A magnificent resource I have just stumbled on, in seeing if someone has already answered this question (do I look like a Turcologist to you?) is tourkika.com. An online Turkish grammar resource for Greek learners of the language, with lots of etymology for loan words into Greek.

The etymology… is enlightening.

Χαβαλές – havale. From Arabic حوالة (ḥawāla), meaning “transfer”. The phrase havale etmek in Turkish means to refer someone, to delegate someone to do something, to transfer responsibility to someone else.

What do Greeks do when they’ve been entrusted a task, and they’ve successfully delegated it to someone else?

They sit around a café, talk shit, play backgammon, crack jokes, have an ouzo.

You know.

Κάνουν χαβαλέ. “Doing havale”. Having fun.

EDIT: The related adverb χαβαλέ (Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής) means “doing something without serious effort”: Δε διάβασα· έδωσα εξετάσεις χαβαλέ “I didn’t study; I sat the exams havale”. Meaning “as if I delegated it to someone else, without taking responsibility for it”.

I’ll take a different template, with Alberto Yagos’ as an inspiration.

When Ptolemy I asked if there were any shortcuts for plodding through the Elements, Euclid supposedly said, “there is no royal road to geometry”: Euclid – Wikiquote

The first Latin translation of the quote is Non est regia ad Geometriam via.

Non est regia ad curationem via? “There’s no royal road to healing”?

Or tweaking Alberto Yagos’ proposal, “the road to healing is not straight”: Via ad curationem non recta est.

Originally Answered:

How do you type superscript’s shortcut on a Mac?

In Microsoft Word: Shift-Clover-Plus.

But that is specific to Word. There is no general shortcut across all or most apps, the way Clover-I is for Italic. In Safari, for example, Shift-Clover-Plus zooms in.

A dune is a heap of sand. We can track it to Gaulish *dunom. Maybe.

A θίς can be a heap of several things, including sand.

A relation between the two has been suggested, but it’s not certain. To quote Frisk:

No satisfactory explanation. Wackernagel compares Old Indic dhíṣṇya– ‘situated on a knoll’, ‘knoll strewn with sand’, which could go back to an IE *dhisen-, *dhisn-. Often compared to German Düne ‘dune’ and related words, either as *θινϝ- related to Old Indic dhánvan– ‘dry land, mainland, beach’ (Fick; but that does not account for the /i/), or as *θϝιν- related to Lithuanian dujà ‘particle of dust’, cf. θύω ‘to storm in’. According to Osthoff, from Old Indic –dh-i in ni-dh-í ‘putting down, keeping’ (see τίθημι).

So… definite maybe.

Yes, it would.

I’m not going to bother with examples other than grave (Germanic: tomb; French: serious).

It is a common perception that language change is driven by trying to avoid ambiguity. In fact, language has an astounding tolerance for ambiguity, because context usually takes care of it. Instances where words change in order to avoid ambiguity (eg French hui > aujourd’hui ) are actually pretty rare.

The respondents so far have not given a satisfactory answer. How’s it feel when your culture is exoticised, eh?

I share Anon’s attitude towards Anglo nomenclature. Let’s try to unpack it.

Traditional societies have traditional approaches to naming people. If you’re a Roman, there’s only a dozen praenomina, some clan names, and a nickname cognomen that ends up being a surname itself. If you’re Ancient Greek or a Germanic tribesperson, there’s a fixed pattern of compounds. If you’re a Christian in Europe up until a century ago, there’s a fixed repertoire of saint names.

That’s not primarily about religion and books of fairy tales. That’s about having roots and a community and a cultural context.

One respondent found that horrifying. You know what I find horrifying? Running out and getting a random name for your kid just because. Saddling someone with Dweezil or Thursday. Dweezil dealt with it, sure (EDIT: he insisted on making it official when he was 5); but Dweezil was born in the Anglosphere.

(EDIT: And he was 5.)

And here’s the thing. The outlier isn’t OP, with his distaste of creative nomenclature. The outlier is the Anglosphere. Coming up with names with unfettered creativity, without any attention to community norms, is not the normal course of affairs.

