Remember: language always has a social context. Always.

• Why do languages borrow words and phrases?
• Sometimes: consciously, to fill in a gap in the language, by bilinguals who care about the target language. That takes work.
• Rather more often: as a transferral of prestige and connotations from the source language, by bilinguals who want to keep thinking in terms of the source language. That takes less work.
• And remember that French was more prestigious than English in scholarship and culture for a very long time. Not just during the middle ages, but up to the 19th century; the phrases OP quotes are not mediaeval.
• Why do languages not borrow words and phrases?
• Sometimes: because they want to keep their elite register accessible to monolinguals. That takes work.
• Rather more often: because they are motivated by an ideology of linguistic purism, which objects to interference from other languages. That also takes work.
• I like purism in the abstract, and (unlike many an English-speaker) I do not believe that it is a bad thing in principle. But purism does not have a great track record in English, in particular: Has there ever been an attempt to “purify” English by removing Latin/French words and reintroucing the old Germanic words (like many languages did)?
• Why would languages get rid of old foreign words or phrases, and adopt native phrasings instead?
• Drop in education and exposure to the source foreign languages. That’s certainly been at work in English: you no longer have to learn Latin to be educated, and French has been marginalised in the US if not the UK. But that drop is symptomatic of other causes.
• Drop in relative prestige of source languages against the target language with the language community. Well that’s certainly happened in the English speaking world in general. And accordingly, there’s very little Graeco-Latin in computer science, as a new discipline. But be careful: we’re talking about specific educated registers of English, not English in general, or even educated English in general.
• Why would languages not get rid of old foreign words or phrases, and adopt native phrasings instead?
• Inertia. Never underestimate the role of inertia. It explains a lot of craziness in language; such as English spelling. Getting rid of well-established old foreign expressions takes work. As you’ll have gathered, the reason those old foreign expressions took root in the first place was that it took less work. And a lot of Latin and French has dropped out of English because it’s more work to maintain them. But expressions of the kind OP is bringing up are so entrenched in their registers, that it’s more work to get rid of them.
• Purism? Not a trait of the English language community.
• Making it easier for EFL learners? Not the way English works (currently): native speakers still set the norms for English. (Despite the fact that alphabet is being used a lot on Quora to mean letter.)

Language as it is practiced does not line up according to what is rational. It is about what is most aligned to the speakers’ ideology, and what represents the least imposition to speakers.

I’ll add that the threshold for words is much higher than phrases. Coup is no longer regarded as French, even though coup d’état might be. Neither is sortie. You’re left with raison d’être. And that’s not a commonplace expression.

Mildred Pope, From Latin to Modern French, 1934. A very good book.

Early on in the history of French, every instance of /u/ changed to /y/; and very soon after, every instance of closed /o/ changed to /u/, as a pull-chain (of the kind that happens a lot with vowels). It’s not as early on as the change of /a/ to /æ/, which was 6th century (carus > kæro > chère); the /y/ seems to have been more like 10th century.

This is not an unprecedented change in language; we think that Greek upsilon went from /u/ to /y/ in the same way. But it is a change that happens to be specific to Early Old French (Francien), because all sound changes are specific to a time and place. So I’m guessing it didn’t make it to Languedoc.

Pope’s fine print (§183) is:

The palatalisation of /u/ appears to have spread slowly from the south, reaching last the northern and eastern region. Norse words were affected by it (cf. modern Etainhus > Steinhüs), rhymes between /y/ and /u/ are occasional in mediaeval northern texts, and the sound /u/ is still retained in Eastern Walloon.

French did have the option of respelling its <u> as something else, like <ü> or <y>. It did not feel it needed to take that option, because all the Latin (and Gallo-Latin) <u>s changed pronunciation to /y/. So it got to keep its spelling the same.

Linguists don’t like the word axioms. as you can tell from the other answers: they imply a degree of mathematical rigour that just isn’t compatible with someone as messy as human language. But there are foundational assumptions to disciplines in linguistics, which are pretty much axioms. And they would be more overtly acknowledged, were linguists a more reflective bunch.

In historical linguistics, for example, you have the Uniformitarian principle. (I see from Wikipedia that Uniformitarianism is actually a geology thing, and you can see why linguists made the connection.) That’s the assumption that languages worked the same way 5000 years ago as they do now. You need that assumption to do any non-trivial historical linguistics: our documented processes of language change reach back only 2 or 3 millennia, and we need to assume that the same processes worked further back in time, if we want to say anything at all about Proto–Indo-European.

