Month: September 2016

Testing Changes to Adding Questions Anonymously by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates

Because, contrary to what you might think, interjections are not always pure spontaneous exclamations from deep in the neural cortex, that are universal to all humans.

A few are; as I noted in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Are there any short expletives that sound the same in different languages?

Nick Enfield [Page on sydney.edu.au] (who I did linguistics with, and boy does he look different twenty years on) just got an Ig Noble [Improbable Research] for claiming the universality of Huh? (The Syllable Everyone Recognizes, Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?)

Of course the realisation of Huh? does differ by language; in the Mediterranean, for example, it is E? But the general idea is a mid vowel (as close to a schwa as your language allows), with a questioning tone.

However plenty of them are culture specific; they may not be arbitrary in themselves, but the choice of which interjection to use can be; and in fact interjections can be borrowed between languages, just like any other word.

Two instances from Modern Greek.

• “Ouch” in Greek is traditionally [ax, ox]. English [autʃ ~ auts] has now been borrowed into young people’s Greek, from TV.
• The Greek sneeze interjection is [apsu]. I’ve just discovered that the Turkish interjection is [hapʃuː], and [apsu] is just [hapʃuː] nativised to Greek phonology. (How is the sound of a sneeze written out in different languages?)

Greek: αψού “apsu”

Hapşuu being the Turkish version

In English? Goodbye. Also farewell, though that is more formal. In fact, it’s harder to find ways of saying goodbye while making it clear that it’s not forever: see you soon is the one that leaps to mind.

Maybe.

There is a plural megara word in ancient Greek, which means “a kind of crypt into which live pigs were thrown during the Thesmophoria festival”. This is related by both Chantraine and Frisk to Hebrew me‘ārā “cavern”, meaning it is Semitic (in all likelihood), and thus related to Arabic Magharat.

The singular megaron “hall” is less definite; it may be related to the town of Megara; it may be related to megas “big”; it may be borrowed from an external language (Frisk rejects the proposed Indo-European derivation by Brugman), and Chantraine notes that a Condoléon thought it was indeed the same word as the plural megara “crypts”. But that’s just one authority relating the two words.

Zagori OTOH is pretty obviously derived from Slavonic Zagore, “beyond the mountain”.

Never, never, ever underestimate the power of inertia.

In the instance you cite, of sex addiction vs compulsivity: the distinction is itself fairly new, and the use of the description to describe the patient has not yet stabilised, because the notion of compulsion as a medical condition has not been pervasive. So there’s a huge amount of inertia behind addiction, and an even huger amount of inertia because there hasn’t been until now a term for “one suffering from a compulsion”, to match “addict = one suffering from an addiction”.

If we went to Latin, we would use the past passive participle, find it to be compulsus (cf. addictus), and say that the person is a *compulse. But that hasn’t happened in English with any of the -pulse/-pel verbs. Not least because pulse and impulse as nouns are abstractions.

Since a sufferer of compulsion is grammatically one who is compelled, we could use *compelee. But compel and compulsion have actually diverged—compel is not used in the psychological context.

So, by accident, we don’t have a straightforward derivative word to describe such a patient. What to do, OP, what to do…

… actually this has already been solved. compulsive can be used as a noun to describe someone who exhibits a compulsive disorder: a sex compulsive. This is also something that English does with adjectives; cf. captive prisoner > captive. It sounds odd to us, because compulsive disorder describes the compeller and not the compellee; but it’s better than the alternatives, and it’s already in use.

The grammatical strangeness may slow down the take-up of compulsive; but if there is a compelling (ha!) case for a single word to be used for sufferers of compulsion, it will be taken up anyway.

Shulamit Widawsky is right about the emotive loading of words affecting their memorability.

In the specific context of dirty words, you may well have been highly motivated to learn them. (There’s always keen motivation to learn dirty words in foreign languages, as evidenced here on Quora.) If you were strongly motivated and were delighted by the frisson of taboo, then the words are likelier to have stuck.

Does that mean naughty words should be prioritised in language textbooks? Well, if you’re taught them boringly by rote, all the fun goes out of them, and if all the fun goes out of them, you’re less likely to remember them. So in fact, maybe not.

I’d say getting people to look up their own words, as they need them in composition, can be very helpful, for a similar reason: it’s a word you needed, and invested some effort in. A lot of my German and Klingon stuck that way.

As far as I can tell, you are referring to Maroneia in Thrace, and the rendering Marogna appears in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854)

Maroneia is reckoned among the towns of Macedon. The modern name is Marogna, and it has been the seat of an archbishopric.

Cramer (1828) also gives the name of Marogna (A geographical and historical description of ancient Greece), citing a P. Mela.

I don’t see any evidence for Marogna being Latin; it is an Italian rendering of /maronja/ (Greek Μαρώνεια Bulgarian Мароня), and is presented as modern explicitly. With Italian mariners having the run of the Mediterranean, it would not have been unusual for a port in Greece to have an Italian rendering, or for the early 19th century rendering of a Greek (or Bulgarian) placename to have been spelled via Italian.

Good question, Anon!

By design, they’re not supposed to. Linguistics makes a point of segregating them hierarchically:

• Phonetics: how individual sounds work
• Phonology: how sounds are organised into meaningful contrasts as phonemes
• Morphology: how phonemes are organised into meaningful components of words as morphemes
• Lexicon: how morphemes are organised into meaningful words
• Semantics: how the meaning of those words works.

The hierarchies are more leaky than we would like; they are convenient abstractions. There can be leakage between them. But by asking for semantics to meet phonetics, OP, you’re asking for an awful lot of leakage.

The closest I can think of is morphophonemes, which leak between phonology and morphology. Plural -s, for example covers both [s] and [z]. The two are clearly different phonemes of English now (though they didn’t used to be). You could argue that the neutralisation of contrast between the two in that context means that there is a single morphophoneme at work, -S, spanning /s/ and /z/. Enough of that kind of thing happens, through diachronic leakage, that Morphophonology is a thing.

That’s a bridge between morphology and phonology, anyway.

EDIT: Forgot to put in another leak: Sound symbolism. Phonemes are associated with particular vague vibes of meaning, and accordingly get used with naming particular concepts. It’s vague, it’s infrequent, it’s not reproducible (little sounds little, but does small?), and linguists usually get away with ignoring it outside the most explicit instances, in onomatopoeia. But it is a leak of some meaning from semantic classes down to phonetics.

Context: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why are opinions from teenagers often not taken seriously on Quora?

What would happen if forty-five-year olds like me took over Quora?

You’d get some geniuses like me, and some dumbasses like, oh, I dunno, whoever your least favourite middle-aged Quoran is.

Ditto teenagers. There’s plenty of dumb answers from the middle-aged, and plenty of genius answers from teenagers.

OK, there would be more dumb questions and dumb answers and herp derp nonsense attempted on Quora. Not because teenagers are dumber than the middle-aged, but because they lack the impulse control. I’ll concede that.

So the proportions would be different, and would need even more policing. Which, regrettably, would probably end up meaning even more QuoraBots let loose to chop people’s heads of. But it would be a matter of scale, not an absolute difference.