And it wasn’t the normal course of affairs in the Anglosphere either, until the 20th century. There are fads and perturbations from the ’20s on, but the massive shakeup in most popular names in the US seems to date from the 1970s: Top 10 Baby Names by Decade

What changed around then? More and more individualism. Less sway of traditional structures, including religion and extended families. Hippie stuff. Social mobility. After that, it just snowballs in those particular communities: if noone calls their kid John or Mary any more, you don’t either. (In fact, Mary’s now are a retro thing.)

But that’s started as an Anglosphere thing. It’s been much slower to happen in Europe, and in fact parents wanting to emulate Anglosphere name creativity often bump into legal barriers.

The legal barriers aren’t to kill your buzz, man. They’re codifications of what was long presumed to be the normal way of doing things.

… And yes, were I to have kids, this would be a major issue of contention in our household…

Fear.

An entirely intelligible response to a hegemonic culture with substantial overlap with your own: fear that your culture will be assimilated into the hegemon, that the country will become unrecognisable to you, that the virtues you are familiar with and have come to cherish will be eroded. That you will cease being you, and start being the Other.

In the panoply of worldwide reactions to hegemony, this one’s rather on the benign side. It’s not Trumpism. It’s not Sinophobia. It’s mostly jocular. And I’m sure it’s exactly what happens in Canada too—except that Canadians are much more polite about it than Aussies are.

(Except possibly for the Québécois, câlisse!)

You might wonder why Australians weren’t as overtly hostile about their former hegemon Britain. But there were flareups, even back in the unenlightened days before Gough Whitlam. The Bodyline tactics in cricket in 1932, leading to Australians boycotting UK products. The strain of Australian nationalism of the 1880s and 1890s, hosted by The Bulletin. The class and sectarian war behind the idolisation of Bushrangers.

Oh, and Why don’t Australians celebrate Halloween? BECAUSE IT’S A SEPPO HOLIDAY!!!

(Psst.

Psst!

C’m ’ere.

Yeah, you.

Some of my best friends are Seppos. But don’t tell anyone, OK?)

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why does the definition of one word recall other n words and m definitions?

• Attempts at a rigorous semantics of definitions will inevitably have to bottom out on a list of Semantic primes, a set of concepts that have to be taken as givens rather than defined themselves.
• Identifying that list of primes, and using them for definitions, has not been a popular pastime. It’s work. Natural semantic metalanguage is an admirable initiative in that direction.
• Unfortunately, NSM also wanted to use those primes in human-intelligible definitions. That makes things dirtier. The initial Spartan beauty of Anna Wierzbicka’s Lingua Mentalis had 14 primes; now it’s in the 60s.

Nick Nicholas. You wouldn’t think it’d be that popular a name, right? And yet, I’m the SIXTH Nick Nicholas here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are you the first to have registered with your name or did a homonym or namealike register before you?

The Nick Nicholas’s that do show up change; there was a jazz musician, there was an anti-spam programmer, there was the CEO of Time, there was a magician, there was a car salesman…

… these days:

1. A gynecologist in Middlesex
2. A golf writer in Florida
3. Me (LinkedIn)
4. Me (Academia.edu)
5. Me (my homepage)
6. The car salesman, in Florida. (So that’s what he looks like…)

The next hit is “Nick (Nicholas) Ilyadis”. “Nick (Nicholas) X” comes up a lot when I ego-surf.

Phonemes are groupings of phones (different sounds), which language speakers treat as equivalent.

The phones that are variants of the same phoneme are allophones of the phoneme.

Normally, the distribution of allophones depends on their context: there is a rule, based on surrounding phonemes, which determines whether one allophone or the other is used.

If you can’t work out such a rule, then you give up and say that the choice of allophone is random. (Or at least, it’s random phonologically: there may be other factors at play, such as sociolinguistics.)

If the distribution of allophones is not phonologically predictable, then the allophones are in free variation.