Category: Uncategorized

Greek: ἀνὴρ ὀψιαίτατος ἐν κόσμῳ παλαιοτάτῳ.

I’ll second the request for more context.

Counting distinct diacritics on the Wikipedia page Diacritic , and ignoring the distinction between diacritics that generate new letters and diacritics that don’t:

• Vietnamese has nine: horn, circumflex, breve, bar (đ), acute, grave, tilde, underdot, and hoi (mini-question mark)
• Livonian has six (macron, umlaut, ogonek, superdot, tilde, hacek), but wins points for multiply stacked diacritics, like Vietnamese: ā, ä, ǟ, ḑ, ē, ī, ļ, ņ, ō, ȯ, ȱ, õ, ȭ, ŗ, š, ț, ū, ž. Livonian however is either moribund, extinct, or under revival.
• Lithuanian has four basic diacritics (caron, ogonek, macron, superdot); dictionaries also use acute, grave, tilde for pitch accent. So seven, though in practice only four.
• No others in the list have more than six.

So for commonplace Roman alphabets, Vietnamese still wins. Other scripts do better: Hebrew have 13 Niqqud, though of course vowel pointing is not a regular part of Hebrew orthography.

Minority languages with orthographies devised by modern linguists may have more diacritics. Though I suspect they don’t.

If phonetic alphabets count, then the IPA has at least 43 diacritics (depending on how you count them), and other phonetic alphabets are probably even more profligate.

As a card-carrying linguist (even though they don’t pay me to be one), I am of course honour-bound to repudiate any claims of better or worse grammar. There is just more formal and less formal grammar, and you use the appropriate register and grammar in the appropriate circumstances. And “proper” grammar is quite improper in informal situations. Try speaking the Queen’s English on the factory floor. (Or in America.)

That said, what is going on is part of a more general devaluing of formality in Western society: it is seen (not unreasonably) as bound up with hierarchy and insincerity. Who wears a suit and tie to a classical concert any more? They did 30 years ago.

Formal grammar has its place, but social media is not it. Informal grammar, conversely, is seen as intimate, hip, and/or playful, which is an asset in social media. Which is why people on social media can go out of their way to ignore formal grammar rules.

They’re not ungrammatical, as far as linguistics is concerned: they’re not jumbling words in random order. They’re just following grammatical norms outside of formal written English. Abbreviations and creative spelling are where the more overt rule breaking lie.

I refer you to the Quora question:

Why are most terminologies in Physics, biology, maths, Chemistry are derived from Latin/Greek languages?

• The vocabulary of STEM comes from Latin and Greek for the reasons explained under that question: following the tradition of Greek as the pioneers in STEM, and Latin as the intellectual lingua franca.
• Symbols come from Greek instead of Latin for the same reason of prestige (and because it’s convenient to have symbols in a different script from the text).
• The numerals, on the other hand, don’t come from Greek or Latin: they’re Arabic/Indian.

Quora collapse bot, you are inane. Your recalcitrance drives me insane.

Selfie is an Australian coinage: No, a Drunken Australian Man Did Not Coin the Word Selfie. (The article disputes only that the particular guy came up with it, not that it was coined in Australia.) The Australian suffix used to coin cutesy abbreviations of words (hypocoristics) is conventionally spelled as –ie, not –y—even when it looks weird (so firie for firefighter).

As a tourist? Most villages, you can get to with the KTEL Buses of Greece , but you would be stuck to their timetable, which would likely be just once or twice a day. If you’re not going anywhere obscure, buses and walking will do you. If you are, taxis are not expensive. 

Sure. Modern Greek: Πήγε για μαλλί και βγήκε κουρεμένος: He went in to get wool, and came out shorn.

As always, good outline in Wikipedia: Swastika

To summarise:

• Lots of ancient civilisations used the swastika as a symbol, because it’s an easy shape to draw.
• Because lots of ancient Indo-European civilisations used it (including Indians, Greeks, Celts, and Armenians), German archaeologists assumed it was a symbol of the original Indo-European people.
• OTOH the Chinese and the Navajo used it too, so that was not that good a guess.
• Because Indo-European may have spread through conquest, Germans assumed the original Indo-European people must have been kick-ass warriors, that they would be proud to call their ancestors.
• There might have been conquest, and there might have been cultural diffusion; who knows.
• The only name that looks like it might possibly have been a name for the original Indo-European people is Arya, shared between Indians and Persians. Hence, Aryans.
• Notwithstanding the general swarthiness of Indians and Persians, if the original Indo-European people were such kick-ass warriors. Germans concluded that they must have been blond, blue-eyed Germans.
• I shit you not.
• So if you want to extol the racial primacy of Germans, you will rally around the symbol that your glorious ancestors must have used—and by historical accident, that the Jews were one of the few peoples not to have made much use of.

So. Hinduism (and Buddhism, and Paganism, and the Navajo) came first. Then came guesswork about Indo-Europeans. Then came German racialist nationalism.

Isn’t simhash/minhash what you want?

simhash

svcs.cs.pdx.edu Git – simhash.git/summary

MinHash

See also How do you find high-similarity pairs of sentences in a large corpus?

Because Wiktionary does not enumerate all possible affixes on a verb.

Bob Cromwell  for example (following Lewis’ grammar) enumerates the following possible verb modifiers:

• negative
• passive
• causative
• reflexive
• reciprocal
• eight tenses
• six moods
• two numbers
• three persons

Of these, Wiktionary is counting:

• negative
• five tenses
• two numbers
• three persons