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The question is not being answered to date by other respondents: are there words in other languages which are not only taboo to use, but even taboo to cite, so that speakers resort to circumlocutions like “N-word” or “F-word”.

Taboo used to be pretty comprehensive: if the word was taboo to use, it was also taboo to even cite. Circumlocutions like this have a history in English (bloody used to be referred like that back in the day), but I don’t think they are widespread. I certainly can’t think of parallels in Greek.

EDIT: Thank you, Robert Neumann: три буквы (“the word with 3 letters”), Russian Хуй, https://www.quora.com/What-words… 

As I’ve noted elsewhere (Nick Nicholas’ answer to Can you say anything using a vocabulary of 100 words?),  Natural semantic metalanguage claims that the minimum is around 60.

Brian Collins’ answer is impeccably correct for why pronunciation was not spelled pronounciation after the combination of the Great English Vowel Shift and Trisyllabic laxing (a long vowel three syllables back is shortened, as in insane ~ insanity). But all the answers aren’t really answering why pronunciation is still being pronounced pronunciation.

Let’s look at another instance of  trisyllabic laxing: private ~ privacy.

In Britain, privacy has a short vowel, following the same rule as insanity and pronunciation. In the US and Australia, it’s a long vowel.

Is that because the US and Australia are illiterate? Why then, so are the British, when they say pirate ~ piracy, with a long vowel. (I’m told piracy still has a short vowel among laywers.)

No, it’s because trisyllabic laxing has resulted in a lack of morphological transparency. The change in vowel looks wrong: if privacy comes from private, they should sound the same. And they’ve been made to sound the same again, a few centuries later,  by analogy.

Well, just as piracy has come to sound more like pirate by analogy, and privacy  has come to sound more like private, now it’s pronunciation‘s turn. People are tempted to pronounce it pronounciation, for the same reason. I do. And it’s not currently considered correct, but it may yet.

The Pilcrow, as it is known, originated in the Middle Ages, when scribes did not use space to separate paragraphs from each other. (Space was at a premium, and spacing paragraphs had not occurred to anyone anyway.) Instead, scribes started using a Latin abbreviation to indicate a change of paragraph.

Only it wasn’t P for Paragraph. It was C for chapter (capitulum), with some lines through it.

See:

• The Pilcrow, part 1 of 3 (from the most commendable Shady Characters blog).

My language features in textbook examples of words that both mean and look the same, in completely unrelated languages, by coincidence. e.g. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Greek mati and Malay mata, eye. Google “mati mata malay greek” for more examples.

As a bonus: Greek meli Hawaiian meli—not accidental.

As I commented in https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-G… 

FWIW, if you look in terms of common stems (someone actually went through Pokorny’s etymological dictionary and did the stem counts: The Distribution of Indo-European Root Morphemes  ), Armenian has the most common stems with Greek. Given that Phrygian was next door to Greek and no other languages from close by have survived, that makes sense.

Yes, lexicostatistics is no substitute for the comparative method. It’s not nothing either.

Lojban is begotten from Loglan; Lojban is a schism of Loglan, and seems to have taken most of the Loglanists with it. Loglan also begat Guaspi, although I don’t think that it got much of a following (and its inventor  is also a Lojbanist).

That’s the Loglan family of logical artificial languages that I know of.

Greece got most of the Aegean islands from the Ottoman Empire in 1913, after the Balkan Wars. There were three exceptions:

• Greece did not get Imbros and Tenedos (Gökçeada and Bozcaada), because of their strategic importance right outside the Dardanelles. When the invasion at Gallipoli happened, the British (and ANZACs) were based at the next island down, Lemnos.
• The Dodecanese, which Italy got from Turkey just before 1913.
• Cyprus, which Turkey had sold to the British in 1878.

Half the island (well, a third) is culturally Turkish; but if Cyprus had still been under Turkish rule in 1913, it’s not impossible that it would have been ceded to Greece. And the Turkish element in Cyprus would likely have been expelled under the 1923 population exchange, as happened in the rest of Greece outside of Thrace—and as did not happen in the Dodecanese, which still weren’t in Greece. (That only happened in 1946.)

Cyprus remained under British rule until the Cyprus Emergency of 1955–60. The intent of the Greek Cypriot militants EOKA was union with Greece, Enosis. That did not happen, not least because of the Turkish minority asserting itself and Cypriot intercommunal violence. The Republic of Cyprus arose as a compromise.

Much water has flown under the bridge since then. The Republic of Cyprus no longer has a substantial Turkish population, because of the continued intercommunity violence and the de facto partition of the island. But fifty five years on, even though most Greek Cypriots do not identify as Cypriots first Greeks second, they are quite used to being a separate country, and don’t feel any urge for Enosis.

Yes you have:

Andrew McKenzie’s answer to Why are written and spoken French so different?

To be fair, Andrew wasn’t making the claim explicitly, he says that some linguists would. He then lays out the arguments why you would.  And having a different underlying syntax is not a register difference, similar to English or other languages I know, contra what Riley Ertel says. It is a huge structural difference. Different language family-level structural difference.

My parents were first generation immigrants to Australia. My mother had no English when she came here. My father had high school English, but no Australian accent. My parents worked in their fish and chip shop attached to the house, so much of the daytime I was reared by Sesame Street; I interacted with my parents in the evening.

Outcome 1. I did not speak until I was two years old. I presume that was because I was getting mixed English and Greek from them. I was reading pretty early, but not speaking.

Outcome 2. My parents asked their GP what to do about me not speaking. This being the ’70s, the advice was to use just one language (not: one language per context or per parent). My parents (to my surprise now) chose English. Had we not moved back to Greece when I was 8, I would never really have learned Greek.

Outcome 3. I did not really interact with any native  speakers of English until I went to kindergarten. Therefore, having been reared by Sesame Street, unsurprisingly I spoke with an American accent. In fact I did not acquire an Australian accent until after we moved back to Australia, when I was 12. My first year back of schooling I was teased a fair bit about the accent.

(Long gone now, though after three years of living in the States at 28, I was starting to do American things with my vocal equipment, and they come back if I speak for ten minutes with an American.)