Month: September 2016

It’s an interesting question, OP. I wonder whether too much similarity will make a word less easy to learn, not more, due to the potential for confusion.

There can’t be a categorical difference for when a word switches from similar to dissimilar. It’s not like a distance of 3 means similar and a distance of 4 means dissimilar. But here’s some starting points:

• The Damerau–Levenshtein distance is a linguistically appropriate metric for how different two strings are: it allows for not only deletion and addition of letters, but also transposition and substitution.
• You will presumably want to include syllable count in your metric: two words will be more different if their syllable count is different (meaning additional vowels). So in the distance metric, vowels count for more than consonants.
• OTOH if the two words are related through morphology, e.g. derivational morphology, they belong to the same family, and all difference metrics are off: the two words are related through a morphological rule.

Can’t find a clip, annoyingly.

Bob Maguire: as Reddit r/atheism has put it, Father Bob Maguire a Catholic priest that an atheist could admire. Social campaigner, cantankerous and way cool old timer, beloved of notoriously irreligious Australians, does a lot of TV and radio sparring with atheist comedian John Safran.

Recently, he was on TV, talking (I think to Safran) about how religions have much to contribute to Australian identity. So Safran (I think) asked him to sum up in one word what each of the Abrahamic religions had to offer to Australia.

Judaism: the Law.

Christianity: Compassion.

Islam?

“Submission”.

Safran (I think) smirked.

“By which I mean,” (I paraphrase) “acknowledging there is something out there bigger than yourself.”

Some highlights from List of Greek phrases. See the Wikipedia page for more detail and other phrases.

• ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω. Ageōmétrētos mēdeìs eisítō. “Let no one untrained in geometry enter.”
• ἀεὶ ὁ θεὸς γεωμετρεῖ. Aei ho theos geōmetreî. “God always geometrizes”
• αἰὲν ἀριστεύειν. aièn aristeúein. “Ever to Excel”
• γηράσκω δ᾽ αἰεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος. Gēraskō d’ aíeí pollâ didaskómenos. “I grow old always learning many things.”
• γνῶθι σεαυτόν. Gnôthi seautón. “Know thyself”
• δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω. Dôs moi pâ stô, kaì tàn gân kīnā́sō. “Give me somewhere to stand, and I will move the earth”.
• εἷς οἰωνὸς ἄριστος, ἀμύνεσθαι περὶ πάτρης. Heîs oiōnòs áristos, amýnesthai perì pátrēs. “There is only one omen, to fight for one’s country”
• ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα. Hèn oîda hóti oudèn oîda. “I know one thing, that I know nothing”
• εὕρηκα! Heúrēka! “I have found [it]!”
• ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς. Ḕ tā̀n ḕ epì tâs. “Either [with] it [your shield], or on it”
• θάλασσα καὶ πῦρ καὶ γυνή, κακὰ τρία. Thálassa kaì pŷr kaì gynḗ, kakà tría. “Sea and fire and woman, three evils.”
• ἰατρέ, θεράπευσον σεαυτόν. Iatré, therápeuson seautón. “Physician, take care of yourself!”
• Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται. Krêtes aeì pseûstai. “Cretans always lie”
• κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί. ktêma es aeí. “possession for eternity”
• μέτρον ἄριστον. Métron áriston. “Moderation is best”
• μὴ μοῦ τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε. Mḕ moû toùs kúklous táratte. “Do not disturb my circles.”
• μηδὲν ἄγαν. Mēdèn ágan. “Nothing in excess”
• μολὼν λαβέ! Molṑn labé! “Come take [them]!”
• νενικήκαμεν. Nenikḗkamen. “We have won.”
• οὐκ ἂν λάβοις παρὰ τοῦ μὴ ἔχοντος. Ouk àn labois parà toû mē ekhontos. “You can’t get blood out of a stone.” (Literally, “You can’t take from one who doesn’t have.”)
• Πάντα ῥεῖ. Panta rhei. “All is flux; everything flows” –
• ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς. Rhododáktylos Ēṓs. “Rosy-fingered Dawn.”
• σπεῦδε βραδέως. Speûde bradéōs. “Hasten slowly; less haste, more speed”.
• σὺν Ἀθηνᾷ καὶ χεῖρα κίνει. Sỳn Athēnâi kaì kheîra kinei. “Along with Athena, move also your hand” — cf. the English “God helps those who help themselves.”
• Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε / κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. Ô xeîn’, angéllein Lakedaimoníois hóti têide / keímetha toîs keínōn rhḗmasi peithómenoi. “Stranger, tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their laws.”

