In addition to the answers from Elke Weiss and Niko Vasileas, note the wrinkle thrown up by Sheol: there is some evidence that Sheol is anthropomorphic in the Hebrew Scriptures, with a womb, a hand, and a mouth.
So Sheol corresponds to the House of Hades, the place (as indeed is the Christian usage of Hades: Christian views on Hades). But the Septuagint translators might have had motivation to map Sheol to Hades himself.
You can use a diacritic only when it’s necessary to prevent confusion, or you can use a diacritic consistently, whenever the pronunciation goes one way rather than the other. In the former case, you reduce the number of diacritics in the language. In the latter case, you reduce the amount of pronunciation ambiguity.
English has a spelling system insane enough to be quite comfortable with pronunciation ambiguity (the more English historical phonology I learn, the more annoyed I get about it). And diacritics have never taken off in English. So the move to avoid diaereses within English, in general, makes sense: Diaeresis (diacritic).
But that’s one language community’s decision. It’s also why Pinyin users aren’t too fussed about <ü>. German does not think the same way about <ü>; and many languages value lack of ambiguity over avoiding diacritics. They don’t want to have to think about how the word is pronounced; if you have to think, you might as well use ideograms.
That’s the general principles. In the 19th century, English was friendlier towards diacritics; hence the profusion of graves like learnèd and diaereses like naïve.
Why does the New Yorker persist in the 21st century, against the global trend in English orthography?
I give you: the New Yorker logo.
It’s a consciously old-fashioned affectation. Of the kind that the New Yorker hopes its readers will find cute.
If your grammar is bad (or even quirky), the grammar bot is going to ding questions as meeting improvement, based on the question. Automatically, because it is a bot. And regardless of whether you’ve posted anonymously or not, because it is a bot. If you edit the question, the “needing improvement” goes away; if the question is still ungrammatical, the “needing improvement” will eventually come back.
The bot has a fairly rudimentary understanding of grammar, and will ding questions even for things like apposition.
I have plenty of issues with Quora moderation, but dinging you for grammar is not really Quora moderation’s style; Occam’s Razor dictates that it’s the bot. Try dumbing down the syntax of the question, and refer to
What should I do if Quora marks my question as “Needs Improvement”?
Also, seek advice from the helpful folks at
It’s a fascinating question, and I don’t know that there is an existing word.
Partly, that’s sexism, and partly, that’s the bias of historical linguistics in explaining derivation: Martina is the “feminine variant” or “feminisation” of Martin, and it doesn’t occur to people to describe the relationship of Martin back to Martina. In the rare instances where a masculine name is derived from a feminine (Catarino < Caterina is the only one that occurs to me), I still think noone has bothered to describe the pair Caterina, Catarino as anything.
Zeibura S. Kathau, I miss having the kinds of pub conversations you’re having.
I like Uri Segal’s zeugonym, and Audrey Ackerman’s didymonym. (Haven’t seen you in my feed in a while, Audrey, but that’s because I’ve muted Game of Thrones 🙂
Heterophylonym “other gender” is the pedantic answer, but it’s too long. Heteronym is already taken; how about phylonym “gender name”? (Phylon is both “tribe”, hence phylum, and “gender”.) There seems to be only very little usage of phylonym in the sense of “phylum”.
Genos has a similar ambiguity between “generation” and “gender”, and to my surprise genonym is already defined to mean a generational name: An Alphabetical Guide to the Language of Name Studies.
There is a gender-neutral word for sibling in Modern Greek, αδέρφι /aðerfi/, derived from the Ancient neuter diminutive ἀδέλφιον /adelpʰion/. But that word is first attested in the second century AD. So Chad’s answer stands.
Kissinger undermined Rogers at every opportunity because he was profoundly insecure. Kissinger would yell at anyone available (quite often Haldeman) for hours about slights, real and imaginary. The story of Kissinger’s time as National Security Adviser was a story of constant tussling with Rogers, and making sure Rogers was kept in the dark.
