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Several ways. Dimitra Triantafyllidou has already answered; I’ll answer as well, a little more schematically, but it’s essentially the same answer.

• Sound mergers in the language. meet and meat used to be pronounced differently [meːt, mɛːt]; now they’re pronounced the same, [miːt].
• Sound un-mergers in the language—or at least, a spelling system out of sync with pronunciation. I read it now, I read it yesterday: same spelling, different pronunciations [ɹiːd, ɹɛd]. I’ll include here stress splits like désert (noun)/desért (verb).
• Borrowing into the language from two different origins; e.g. Dimitra’s example of tire, French and Germanic.
• Zero derivation: English can form verbs from nouns without adding any extra affixes. E.g. a book, to book.
• Semantic split (polysemy). What used to be a single word is now considered two different words, because of diverging meanings. Crane as in bird; crane as in machinery.

Lyonel. Lyonel, Lyonel, Lyonel…

je ne parle point Français. But you can have a recording anyway. Especially because I suspect I sound like your worst Languedocien nightmare…

Steven. Steven, Steven, Steven…

… you’ve finally got your third recording out of me. (Or is it fourth?)

Vocaroo | Voice message

We will never find out.

My father conducted a scientific experiment at 19, to determine his answer to this question. He vaguely remembers passing out.

My control issues are much too deeply embedded for me to recapitulate my father’s empiricism. Once I realise that I am affected by imbibing booze, I get annoyed enough at the impending loss of control that the imbibing ceases. Even if it involves quite yummy cocktails, as my birthday degustation on Monday did.

The limit is I think 5 shots’ worth.

The symptoms only get as far as me being slightly more voluble than usual, and an incipient wooziness. No room spinning or nausea or anything like that.

My threshold has dropped since my twenties too. I was capable back then of downing a Long Island ice tea. Already by 35, I was struggling with half of one.

Anon, I commend you on your initiative. I don’t commend you on your question topic tagging; hopefully you’ll get some responses better targeted than this now.

Learn Python.

Not because I have any love for Python. I’d be happy to chain Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum together: each other’s company would be punishment enough.

Learn Python, because Natural Language Toolkit.

Learn the Natural Language Toolkit.

Then get familiar with the techniques of Natural Language Processing. Which you can do via the Natural Language Toolkit. You’ll want to get into stemming. And lexical databases. And if you’re wanting to replicate what Google Translate does, statistical machine translation techniques.

By which time, you’ll have more targeted questions, which better informed individuals can help you out with.

Not a question I know much about, but let me take a stab, and see if someone more knowledgeable corrects me.

The Wikipedia article on Constantine I goes on to say:

The capture of Thessaloniki against Constantine’s whim proved a crucial achievement: the pacts of the Balkan League had provided that in the forthcoming war against the Ottoman Empire, the four Balkan allies would provisionally hold any ground they took from the Turks, without contest from the other allies. Once an armistice was declared, then facts on the ground would be the starting point of negotiations for the final drawing of the new borders in a forthcoming peace treaty. With the vital port firmly in Greek hands, all the other allies could hope for was a customs-free dock in the harbor.

In this scenario: Bulgaria takes Salonica, and Greece takes a good chunk of (FYRO) Macedonia. In real life, Bulgaria then went to war with Serbia and Greece in the Second Balkan War, dissatisfied with how much territory it had gotten, and Serbia thought that Bulgaria was reneging on the deal they had before the war on what would happen next.

Balkans after the First Balkan War. Bulgaria has gotten a lot bigger than it was later. In our scenario. Constantine I takes Monastir, and loses Salonique in the process.

Greeks having Monastir and not having Salonica spells even more trouble. I would surmise that the Second Balkan War becomes a three way war rather than a two way war. Any deal between Bulgaria and Serbia would be off. Serbia may well feel more of an imperative to protect the Southernmost Slavs, as Greece is now a lot closer to Skopje. Greece can’t be happy with Bulgarians in Salonica, especially as this likely means even more ethnic Greeks under Bulgarian control (Chalkidiki, as well as Eastern Rumelia).

In the ensuing free far all, Bulgaria is at less of a disadvantage: it may have retained Western Thrace, and it may even have ended up taking a big chunk of Vardarska Macedonia—which would end up with all of geographic Macedonia being Bulgarian.

I dunno. You tell me.

A question of this profundity deserves a well-considered, thoughtful evaluation.

Such as that given in Episode 3, Series 4 of Epic Rap Battles of History:

Zeus vs Thor

Tell your three headed bitch I say hi

The YouTube audience assessment, FWIW, seems to have weighed towards Thor.

From Nişanyan’s etymological dictionary of Turkish, and زور – Wiktionary , zor came into Turkish (and thence Greek) from Persian, not Arabic. And lots of languages either side of Persian and Turkish have picked it up.

A single word for all uses of ζόρι in Greek, that Dimitris Sotiropoulos lists in his answer? No, but “force” covers most of them.

From the Triantafyllidis dictionary:

Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής

• Application of relatively large amount of strength on something [force]
• Exercise of violence or pressure on someone, compulsion; typically in the expression “with the ~” (“by force”) [force]
• Of difficulties, inconvenience, which demand particularly intense effort. “The job has/needs much ~. I have great ~, I suffer much ~: I am under pressure”. [pressure, travails, difficulty]

The expression Dimitris brought up, “do you have a zori with me”, is not accounted for in that definition; the English equivalent is “do you have a problem with me? What’s your problem with me?”

I’ll echo others on Wiktionary: it has astounding range.

For ancient Greek, don’t bother with Liddell-Scott: its etymologies are antiquated. Check both Chantraine and Frisk. Both are under copyright, and I can neither confirm nor deny that both are available at a reputable academic archiv al org anisation.

We are served quite well for later stages of Greek. For contemporary Greek, I go to the Triantafyllidis dictionary by default, because it is online.

Me, personally?

That the same changes happen, again and again, from language to language to language. The same grammaticalisations; the same sound changes; the same semantic changes; the same syntactic changes; the same metaphors.

Which is little to do with Universal Grammar, and a lot to do with universals of cognition and articulation.

So. Mate. Maaaaate.

Youse wanna hang out in a ciddy where youse’ll get the bestest idear of some dinky-di Aussie culture, mate?

Tough question, because of our parochialism, and because our culture has been shifting noticeably over the last fifty years.

For the old Australia, a regional city. Tamworth, New South Wales, because they play country music unironically?

For the new Australia, Sydney or Melbourne. Sydney and Melbourne still loathe each other, so I can’t give an unbiased answer, and I’ve give you the biased answer of Melbourne.

They’re clines of course: there’s nowhere left in Australia that you can’t get a half-decent latte from, and there’s quite a cultural divide between the hipster inner city and the burbs.

EDIT: I queried this of a better travelled colleague. Her retort: Tamworth would be so desperate to cater to out of town yuppies, that you would not see anywhere near as much Old Australian culture as I’d hope. My two colleagues concurred that Queensland was a better bet, as a more decentralised state. Christine Leigh Langtree, Tracey Bryan, what say you?