“44 or so”.

And there’s your problem.

English phonology

trap bath palm lot cloth thought

The vowels in Received Pronunciation group as:

(tɹæp) (bɑːθ pɑːm) (lɒt klɒθ) (θɔːt)

They group the same way in Australian English, though as

(tɹæp) (bɐːθ pɐːm) (lɔt klɔθ) (θoːt)

The vowels in General American, however, group as:

(tɹæp bæθ) (pɑːm lɑːt) (klɔːθ θɔːt)

You can do that, and teach the phonology of only one dialect—but at the expense of having to reteach them an intradialectal phonology later; in effect, you’d be reinventing English spelling.

• You have an aesthetic appreciation of different phonetics and phonologies. You like those particular sounds.
• You have positive cultural associations in your mind with those languages.
• You already know a little of those languages (as OP has indicated), and you enjoy the mental challenge of working out what is being said.

It’s a very insightful question, OP. If an onomatopoeia is a completely transparent mapping of natural sound to human language, then it is an inevitability, and there’s no point attributing it to one coiner or another, one language or another: the onomatopoeia is just there, a sound ready for humans to imitate, and humans will keep imitating it over and over in the same way.

… Except, well, no. The mapping of natural sound to human language is not inevitable: if the sound isn’t articulated by a human mouth as communicative language, then there’s no single deterministic way of representing it in language. Different languages can come up with different ways of mapping it. See the renditions in diverse languages of cock-a-doodle-doo – Wiktionary.

(And I strongly suspect Middle English had a different version of “cock a doodle doo”, Andrew Dunbar, but I can’t find it: Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale has just “Cok! cok!”)

And onomatopoeias can be borrowed between languages too. The Turkish onomatopoeia for sneezing is hapşuu. The Greek onomatopoeia is apsu. Which is exactly what you’d get if you borrowed the Turkish onomatopoeia into Greek as a normal word, and accommodated it to Greek phonology.

Romans had nomen and cognomen, which were inherited names like surnames. Greeks and Jews, like contemporary Icelanders, just had patronymics: John son of Zebedee. (See also the list of high priests of Israel.)

Less often, they had nicknames indicating jobs or characteristics: Simon the Zealot, Judas of Kerioth, Jesus the Nazarene. In narratives, those distinctions would only have been used when felt necessary.

Already posted this as a comment:

… The business with Yahuda’s supposedly suppressed book is a longstanding urban legend in Greek nationalist circles (such as Davlos magazine).

An urban legend uninformed by the existence of Worldcat:

• Hebrew is Greek (Book, 1982) [WorldCat.org]
• Hebrew is Greek.

Or Amazon:

• Hebrew is Greek: Joseph Yahuda: 9780728900134: Amazon.com: Books

The nearest copy of the book to me is in the Australian Catholic University. 18 km from my house, and across the road from the Catholic Education Office, where I have routine business. Next time I’m there, I should get a photo…

Strike that: some soul has uploaded the book to Hebrew is Greek : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Oh, and no book reviews ever? People *do* realise that the academic press is Googlable nowadays, don’t they?

Bible and Interpretation: The Collected Essays of James Barr

with the wonderful summation:

It is, therefore, just as if one were to claim that Milton’s Paradise Lost was a text in Russian. If the reader objected that it looked very like an English poem and not at all like a piece of Russian, he would be shown a set of permutations of vowels, consonants, prefixes and terminations, from which it would emerge that each word of Milton’s text was in fact a Russian word; and, since the Russian words, remarkably, added up to pretty much the same general meaning as the English had had in the first place, it would have been demonstrated that Russian and English are the same language anyway.

