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In English? Goodbye. Also farewell, though that is more formal. In fact, it’s harder to find ways of saying goodbye while making it clear that it’s not forever: see you soon is the one that leaps to mind.

Greek: αψού “apsu”

Hapşuu being the Turkish version

Because, contrary to what you might think, interjections are not always pure spontaneous exclamations from deep in the neural cortex, that are universal to all humans.

A few are; as I noted in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are there any short expletives that sound the same in different languages?

Nick Enfield [Page on sydney.edu.au] (who I did linguistics with, and boy does he look different twenty years on) just got an Ig Noble [Improbable Research] for claiming the universality of Huh? (The Syllable Everyone Recognizes, Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?)

Of course the realisation of Huh? does differ by language; in the Mediterranean, for example, it is E? But the general idea is a mid vowel (as close to a schwa as your language allows), with a questioning tone.

However plenty of them are culture specific; they may not be arbitrary in themselves, but the choice of which interjection to use can be; and in fact interjections can be borrowed between languages, just like any other word.

Two instances from Modern Greek.

• “Ouch” in Greek is traditionally [ax, ox]. English [autʃ ~ auts] has now been borrowed into young people’s Greek, from TV.
• The Greek sneeze interjection is [apsu]. I’ve just discovered that the Turkish interjection is [hapʃuː], and [apsu] is just [hapʃuː] nativised to Greek phonology. (How is the sound of a sneeze written out in different languages?)

Testing Changes to Adding Questions Anonymously by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates

The drop is indeed puzzling, but unlike Brian Collins I don’t think it reflects an actual change in English usage (such as the perishing of the encyclopaedic the—that wouldn’t make that much of a dint). I also don’t think Second Language Learner English would make such a dint. It’s about the representation of texts in the Google n-gram corpus.

The dip seems to be from 1960 on. What I think is happening is more texts from then on in the Google corpus have headline-like English, of the kind you see in dot points; headline-like English drops the readily. It’s a real written register (in business reports, instructional manuals, &c), and it’s not one that was really around before then. So:

• “Attach nozzle to faucet, see diagram A”
• “Referred director to board for more information”
• “Computer incapable of processing input”

EDIT: See comments: this is unlikely to account for the drop either, especially in fiction.

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.

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.

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.

Context: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are opinions from teenagers often not taken seriously on Quora?

What would happen if forty-five-year olds like me took over Quora?

You’d get some geniuses like me, and some dumbasses like, oh, I dunno, whoever your least favourite middle-aged Quoran is.

Ditto teenagers. There’s plenty of dumb answers from the middle-aged, and plenty of genius answers from teenagers.

OK, there would be more dumb questions and dumb answers and herp derp nonsense attempted on Quora. Not because teenagers are dumber than the middle-aged, but because they lack the impulse control. I’ll concede that.

So the proportions would be different, and would need even more policing. Which, regrettably, would probably end up meaning even more QuoraBots let loose to chop people’s heads of. But it would be a matter of scale, not an absolute difference.

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.