Category: Uncategorized

If you’re asking about the etymology of idiolect:

idio-: from Greek idios “particular, individual”. Cf. idiosyncrasy, idiot (originally: private citizen, loner), idiom.

-lect: back-formation from dia-lect, originally “something conversed about/in”, from dia “through” and lektos “spoken”.

See:

• What are some examples of idiolects?
• How is an idiolect different from a sociolect?

If you’re asking why there are idiolects, where they come from:

We like to abstract languages, sociolects, and dialects as the common property of a language community. But that is always an abstraction.

What occurs in reality is that each individual has their own mental model of a language, with their own influences from the people they’ve learned from and spoken to, and with their own individual variations.

Idiolects are the source of all language variation and change: those variations are levelled and grouped together because people talk to each other, and that’s how the higher groupings of languages, sociolects, and dialects are real.

The archaicness of -trix is indeed very very relevant to the topic.

I agree with Jason Whyte’s answer, I’ll just elaborate on it.

In the past of English, gendering was overt, and feminine actor suffixes were quite marked. –er was masculine and had a –ress counterpart; –or was masculine and had a –trix counterpart; –man was masculine and had a –woman counterpart (kinda).

When English ideologically moved away from gendering of roles, –trix was pretty marginal already, so people just forgot it was ever there: dominator/dominatrix is the only instance where -trix is alive and well. –ress is far from dead, but English is pretty ungendered much of the time, and it was easy for –er to generalise from masculine to generic. Not all the time: the US prefers she’s a server to she’s a waiter—but note, it’s still serv-er. The masculine connotation of -er was weak enough, and -er was generic enough already in meaning, that it could be ignored.

But –man? Well, it’s identical to man.

At this point, you could retort that –man in Old English meant “human being” (“man” was were), and people should have accepted that –man was generic. Well, they could have, but they didn’t. People interpret the meaning of morphemes in a synchronic paradigm (what other words and suffixes do I know right now, not historically). The synchronic identity of –man and man has been too compelling for people, and (this is also crucial) the use of –man as a suffix infrequent enough that it was never as generic as –er.

Several culture-specific factors, as others have pointed out: scarcity, attitudes towards ethnic minorities, constructs of beauty, yadda yadda.

I conducted the extremely scientific experiment of searching mavromata “brown-eyed girl” and galanomata “blue-eyed girl” on the Greek lyrics site stixoi.info. Brown-eyed win 87 to 20—despite blue-eyed Greeks being rather rare. And there is a definite cultural construct of brown-eyed girls in Greek song: that of the penetrating glance.

And yet, there’s that lovely poem by Dimitris Lipertis in Cypriot dialect: “Hey, blue-eyes, hark! They’re knocking!/ Oh mother, it’s just the pig.” (about a girl trying to cover up her nighttime tryst).

… OK, it sounds better in Cypriot.

The question is somewhat opaque, but OP is getting to the question of, why is the definition of a word such a complex, and potentially circular, graph of links to other definitions. Your original question, OP, was in fact about circularity.

The answer is:

• Dictionary definitions aren’t particularly concerned about rigour or non-circularity: you’re assumed as a language learner to already have a baseline understanding of the definitional human language, which you can use to bootstrap any other definitions.
• Attempts at a rigorous semantics of definitions will inevitably have to bottom out on a list of Semantic primes, a set of concepts that have to be taken as givens rather than defined themselves.
• Identifying that list of primes, and using them for definitions, has not been a popular pastime. It’s work. Natural semantic metalanguage is an admirable initiative in that direction.
• Unfortunately, NSM also wanted to use those primes in human-intelligible definitions. That makes things dirtier. The initial Spartan beauty of Anna Wierzbicka’s Lingua Mentalis had 14 primes; now it’s in the 60s.
• Definitions of words in NSM are a valuable discipline to get into: they really force you to break concepts down. They are also a hilariously forced subset of English.

Look into Wierzbicka’s work, OP. Even if you don’t like the approach, it’s got some excellent insights. And start with the early stuff, including Lingua Mentalis itself.

How many months ago did you A2A me this, Zeibura S. Kathau? I’ve been clearing out my backlog.

The question really is not why isn’t there a Single Modern Latin, but why is there a Single Modern Greek.

