Category: Uncategorized

A socially marginalised group will not have access to the normal institutional advantages of members of the host society—connections, class privilege, leisure time, cultural familiarity etc. etc. Members of that group will be more highly driven to succeed, to redress those disadvantages.

They will be more strongly motivated to succeed, if they see exemplars of success around them—if some members of the diaspora have already succeeded despite social marginalisation, or if they are intermixed with the host society (not ghettoised), so that they are exposed to paradigms of success from within the host society.

If OTOH they’re ghettoised, and if the diaspora society is insular, so that they are not exposed to paradigms of success—then, not so much. There is less incentive to succeed, if the only experience you have is of failure.

And if the diaspora knows what success looks like, they will use whatever levers the host society does not expressly or implicitly block them from using. Such as public education.

That, btw, is why I did not know any Greeks in Australia doing linguistics when I went to uni. That’s a luxury of established ethnicities. I only started seeing Greeks in linguistics classes when I was lecturing.

… Another episode of Quora Jeopardy!

A clearing is a lea.

A court can be a royal Castle.

… Courtleigh?

EDIT: Kimberly (given name)

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

“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.

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.”

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.”

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.