….

For scholarship, then, this book, though learned-looking, full of words in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic script, attractively printed, extending to nearly 700 pages in length and being correspondingly expensive to buy, is of no importance or interest. The author simply does not know what he is talking about.

And the sample etymologies from Yahuda that George Stamatis supplies—

Cain < Ka-en < Κα ην < Γα ην < Γηινος (‘from the earth’)

Israel < Eis-ra-el < εις (‘powerful’) + ρα (‘king’) + ηλ (‘sun’)

don’t make me dispute James Barr’s conclusion.

A2A, because apparently I have a great big “kick me” sign on me. (Only joking, Snežana Đorić (Снежана Ђорић)…

… or am I?)

Look, my personal opinion, as a taxonomist of the world (a Lumper and not a splitter) , is to look at what used to be one language, turned into four over a decade, of which at least two are identical, and exclaim Oh FFS.

But my personal opinion doesn’t matter.

Nor indeed does my professional opinion. Because I’m not professionally a linguist. But also because this isn’t really a linguistic matter.

Every time someone says “a language is a dialect with a military”, like Daniel Nikolić did here, a little piece of Zeibura S. Kathau dies (Zeibura S. Kathau’s answer to Do you agree that the difference between a dialect and a language is an army?). But, well, it’s not like Daniel’s wrong here.

Linguists want the distinction between languages to be about mutual intelligibility. But if the weird dialect is spoken by your fellow nationals, you’ll expend that much more effort to understand it and call it your own; and if the not-as-weird dialect is spoken across the border, you’ll expend that much less effort.

Sociolinguists want the distinction between languages to be about Abstand and ausbau: separateness and development. The development comes with status; the separateness… well, the separateness can end up manufactured. When Serbo-Croat was one language, the separateness was quashed; when Serbo-Croat became four languages, the separateness was cranked up.

A language is deemed a language when people call it a language. I can think it’s silly; I can exult that the Montenegrin-language Wikipedia did not go ahead. But it’s not up to Nick Nicholas to tell the Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins and Bosnians that they’re speaking the same language, FFS, or to roll his eyes when the same polling booth in Bosnia uses Jekavian in Latin alphabet and Ekavian in Cyrillic alphabet (Mjesto, Место).

(… That’s a Russian Italic т, isn’t it. Sucks to be Serbian/Macedonian, I know.)

There are linguistic and sociolinguistic criteria for whether it’s one language or four; but if the language speakers are convinced one way or the other, well, that’s how it is.

FFS.

• Placeholder name
• List of placeholder names by language

The typical use in English of placeholder names for persons is to emphasise their random selection, or their representativeness. Hence the rich assortment of List of terms related to an average person, including J. Random Hacker for computing, Tommy Atkins for the British Army, or The man on the Clapham omnibus for the legal system.

Going through the Wikipedia language list for all the following:

• Dutch makes a class distincion between the average couple Mieke en Janneke, and the lower class average young couple Sjonnie en Anita. That’s easy to replicate in the various dialects of English, with whatever given names happen to be in vogue in a particular community.
• Hebrew has Buzaglo for a simple lower-class citizen (a Moroccan Jewish surname, reflecting the lower status of Mizrahi Jews).
• Finnish has Pihtiputaan mummo (“the grandmother from Pihtipudas”) for someone who’s the last to adopt new technology. Again, I’m sure other languages have equivalents. Ditto French Madame Michu as an unsophisticated computer user.
• Hungarian Gizike and Mancika are “stereotypically obnoxious and ineffective female bureaucrats”. (This sounds like Patty and Selma from the Simpsons.)
• Legal Latin as codified by Justinian used Titius and Seius as names for Roman citizens, and Stichus and Pamphilus as names for slaves.
• In Portuguese, João Ninguém or Zé Ninguém (Jack Nobody) are used for someone who is unimportant.
• In Russian, Dzhamshut is a derogative placeholder for a gastarbeiter from southern Former Soviet countries.
• In Tagalog, Hudas (= Judas Iscariot) is a placeholder for people the speaker considers to be a malefactor or treacherous.