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Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does an equivalent of cursive exist in other alphabets?

Greek: there was a cursive modelled after Western cursive in the 19th/20th century. It fell out of use long before computers (I was never taught it in school); I have seen it in letters from the 50s.

The main differences to what you might expect: kappa looking like a <u>; pi as an omega with a loop (ϖ); tau as a tall slash; psi looking like a <y>.

Translating your surname into Latin was in fashion in the 16th through 18th centuries for many Germans and Swedes; Linnaeus (von Linné), for example, or Neander (as in Neanderthal; Neumann).

EDIT: Philip Newton points out Neander is Greek. True dat. OK, try Faber (surname), Latin for “Smith”. Or Schmidt.

Sometimes, it has stuck around. I’m assuming Oscar Pistorius is also an instance of Afrikaaners doing this.

See Why are some old German surnames Latin?

I can think of other examples of Latin surnames in Germany, such as Michael Praetorius. There was even a good footballer in the 80’s named Holger Hieronymus.

Ah, Desmond. I am a philosophy dolt, and I take no pride in that. But I have dreaded death since I associated Alice Cooper with the Boogeyman when I was 6, and I’ve had different responses to it. Fear, denial, self-aggrandisement. (That was my twenties: “I’ll write the definitive grammar of mediaeval Greek”, “I’ll get all my papers laminated and sent to Spitzbergen.”)

In my forties, I have reverted to a verse I wrote in my teens, in Esperanto, about what the apocalypse might look like, and which features here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to If Earth were to explode in 10 hours, what would you do?

Ni iris — laborejen. Malkontraŭ la malbeno.
We went — to the office. Un-against the un-blessing.

I won’t fight Death. And I won’t allow Death the victory of overawing me, or paralysing me, or making me have one last riotous spree, or doing any goddamned thing differently. I will go about my business.

Or as that Greek folk song put it (a little less morosely):

Alas I’m forty by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

και από τσι χάρες τση ζωής τσι πλια όμορφες θα πάρω,
να αφήσω αποδιαλέουρα στον κερατά το Χάρο.

I’ll sample all the best life has to give.
The leftovers—that bastard Death can have.

I’ve tried to limit the people I follow to Dunbar’s number of 150, and failed. I’m at 368; I’m very circumspect nowadays about adding more people. But yes, I have lost track, and I doubt anyone with more than 150 hasn’t.

I have kept track of my regulars; they feature on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile in the “I love youse all” series, and they are added to as I go. 60 so far in the series, and there will be more. In fact, I probably have kept track of… oh, I dunno… 150 of the 368? 🙂

Why I followed them? I’m a lot worse at that. I only remember a couple of Why-I-followeds, as opposed to Why-I-keep-followings. I remember well that I followed Dimitra Triantafyllidou, because we started by yelling at each other about the provenance of Greek-speakers in Western Turkey. I know that I followed Sam Murray, because they messaged me first, with a joyfulness that came quite out of nowhere. I vaguely recollect that I noticed Michael Masiello posting about obscure music (Alkan), and I dug his style. Chrys Jordan snared me with his post on the Cryptocracy: Chrys Jordan’s answer to What if Quora were a country?.

But many of them, I just saw around, often as friends of friends, often in topics I focus on, and I liked what they had to say. I’ve been rewarded for it. I’m hazy as to how it started, but I’m glad it’s continued.

Per Monthly Summary: Jan 2017 by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue, I am aware of four un-bans in January 2017, and several through late 2016. So yes, it is possible, and it does happen.

Eg : αὐλέω to αὐλητής, actually. 🙂

For a list of suffixes and how they work in Ancient Greek, see Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges from §833 on for more detail than you’ll ever want on the mechanics. The list starts at §839.

That list is for Ancient Greek; Koine is substantially the same list, and works the same way, but some suffixes did fall out of fashion. For example, -τήρ is Attic, -τής is Attic and Koine.

For accentuation: the rule in Koine remains the rule for Ancient Greek: accent is governed by Mora (linguistics). (It’s terrifying how strongly the rule applies, by analogy, even after vowel length was eliminated in Greek, as it was by the time of the New Testament—and indeed, even in Modern Greek, two millennia later.)

By default, accent is recessive. So if the suffix is unaccented, and ends in a long syllable, then accent will be on the penult. If the suffix is unaccented, and ends in a short syllable, then accent will be on the antepenult. So σημαίνω > σημάν-τωρ; μανθάνω > μαθή-τρια.

Many suffixes bear accent, and that accent overrides the recessive default. αὐλη-τής is one such instance: the agentive -τής is consistently accented.

The only instance where accent makes a meaning distinction is one familiar to students of the Koine from the Paraclete. If you form an adjective in -τος from a prepositional verb, there is meant to be a meaning difference between accenting on the ultima and the antepenult. Accenting on the ultima means the description in the adjective applies as a one-off. Accenting on the antepenult means the description in the adjective applies permanently.

So a παρακλητός is someone you’ve summoned to stand by your side just now. A παράκλητος is someone you summon all the time, a permanent advocate. Which is what the Holy Spirit is supposed to be.

