Month: February 2016

Downstairs from my workplace, for one. The Mug House – Melbourne  at 440 Collins St.

See also Are there other Greek words that mean freedom besides “eleutheria”?

Sixth. I am the Sixth Nick Nicholas on Quora. And there are currently five more after me.

One of them even upvoted an answer once.

I am perpetually astonished that there are other Nick Nicholas’s out there. Including one that showed up on a dating show last week here in Oz.

I would have thought that with my three cousins also called Nick Nicholas, we’d have used up the world’s supply…

I lived in Orange County, CA, 1999–2002. Tell you what I missed. Yes, this will overlap with Vadim Berman.  

• Food. Vadim begged not to get started, I will. Yes, it’s my fault for not cooking; I did myself permanent damage through three years of  US takeout. In particular:
• Lamb
• Subtle pasta sauces
• Human-sized portions
• Coke that tastes like acid instead of cough syrup
• Obscure food
• Tim Tams
• To counter these: Australian ice cream was crap 15 years ago, and you can’t get decent Mexican in Australia. Taco Bill’s does not count.
• Come to think of it, getting  decent Mexican was too much of a challenge in Orange County too.
• Rudeness. Yes, people in Australia are relatively relaxed and carefree. They are also far more British than they realise, reserved, and do not talk to randoms. (Foreigners coming here diagnose this as cliqueishness.) So no, we do not like it when people assume we do.
• I was heartily sick of being told “Hey How Ya Doin'” by randoms any time I ventured out the door. I dreaded going into the SuperShuttle and being chatted to by Americans. Do I know you? No? Then leave me alone already.
• Which is why, two years in, visiting New York was an epiphany. Finally, a place where I can be shoved by passers-by in the street!
• Absence of religion in the public sphere.
• Absence of flags in the public sphere. (Tony Abbott was in my future at that point.)
• Non-toxic politics and unnoticeable culture wars. (Tony Abbott was in my future at that point.)
• Having Australian accents  on the TV not sound weird.
• Seeing people walk around to go to places.
• Human sized shopping malls.
• Weather. At all. (I was in SoCal.)
• Public transport. At all.   (I was in SoCal. SoCal buses do not count.)
• Australian humour.

I am going to regret wading into this.

I am quite OK to say Czechia; then again, I have been exposed to languages that are quite OK to say Czechia (Tschechei, Tchéquie, Τσεχία, Ĉeĥio). So why the anomaly in English?

It could be an endogenous reason—because Czechia doesn’t work for English speakers; or it could be an exogenous reason—because someone told English speakers to use Czech Republic instead.

Is there something awkward in English about Czechia? Can’t be that the root is monosyllabic: we’re fine with Serbia and Bosnia and India. Can’t be the final -/k/ before –ia: Slovakia is OK.

Is it that Czech and Czech-oslovakia is familiar, and Czechia is unfamiliar? A minor factor, possibly, but I find it hard to believe that it was decisive. We didn’t freak out with Abkhaz ~ Abkhazia, after  all.

So I’ll assume it was exogenous reasons. Someone, at the critical time of the Velvet Divorce, told English speakers that they should use Czech Republic; and Czechia wasn’t put forward as an alternative. Without exposure to the alternative Czechia, people went with Czech Republic.

Actually, no they didn’t, because that’s a damn fool thing to call a country. Noone says they went on holidays to the Commonwealth of Australia, or that they like listening to Republic of Korea-Pop. Without being given the option of Czechia, they started calling the country Czech.

Now, why were English-speakers not given the option?  Presumably because some shmuck started getting all hot under the collar about how Čechy is not Česko, and we can’t have the world language conflating Čechy with Česko, and Moravo-Silesians are people too.

That hypothesis leads to the following questions:

1. Why did only English get subjected to that kind of edict?

2. Why did anyone in Czechia  assume that anyone outside Czechia cares about the difference between  Čechy and Česko?

3. Why did anyone in Czechia not realise that the small number of people who are both native speakers of English and care about the difference between Čechy and Česko, already have a word for Čechy—Bohemian.

4. Why did anyone in Czechia think they could get non-Czechs to understand that Czechia only refers to Bohemia, but Czech refers to Bohemia + Moravia + Silesia?

English does not have a committee running it, as Zeibura S. Kathau says in his answer. It does however have linguistic conventions and regularities. By making people say Czech Republic, the aforementioned shmuck was flouting the   linguistic conventions and regularities of English. For that, they deserve to been bastinado’d.

Except that Fate has held an even better vengeance for that shmuck—and as collateral damage, all of said shmuck’s compatriots.

Fate has rewarded said shmuck with a generation of English speakers, saying that they went on holidays to Czech.

Well.

Grammaticalisation theory posits that there is a regular process in language of content words becoming function words and then bound morphemes.

Opponents of grammaticalisation theory (e.g. Lyle Campbell, Brian Joseph) posit that grammaticalisation theory is not particularly meaningful if there are counterexamples (degrammaticalisation), whereby function words or bound morphemes become content words. Their ultimate point is that grammaticalisation is not a discrete phenomenon, and doesn’t have explanatory power.

Proponents of  grammaticalisation theory counter that the preponderance of change is in the direction of grammaticalisation, so it is still a meaningful claim. That’s the point of Kasper Geeroms’ answer. FWIW, I agree that grammaticalisation is a preponderance, although I think “rare” is an overstatement; and it is certainly a distinct process from degrammaticalisation, which needs to be made sense of.