1. Actually, there is not a single Modern Hellenic language. Under no linguistically informed notion of language is Tsakonian or Southern Cappadocian the same language as Standard Athenian Greek. You have to be damned generous to say Pontic is. And if we’re being honest, basilectal Cypriot is pretty iffy too. But it is still fair to say that there is less diversity within the Hellenic languages than there is within the Romance languages.
2. The area over which Modern Romance languages were spoken historically is much bigger than the area over which Modern Hellenic languages were. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Romania, patches of the Balkans; vs. Greece, Cyprus, and patches of the Anatolian hinterland [EDIT: and some other bits: see Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s comment]. Greece may have been the Eastern Roman Empire’s lingua franca, but that didn’t hellenise the Slavs or the Syrians.

A rough guess at 800 AD dominion of Romance and Hellenic languages.

1. There are lots of substrates at work in Romance, both Celtic and Germanic (and whatever the hell the substrate of Romanian is). That’s a large part of what has differentiated the Romance languages. Now, Greece has had its share of other peoples moving in too, and there’s a lot of adstratal effects on Greek: Greek is a part of the Balkan Sprachbund, especially on the Balkan mainland, and there have been clear contact effects—not all one way. But even though there were clearly substantial hellenised Slavic populations in the middle ages, Greek does not come across as a language with a whole lot of substrate going on.
1. Tsakonian does; but Hesseling was pilloried for suggesting it. By town council meeting, no less.
2. If an Egyptian Greek had survived, you’d be seeing a lot more substrate effects. They’re certainly quite clear in the papyri.
2. The prestige of archaic Greek (particularly church Greek; much later on, written Greek in general) had a profoundly conservative effect on the language, in a way that was different to Western Europe. In fact, the Greek Aromanian linguist Nikos Katsanis has pointed out that the most extreme palatalisations that have happened in Greece were in Tsakonian and Aromanian. Both were so far removed from the language of the Church, that the language of the Church could not have any effect on their pronunciation.
1. He left out Lesbos, where there’s been similar hi-jinx. But it’s a nice observation.

People loathe the pissing contest between Hitler and Stalin that always arises with these questions, but it’s curiously absent from this thread. So:

Stalin.

Because with Hitler, at least you knew who the enemies were throughout his reign. With Stalin, the enemies changed depending on what side of bed he got up on. If both are evil, I’ll fear evil + unpredictable more than evil + predictable.

No, because the Roman and Greek letters for constants are treated as international standards: Greek is not going to rewrite E = mc[math]^2[/math] as Ε = μτ[math]^2[/math].

The very most you’ll see is High School algebra pretending x y are the Greek letters χ ψ through strategic use of Greek cursive.

What Konstantinos Konstantinides said, but recall that there are constraints on what topics have MVW lists. Refer:

• What determines whether a Quora topic has a “Most viewed writers” statistic associated with it?
• Are there most viewed writers in every topic on Quora?

If there aren’t 10 users posting more than 3 answers in a month on a topic, there is no point having a MVW list.

Anecdotally, some topics are banned from having MVW lists, as Patrick Ehlert’s answer to What determines whether a Quora topic has a “Most viewed writers” statistic associated with it? notes. For example, Survey Question. I remember seeing somewhere that “adult” topics don’t have MVW lists either. Nothing in Pornography or Porn Stars, for instance.

Otherwise, if there is reasonable traffic in a topic, the MVW list will come; I have seen it happen once (though devil knows where).

I assume there’s a prize at the end of this?

No?

Well, I wouldn’t win it anyway.

1. Australia
2. Greece
3. Cyprus
4. USA
5. Austria
6. Canada
7. Netherlands
8. Belgium
9. France
10. New Zealand
11. Turkey
12. Armenia
13. Italy
14. UK
15. Germany

Grade: B-. Could do better.

OP; putting this question up because other Quorans have envied me my access to the IPA.

I have the following six keyboard layouts installed on my Mac:

• Greek Polytonic (GreekKeys)
• Greek Monotonic
• IPA-SIL
• Russian Phonetic
• ABC Extended (former US Extended)
• Australian

ABC Extended gives me all the Eastern European diacritics as well as the Western. Australian gives me the extended punctuation signs I’m more familiar with from two decades of Mac use: ¡™£¢∞§¶ †°±«»… And because… Straya!