Category: Uncategorized

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.

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”.

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.

Greek: αψού “apsu”

Hapşuu being the Turkish version

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?)

*shrug* Similar. 500 years of close coexistence and bilingualism (not that people can grok that now). Lots of food in common, with traffic in both directions, and different preferences of spices. Several common cultural practices, such as taking shoes off before going inside. Many, many formulaic expressions in common. Significant musical overlap: in some genres more than others, and church music was one of them.

Aziz Dida, as a neighbour of both our peoples, can see it clearer than both our peoples: they’re different, but only if you look closely.

Some of those cultural similarities aren’t even old. One that astonished me was reading a Turkish paper while waiting around a hamam. (I wasn’t the one in the hamam.) I don’t really know the language, but the look and feel, the cliches, the punctuation, the formatting… they were all recognisable from the Greek press. So too were the apartment buildings, down to the clunky old lifts. Those commonalities though is more about common cultural hegemony from an external source—in those cases, I’m guessing, pre-WWII France.

For documents to survive, they needed to be important enough to the copyists to keep recopying, as the technology of books was upgraded—from wax tablet to scroll to codex in capitals to codex in lower case. And they needed to be important enough to be copied multiple times, so that random destruction of books did not eliminate the last remaining copy.

The perishing of the great libraries of antiquity did away with a lot of unique copies of texts. So did the looting of Constantinople in 1204: there were a lot of heretical texts kept under lock and key at the Patriarch’s, which were lost forever.

So the data had to be actively maintained to be preserved. If it wasn’t, what we get is random bits and pieces from garbage dumps. That’s what we have of Sappho, for example. It’s why the only capital letter codices we have are luxury items, such as the illustrated Dioscurides or the Codex Argenteus. Each time the technology of books is upgraded, it’s effort to recopy the text, and effort is necessarily selective. And codices were always susceptible to becoming palimpsests, if noone found them interesting any more.

So what literature was prioritised for copying in Greek literature? The school curriculum. That means the top texts in Attic, the prestige dialect, and Homer, which was the foundation of Greek culture. It did not mean lyric poetry, which was in the wrong dialect and not fashionable. It did not mean Menander, because that was in Koine, and the monks did not get sitcoms anyway. It meant lots of Galen and Hippocrates, because they were of practical use. And it meant huge amounts of theology, because Christian monks were doing the copying.

And there was lots of accidental survival. We have double the Euripides that we have of the other dramatists, for example, because a volume of the collected works of Euripides accidentally survived.

Inasmuch as we can trust the ancient sources, Herodotus’ native dialect was Doric, and he may well have been a Carian speaker. As Wikipedia says, we can’t trust the ancient sources anyway: Herodotus

Herodotus wrote his ‘Histories’ in the Ionian dialect, yet he was born in Halicarnassus, originally a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda (an 11th-century encyclopaedia of Byzantium which possibly took its information from traditional accounts), Herodotus learned the Ionian dialect as a boy living on the island of Samos, whither he had fled with his family from the oppressions of Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia I of Caria. The Suda also informs us that Herodotus later returned home to lead the revolt that eventually overthrew the tyrant.

]However, thanks to recent discoveries of some inscriptions on Halicarnassus dated to about that time, we now know that the Ionic dialect was used there even in official documents, so there was no need to assume (like the Suda) that he must have learned the dialect elsewhere. Moreover, the fact that the Suda is the only source which we have for the heroic role played by Herodotus, as liberator of his birthplace, is itself a good reason to doubt such a romantic account.

Note that Kos, next door to Halicarnassus, was also Doric speaking; but Hippocrates of Kos also wrote in Ionic. The cultural prestige of Ionia is indeed a likelier explanation, and Wikipedia speculates that “Herodotus appears to have drawn on an Ionian tradition of story-telling, collecting and interpreting the oral histories he chanced upon in his travels.”

There was Doric literature too, but I don’t know of any early Doric literary prose.

Here’s another limitation: speech acts. A statement of how the world is (a declarative speech act) can be true or false. A command, a promise, or a performative statement (“I hereby declare…”) cannot meaningfully be true or false: it can only be felicitous or infelicitous (that is, appropriate).

Here’s yet another, which Gary Coen already offered: Sense is not denotation, and denotation does not match de dicto references. Statements about The President Of The United States may be now statements about Barrack Obama, but come January, they won’t be. Statements about Superman may be statements about Clark Kent, but you only know that if you’re Superman or the narrator.

Yeah, truth-conditional semantics is reductionist. It’s still a starting point, and a useful one: there’s a lot of sentences that it does work for.

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.