Olli Mann’s comment would be an extreme approach, to deny it is happening. But it does happen; to up the ante and the pros and cons are the more obvious example from English, and Campbell has brought up lots of Finnish examples. My recollection is that grammaticalisation theorists tried to deny degrammaticalisation at the beginning, then just harrumphed it was an exception.

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EDIT:

Oli Mann asks:

Do you know any striking examples of degrammaticalization?

Yes. (And my PhD thesis was done in the grammaticalisation framework, so not speaking as a hater.)

I’ll give an example in Greek, since I can speak to it; someone has written up a paper on it, but I don’t remember who.

Homeric Greek: ex and ana : two distinct prepositions/adverbs/verb prefixes (like in German).

Classical Greek: ex-ana– : verb prefix; ex and ana: prepositions. No more treatment of verb prefixes as separable morphemes (adverbs).

Early Modern Greek: xana-: verb prefix. ex and ana do not exist as separate morphemes. (Well, okh is a reflex of ex as a preposition, though it is regionally restricted.)

Modern Greek: xana– : verb prefix. AND adverb.

You could argue that xana– became an adverb by analogy with other productive prefixes, which also remained prepositions (apo, para). But they’re prepositions, not adverbs.

You could argue that this is just reanalysis. And so it is; but it’s reanalysis going the wrong way.

If the accent deviates only in intonation, probably not: intonations are difficult to capture schematically; and by the time you have a different intonation, typically there’ll be a whole lot of other differences anyway.

If (as your question posits) you have only phonetic differences, but not phonological (so the same spelling system does just fine for both), and not lexical: again, typically not. The distinction between [pɑːθ] or [pæθ] is a significant isogloss of Northern vs Southern England; but traditionally those differences are accompanied by differences in lexicon and morphology (and often enough phonology), and they are what has been prioritised in the differentiation: they are bigger ticket items, and make for a more obviously distinctive linguistic system.

With the prevalence of standard English, the dialectal differences in England have been attenuated, so the phonetics is more important as a differentiator.  But that’s not been a normal state of affairs.

It’s an interesting question, with a boring answer. Because there’s no point.

Let’s break that down though.

1. Right up until the 19th century, the main language being written in Greek script was Ancient Greek; and right up until the 17th, the main language being written in Roman script was Latin. The script hands and typefaces (i.e. “fonts”) evolved over centuries, as memes do, but there was no differentiation felt necessary between Ancient Language font and Modern Language font.

2. People didn’t read Ancient Greek or Latin for primarily antiquarian interest: those were the contemporary languages of the intelligentsia. So they got contemporary fonts; and they couldn’t justify for themselves the additional effort of using an antiquarian script.

3.  The authentic scripts of Ancient Greece had not been standardised, and varied  greatly from town to town. If you’re going to go with a standardised version of Greek script—you have it, and it’s what you print Modern Greek with. (That argument doesn’t apply to Roman with Trajan’s capitals of course.)

4. The notion of antiquarianism and authenticity is really a 19th, if not 20th century thing anyway. Like historically accurate musical instruments. Before then, it would not have even occurred to anyone that a 2500 year old text should be reproduced in a 2500 year old font.

5. People are familiar with contemporary fonts, and not with really old fonts—the odd period  embellishment notwithstanding (such as lunate sigmas). It is *difficult* to read even 500 year old manuscripts; that’s why palaeography is a specialist skill. The shorthand abbreviations commonplace in Greek from the 1000s right up until the 1800s are impenetrable to anyone but specialists. Ditto Latin palaeography.

6. The writing conventions of antiquity are even more challenging for contemporary readers. No lowercase, no spaces, minimal punctuation that doesn’t work the same way as modern punctuation does. Is it worth it?

Papyrologists and epigraphers differ from other classicists who work off mediaeval manuscript copies. The texts that other classicists reconstruct from the mediaeval manuscripts follow modern conventions and punctuation; there’s nothing much in the mediaeval manuscripts’ convention they feel beholden to.

Papyrologists and epigraphers OTOH are working with texts written at the time, not copies; so they are interested in preserving more of the look and feel. Still, usually they put spaces and punctuation in, if not capitals; and only the most fastidious will print two versions of the text—one as it appears on the papyrus or stone, and one normalised. Making sense of the original, unspaced, run-in,  unpunctuated text is the specialist’s job—not the reader’s.

7. There’s a related question you haven’t posed, but which is worth posing: why does noone (outside the Gothic Wikipedia) print Gothic in the Gothic alphabet, instead of the Roman? Why does noone print Old Church Slavonic in Glagolitic, instead of Cyrillic? Because the people primarily interested in the scripts feel it’s part of their patrimony, and don’t feel the need or the inclination to learn a more authentic, but completely different writing system, when it’s painful enough to read the originals to begin with.

7a. Although I’ll concede that  Old Church Slavonic is  printed in old fashioned Cyrillic, looking like what it did before Peter the Great made it look all serifed and Western. That’s an exception to the global trend, witnessed with Greek and Latin.

If you are indeed asking about arse vs ass, I refer you to What is the difference between the words ass or arse? And butt or booty? 

Ancestor worship.

The first capital of Greece was Nafplio (Nauplia), which was an important port in Ottoman times, while Athens was an insignificant village that attracted the odd Western tourist.

In 1834, King Otto (himself a Western tourist) decreed that the capital of Greece shall be the most important city of Ancient Greece. For after all, Otto was King of the Hellenes.