Nixon initially undermined Rogers so that the White House, not the Secretary of State, would have control of foreign policy, which was all that he really cared about. It’s why he deliberate chose a former business partner who knew nothing of foreign policy. Of course, once Kissinger became too big for his boots, Nixon found he needed to undermine Kissinger too, and very rarely he would side with Rogers against Kissinger.
It’s an awful question to pose, to pick just one (or even several). I’m forcing myself to limit myself to five:
If I’d allowed myself 10: the 3rd movement of the First; the 3rd and 4th movement of the Second; the 1st movement of the Third; the last movement of the Ninth. (Or of the Third. Or of the Sixth. Not easy….)
The first four Mahler symphonies are called Wunderhorn symphonies for good reason: they all draw inspiration from songs in the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection, including quotations or rearrangements of song settings that Mahler had done.
That correlates with the structure of the Wunderhorn symphonies, contrasted with his later work: more songlike, more scene-painting, more focus on single musical ideas, more overt programmes. The later works, the 5th, 6th, and 9th, are greater (not by far), and certainly more sophisticated, but the first four are more accessible. Which makes it easier for them to tug at the heartstrings.
Mahler never wore his heart on his sleeve as much as in the Funeral March of the 1st. He probably intended nothing Klezmer about it—he thought of the band as Bohemian, rather than Jewish, and his mental picture was about a band marching in and out of earshot; but the simple melodies and violent clashes in mood have a special resonance for me, one that the Yiddishkeit of the march (from our post–Austro-Hungarian perspective) enhances.
And the bit that gets me crying without fail is the yearning for heaven in Urlicht, from the 2nd symphony. Again, because of the contrast—in particular, the contrast with the cynicism of St Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes, which precedes it, and swallows it up afterwards.
Oliver Stone’s Nixon.
It may be an eccentric choice. It may be the choice of someone who does not understand film at all. But it’s my favourite movie. Grand Shakespearean tragedy, operatic, intense, cinematic tour-de-force, encompassing the world like a Mahler symphony. And not that this matters anywhere near as much to me, but historically more accurate than you might think.
A surprise, because the biopic is justly maligned as an incoherent and/or formulaic genre; but Stone had great subject matter.
I had little time for Natural Born Killers or The Doors, so falling in love with Nixon surprised me too.
Fun fact: on my first date with my future wife, when we were in the infuriatingly cutesy stage of identifying common interests—
—What’s your favourite city?
—Vienna.
—Me too! What your favourite cake?
—Black Forest.
—Me too!
… and when it came to favourite movie:
—What’s your favourite movie?
—Nixon!
—Me too!
Only by Nixon, Tamar did not mean Oliver Stone’s Nixon. She meant Frost/Nixon (film).
And Frost/Nixon is in many ways the anti-Oliver Stone’s Nixon. It’s intimate, focussed, stagey, and somewhat conventional; a chamber piece.
We’ve watched Frost/Nixon together, and we’ve watched Oliver Stone’s Nixon. (For limited values of “we”.)
I guess we’ll always have Vienna…
Thx4A2A.
I’ve already answered a related question from a linguist’s perspective: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What makes Modern Greek an interesting language to learn, from a purely linguistic point of view?. But this question really should be about a lay description.
(But I can’t resist telling Ilir Mezini: it’s Albanian, missing half the letters, and with even more Greek words in it. 😉
Modern Greek is a historical battleground, caught between its ancient heritage, and its more recent, variegated past. Lots of texture and hidden battles in there, of which only some have been resolved, and many have been resolved only recently.
It’s a staccato, rapid fire, impassioned language—although you should listen to some regional accents; Cretan and Cypriot are pleasantly sing-song, in different ways.
And of course I will use the Cretan Muslim village of Al-Hamidiyah in Syria to illustrate. Contrast the intonation of the journo, straight outta Athens, with the locals’:
As Indo-European languages go, it has rather more grammar than you’re used to, including some entrenched randomness in the verb system (sigmatic vs asigmatic aorists), random genders, and an accusative and genitive.
Compared to Classical Greek, it is drastically simplified, and the simplifications mostly are rather sensible. Although a classicist I once asked did say it looked like a drunk Ancient Greek.
If you speak a Balkan language, as I alluded above, a lot of its syntax, idioms, and morphology will look rather familiar.