(Given that the instance of παράκλητος in Dio Cassius 46.20 refers to slaves dragooned into a one-off task, that accent distinction turns out to be bogus in practice, and I’ve seen oodles of other instances where it was ignored. Sorry.)

Scottish English? My Scottish personal trainer reports people have difficulty understanding her. I can’t fathom why, and I don’t, but maybe my ear isn’t as tin as I think it is. (FWIW, it’s rare that any Scots creeps in to her speech: cannae only once in a while.)

Northern English? I think highly of it, and I think most Australians do; Freddie Flintoff is an honorary Australian, and the accent hasn’t hurt that.

As OP makes explicit in comments, what he’s actually asking about is Received Pronunciation.

Well, Cultivated Australian used to be the dialect of the Australian elite, and Cultivated Australian was not terribly different from RP. (The main difference was the plural: boxes [boksəz] vs [boksɪz].) If you watch Australian TV shows from the 70s, you’ll notice that all the lawyers and doctors talk like Poms.

Cultivated Australian is still around, but it’s been stigmatised through resurgent Australian nationalism, and no Australian politician will touch it now.

(The last one I remember speaking it is Alexander Downer, of a three-generation political dynasty, now High Commissioner to London like his father before him—and not taken terribly seriously by many Australians. His daughter Georgina is angling for a seat in parliament, and doing radio to get her brand out. And she’s as Ocker-sounding as the rest of our contemporary politicians. Any elocution lessons she’s had are carefully concealed.)

So. If a jumped up local imitation of RP is stigmatised, how do you think actual bona fide RP fares?

Yeah. Suspicion and derision. All the old resentments against Mother England are still there; all the old admiration of Mother England isn’t.

I think I get your question. Is the etymology of etymology subject to the Etymological fallacy?

The etymological fallacy is a genetic fallacy that holds that the present-day meaning of a word or phrase should necessarily be similar to its historical meaning. This is a linguistic misconception, and is sometimes used as a basis for linguistic prescription. An argument constitutes an etymological fallacy if it makes a claim about the present meaning of a word based exclusively on its etymology. This does not, however, show that etymology is irrelevant in any way, nor does it attempt to prove such.

And the answer is, of course it is. Etymon is from the Greek for “true”. Not “true origin”, just “true”—as in “true meaning”. As in, the truth of the word is to be found in its origin.

That’s your etymological fallacy right there.

This is a more general question: why would linguistic Olympiads and competitions in general use for their puzzles real, non-obscure languages, which someone among the the contestants may already know?

I know nothing about NACLO in particular, and I will offer some speculation which I still think relevant.

• Oversight: “meh, noone will know Turkish”. Which of course is pretty lazy. And that’s why fieldwork linguists pick their own language of interest, which they can be reasonably sure noone will know. I was never a fieldworker, but when I set assignments, I’d make a point of using Tsakonian. I’ve seen a fair few Australian Aboriginal languages in assignments. I’ve also seen Klingon, although I don’ t think that’s nowadays a more obscure choice than Hungarian.
• On the other hand, if the puzzle or quiz is not just about “work out what this means, and give a one sentence answer” but “give an analysis of this data”, then the choice of language doesn’t matter in most cases. Maybe 0.5% of the people sitting the Olympiad know Turkish or Hungarian. The number of people able to come up with a cogent linguistic analysis under exam conditions will be a smaller proportion: native speakers aren’t linguists out of the box. Admittedly, not massively smaller.
• And if you’re going to write a non-trivial question, making up a toy language is not going to cut it. You’ll want a language whose mechanics have been worked out, so that you can ask intelligent questions around it. But honestly, if you’re picking Hungarian or Turkish over, I dunno, Lakota or Mandinka, I go back to point #1. Pretty lazy.

I have attempted to recuse myself from answering this, being ethnic Greek myself. But Desmond James has importuned me to answer with my Australian hat on, and I do appreciate a challenge.

So I will meet this challenge with generalities, reflecting on the hellenophiles and/or philhellenes that I have encountered.

Hellenophile is not an established term, by the way, whereas philhellene is. But I can easily see a nuance between them. A philhellene has a romantic attachment to Greece, and is typically politically invested in Greece. Or at least, that’s how Greeks think of it. Hellenophile is a novel coinage, and it can be less emotionally loaded. It can just refer to someone who is a fan of Greek things.

I am also going to be biased towards interest in Modern rather than Ancient Greek things.

So how have I seen people become either?

• Marrying a Greek is always a good start. I’ve seen that be a factor, although sometimes it’s been a cause and sometimes it’s been an effect.
• Fascination with ancient Greek culture, often via the most kid friendly version of ancient Greek culture, which is sanitized mythology. Often enough, this leads to an interest in what happened next, and I know of several foreign experts in modern Greek who started out in Classics.
• A holiday in Greece, strategically timed for when you are open to new interests. Of course that will depend a hugely on where you choose to holiday. Going to the wilds of Southern Crete and hanging about with shepherds is likelier to have such an effect than a package holiday weekend throwing up in Malia.
• Malia. *shudder*
• Less often, a chance encounter with Modern Greek culture, music or literature.
• I haven’t seen this myself, but there is a stream of converts to Orthodox Christianity at least in the States. That may be another contributor, although Orthodoxy in the states is not as ethnically bound up as it is elsewhere.