In generative syntax, you have configurationality, the principle that you can build up the syntax of a language out of phrase structure grammars (the kinds of grammar computer programmers are used to). Non-configurational language are a shock to generative syntax: they are languages where word order is seemingly random, and words do not hang together in well-defined phrases; so you can’t write a simple grammar (the kinds of grammar computer programmers are used to) to account for those languages’ syntax.

There’s other foundational beliefs, such as the primacy of spoken over written language, the “natural” evolution of language, the exceptionlessness of language change, the unidirectionality of grammaticalisation, the arbitrariness of the sign, and so forth.

There are four major groups of ancient Greek dialects:

• Ionic, of which Attic is a subbranch
• North-Western, of which Doric and Achaean are subbranches
• Aeolic
• Arcado-Cypriot

I’ve ranked them in impressionistic order of archaicness.

The easiest explanation for the spread of the North-Western group is as a wave of settlement, that you might as well associate with Dorian invasions. You can similarly make sense of Ionic as a different wave of settlement. And you can make sense of Aeolic as what was left over in between the two waves of settlement; bear in mind that anything Ionic north of Lesbos resulted from later colonial activity.

Now, notice where Arcado-Cypriot is spoken. Some mountains in the middle of the Peloponnese, and Cyprus, which is very very far away.

The default assumption here is that the Dorian invasion pushed the previous Greek speakers of the Peloponnese up into the mountains. And that Cyprus had been settled by Greek speakers speaking that dialect, before the Dorians cut them off from the sea. In other words: that Arcado-Cypriot was a continuation of the original Mycenaean version of Greek. And there are bits of Arcado-Cypriot and Aeolic embedded in the mishmash language of Homer, although it is basically an archaic Ionic.

Originally Answered:

How does Quora combat duplicates of other questions and answers?

Dupes of answers: Quora does nothing to prevent us, and God preserve us from the day when it does. Bots unleashed to collapse answers left and right, muttering “this answer has three words in common with the next answer. Exterminate! Exterminate!”

Dupes of questions: Quora has conflated the search bar and the question bar, in the hope you’ll notice as you’re typing that similar questions have already been asked. Quora also displays similar questions in the sidebar, which triggers users to merge them. Both reasonable actions.

It has been de rigeur in Greece to take your shoes off when entering a house, as owner or guest. Indeed, Greek has borrowed the Turkish proverbial expression about it: to “hand someone their shoes” is to invite them to get the hell out of your house. (του ’δωσα τα παπούτσια στο χέρι/pabuçu eline vermek).

I will note that while it’s a norm I follow to this day as a householder, it’s not one I experienced as a guest in Greece: I don’t remember ever having to remove my shoes when a guest. In fact, it was only when I crashed at an uncle’s place for a few days that the spare slippers would surface.

Modern Greek:

Μια μπύρα [παρακαλώ] /mja ˈbira [parakaˈlo]/
“One beer [please]”

The “please” is really optional. In fact Greeks tend to get creeped out by such politeness. But as a foreigner you’d probably be expected to produce it.

Klingon:

DaH HIq HInob /ɖɑx xɪq xɪˈnob/
“Give me alcohol NOW”.

Any similarity of the word for alcohol and “hic!” is purely intentional.

Surely, there can be only one.

Ben Folds Five: Song For The Dumped

Quora’s answer to How do I share content from Quora?

It’s a tough one.

I know Klingon and not Elvish, like Brian Collins. I think I disagree with him: Tolkien gives slightly more opportunity.

• Elvish is a more complicated set of languages than the agglutinative Klingon.
• Elvish is much less well documented by Tolkien than Klingon is. That’s why people are very reluctant to use Elvish conversationally at all (and they put an asterisk next to the grammars done for the films). But that means you have to exercise a lot more linguistic and philological skill to get anything out of Elvish.
• Paramount only used Klingon for the Trek movies, and when they did, they asked the language inventor to do the job. TV Trek have either ignored Klingon, or used the “idiots with dictionaries” approach to language learning. (wIjjup for “my friend”. Where –wIj is a SUFFIX.) So even less chance of remuneration than for Elvish.

I think Elvish would be endlessly frustrating to work on, which is why I was never tempted. (That, and Tolkien’s mythology didn’t do anything for me.) But for that reason, it would be more of a mental challenge.