching that many silent letters is just looney tunes.

From Wikipedia, the spelling reform process was messy, controversial, and what prevailed was the work of civil servants (the parliamentary translation service), who had less compunctions than the linguists about what might be put into practice.

And yes, the standardisation of Irish did run roughshod over dialect, which was inevitable. The survival of Ulster Irish does not owe a debt of gratitude to Standard Irish.

No, btw, the fact that Irish spelling reform succeeded does not mean that the Irish are an inherently superior people to the “Anglo-Saxons”. It’s far easier to do spelling reform on a moribund language, when the second-language learners are running the standardisation, and the native dialect speakers barely write anything. American English is not Ulster Irish. And it’s unlikely to see the UK Parliament and the US Congress get into spelling regulation in my lifetime…

Mention by @-citation of my name inside a comment was working in generating notifications for me, until mid October 2016.

It’s not working for me currently; interested in hearing of others’ experience.

As is often the case in Quora, hard to tell if the new state of affairs is meant to be a bug or a feature.

I resent the universal blocking of comments by those who don’t want to have a two way discussion on any of their answers, because they think two way discussion is pointless. I’ve bloviated on this several times already; Ernest Adams is the most obvious instance. I don’t downvote him, because his answers are good (though at times supercilious), but I have long stopped upvoting him. And though I haven’t muted such posters yet, muting is a more proper response than downvoting: distaste for comment-blockers is far from universal in Quoradom, and downvoting does have universal impact.

I do not resent the universal blocking of comments by those who have received inordinate abuse, and are trying to stay safe. See Sonya Abarcar’s answer to Do all the popular Quorans receive mean comments? They gotta do what they gotta do, and it’s better than them feeling they have to leave Quora.

I don’t resent those who turn off comments selectively per question (now that the option is available), in response to abuse. Lara Novakov, to take one example of someone, is both very open to non-abusive comments, and disproportionately targeted by islamophobes.

I do resent Jae Alexis Lee for having made me change my mind on this. I can admit to being wrong about an issue; I just don’t like it. 🙂

So, no, OP, I won’t agree with you. And I’m more in sympathy with you than most other likely answerers…

Thanks to Eutychius Kaimakkamis and Alberto Yagos.

Alberto, you have Andriotis’ etymological dictionary? Awesome!

The Cypriot dictionary I opened up at random confirms caracol/caracollo as the origin of karaolos, and they confirm your etymology as “twisted”. It did not say that the etymology of caracol in turn was ultimately Greek kokhlias via Vulgar Latin *cochlear, which makes karaolos a round-about Rückwanderer: caracol – Wiktionary

And who knew that the Romance words for spoon have the same derivation.

What’s this about patrolling, though? A caracole is a snail-shaped (i.e. spiral) military manoeuvre or move in dressage. Is it as generic as “patrol”?

To elaborate on Joe Devney’s answer to How do you refer to your left foot with languages that only use cardinal directions?

Yes, your South foot, if you’re facing west, and your North foot, if you’re facing east. Just as geographically oriented languages will refer to it as your seaward foot if you’re by the beach, and as your landward foot if you turn around.

That’s the thing about languages with no relative direction. They really have No. Relative. Direction.

Which means, you might ponder, that they don’t refer to their left foot the same way all the time; how they name it depends on which way they’re facing. Yes it does. They know it’s the same foot, they just shrug off the fact that the name for it changes. Just as you shrug off the fact that your left is the opposite of my left.

Cum X (accusative) Y (nominative) esse dicis, quid in mente habes?

EDIT: Sorry, Peter Hansen:

Cum X (accusative) Y (accusative) esse dicis, quid in mente habes?

My guess: no.

If anyone would have written articles in an Esperanto psychological journal, that would have been the late Claude Piron, who lectured in psychology, and who also wrote a psychoanalysis of people’s attitude to international languages. (No, I’m not endorsing that kind of thing.)

I’ve looked through his now defunct fan page at Pironejo , Claude Piron: Bibliografio . Not seeing any evidence he published in anything such.

I’m not sure there have been academic journals in Esperanto about anything other than Esperanto (including Esperantologio and Planlingvistiko, which were pretty good).

Muhammad Irfan Perdana and Imre Kovacs are quite right that the art of dictionary-writing is (practical) lexicography.

If you are interested in reflections on past dictionaries, rather than how to write a new one, that is still lexicography. See the references in English lexicology and lexicography – Wikipedia: most of them fall under that category; and in fact any work on how to write a dictionary (practical lexicography) is going to reflect on how dictionaries have been written in the past.

Ex bibl. = Ex bibliotheca. The whole thing is abbreviated:

From the theological library of the Free Church of Aberdeen.

Edit: thinko, I said ex bibliis, but I was getting confused with ex libris, from the books of, which refers to a person’s library.

Depends on your criteria.

Biggest & Up to date is not English, but the now online DGE Diccionario Griego-Español . Only goes up to epsilon though, and I don’t see it finishing for another century.

Biggest in English remains Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon — though the online editions don’t include the 1996 Supplement.

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is coming out next year; it’s not meant to be as big as LSJ, but it has been redone from scratch, rather than copypasting previous lexica (a tradition LSJ itself is part of).

The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek came out last year, as a translation of Montanari’s Italian dictionary. I haven’t gone through it; from the headword count, it sounds close to LSJ (more than the original edition, less than original + supplement), and I know that Montanari maintained PAWAG-Poorly attested words in ancient greek, with 1000 words not in LSJ (well, a substantial subset of them, anyway).

It won’t be as comprehensive as DGE, which quite confidently does Proper Names and Early Byzantine texts, an area previous dictionaries have shied away from. But then again, DGE is up to epsilon.