How is your accent in French? Could you record this extract from “Le Petit Prince” to let us hear how you sound in French?

Lyonel. Lyonel, Lyonel, Lyonel…

je ne parle point Français. But you can have a recording anyway. Especially because I suspect I sound like your worst Languedocien nightmare…

Steven. Steven, Steven, Steven…

… you’ve finally got your third recording out of me. (Or is it fourth?)

Vocaroo | Voice message

How many shots does it take to get you drunk? What does it feel like, when you’re drunk? How do you see around you? How do you talk? What do you do?

We will never find out.

My father conducted a scientific experiment at 19, to determine his answer to this question. He vaguely remembers passing out.

My control issues are much too deeply embedded for me to recapitulate my father’s empiricism. Once I realise that I am affected by imbibing booze, I get annoyed enough at the impending loss of control that the imbibing ceases. Even if it involves quite yummy cocktails, as my birthday degustation on Monday did.

The limit is I think 5 shots’ worth.

The symptoms only get as far as me being slightly more voluble than usual, and an incipient wooziness. No room spinning or nausea or anything like that.

My threshold has dropped since my twenties too. I was capable back then of downing a Long Island ice tea. Already by 35, I was struggling with half of one.

How would I go about making a Latin translator website?

Anon, I commend you on your initiative. I don’t commend you on your question topic tagging; hopefully you’ll get some responses better targeted than this now.

Learn Python.

Not because I have any love for Python. I’d be happy to chain Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum together: each other’s company would be punishment enough.

Learn Python, because Natural Language Toolkit.

Learn the Natural Language Toolkit.

Then get familiar with the techniques of Natural Language Processing. Which you can do via the Natural Language Toolkit. You’ll want to get into stemming. And lexical databases. And if you’re wanting to replicate what Google Translate does, statistical machine translation techniques.

By which time, you’ll have more targeted questions, which better informed individuals can help you out with.

If Konstantinos I of Greece had gone North to take Monastir in 1912, instead of going to Thessaloniki, would the Balkans be different?

Not a question I know much about, but let me take a stab, and see if someone more knowledgeable corrects me.

The Wikipedia article on Constantine I goes on to say:

The capture of Thessaloniki against Constantine’s whim proved a crucial achievement: the pacts of the Balkan League had provided that in the forthcoming war against the Ottoman Empire, the four Balkan allies would provisionally hold any ground they took from the Turks, without contest from the other allies. Once an armistice was declared, then facts on the ground would be the starting point of negotiations for the final drawing of the new borders in a forthcoming peace treaty. With the vital port firmly in Greek hands, all the other allies could hope for was a customs-free dock in the harbor.

In this scenario: Bulgaria takes Salonica, and Greece takes a good chunk of (FYRO) Macedonia. In real life, Bulgaria then went to war with Serbia and Greece in the Second Balkan War, dissatisfied with how much territory it had gotten, and Serbia thought that Bulgaria was reneging on the deal they had before the war on what would happen next.

Balkans after the First Balkan War. Bulgaria has gotten a lot bigger than it was later. In our scenario. Constantine I takes Monastir, and loses Salonique in the process.

Greeks having Monastir and not having Salonica spells even more trouble. I would surmise that the Second Balkan War becomes a three way war rather than a two way war. Any deal between Bulgaria and Serbia would be off. Serbia may well feel more of an imperative to protect the Southernmost Slavs, as Greece is now a lot closer to Skopje. Greece can’t be happy with Bulgarians in Salonica, especially as this likely means even more ethnic Greeks under Bulgarian control (Chalkidiki, as well as Eastern Rumelia).

In the ensuing free far all, Bulgaria is at less of a disadvantage: it may have retained Western Thrace, and it may even have ended up taking a big chunk of Vardarska Macedonia—which would end up with all of geographic Macedonia being Bulgarian.

I dunno. You tell me.

Is Zeus more powerful than Thor?

A question of this profundity deserves a well-considered, thoughtful evaluation.

Such as that given in Episode 3, Series 4 of Epic Rap Battles of History:

Zeus vs Thor

Tell your three headed bitch I say hi

The YouTube audience assessment, FWIW, seems to have weighed towards Thor.

Is it possible to translate the word zori/zor/زور , that exists in Greek & Persian, with ONE English word?

From Nişanyan’s etymological dictionary of Turkish, and زور – Wiktionary , zor came into Turkish (and thence Greek) from Persian, not Arabic. And lots of languages either side of Persian and Turkish have picked it up.

A single word for all uses of ζόρι in Greek, that Dimitris Sotiropoulos lists in his answer? No, but “force” covers most of them.

From the Triantafyllidis dictionary:

Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής

  • Application of relatively large amount of strength on something [force]
  • Exercise of violence or pressure on someone, compulsion; typically in the expression “with the ~” (“by force”) [force]
  • Of difficulties, inconvenience, which demand particularly intense effort. “The job has/needs much ~. I have great ~, I suffer much ~: I am under pressure”. [pressure, travails, difficulty]

The expression Dimitris brought up, “do you have a zori with me”, is not accounted for in that definition; the English equivalent is “do you have a problem with me? What’s your problem with me?”

Is there a way to find the etymology of words from foreign languages?

I’ll echo others on Wiktionary: it has astounding range.

For ancient Greek, don’t bother with Liddell-Scott: its etymologies are antiquated. Check both Chantraine and Frisk. Both are under copyright, and I can neither confirm nor deny that both are available at a reputable academic archiv al org anisation.

We are served quite well for later stages of Greek. For contemporary Greek, I go to the Triantafyllidis dictionary by default, because it is online.

What are the most fascinating things you’ve learned studying linguistics?

Me, personally?

That the same changes happen, again and again, from language to language to language. The same grammaticalisations; the same sound changes; the same semantic changes; the same syntactic changes; the same metaphors.

Which is little to do with Universal Grammar, and a lot to do with universals of cognition and articulation.

What can be most easily seen that change is constantly going on in a living language?

If you’re detecting change with your eyes: New vocabulary, then semantic shifts in existing words, then syntax — particularly syntax of individual words. fun became an adjective within my lifetime.

If you’re detecting change with your ears: all of the above, then maybe phonetics. But sound change is slower, socially and generationally stratified, and geographically uneven: most people don’t realise it even if they’re in the middle of it.

Pragmatics, phonology and morphology are much slower moving, though of course they change too.

What do we call the process of creating all of the possible morphological extractions of a given word?

In traditional grammar, this is conjugation for verbs, and declension for nominals; both are limited to inflectional morphology.