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The Latin prefix for “with” was con-, but like other Latin prefixes, its final consonant changed to match the following consonant. So com-pare, col-late, cor-rupt. The prefix in- does the same: im-port, il-literate, ir-relevant.

Now, another variant of con- was co-, before h and vowels: co-herent, co-agulate. English generalised this version of the prefix into a new version of the prefix, which did not care what letter followed it (so long as you use a hyphen). So if the notion of co-dependency had been invented 200 years ago, it would have been condependency, because the co- prefix had not become generic yet.

So it’s spelled cor-related rather than co-related, simply because it is an older word.

Philip Newton gives two thirds of the answer. The remaining third is, why choose the word “observance” in particular.

The reason is given in the 1702 dictionary that the collective noun was fished out of, as cited here: Unkindness of Ravens. You get a bunch of hermits hanging out together, because they all belong to the same monastic order; that is to say, they observe the same monastic rule.

My wife has been consistently advocating for Hawaii to anyone she knows, and we did in fact get engaged there. But we’re not typical of Australians: we’ve both lived in the States, and we’re not drawn to Indonesia. (Which is why she needs to do advocacy.)

That said, Hawaii was full of Australians when we went—which put us off, as we didn’t go halfway across the Pacific just to hear Australian accents all over Waikiki. I  didn’t check how many were honeymooners.

The shopping was a drawcard; even with the weakened Australian dollar, most goods are much cheaper in the US than here.

There is a very very slow process in English of differentiating nouns and verbs fitting a particular pattern (Latin prefix + single syllable) by shifting the accent. a rebel vs. to rebel, for example. Initial-stress-derived noun 

I can’t find online the guess of how many verbs are changing accent per year, but I think it’s one or two. In any case, if they’re saying deTAIL as the verb, they are indeed following that trend.

Yes, Gabrielle Wilkinson Adams, it is hilarious that Lexa’s own answer was downvoted. Not incomprehensible, but hilarious.

In Greek, /mixailiðis/. In English, /majkəlˠiːdiːz/ (or something), as indicated in Lexa Michaelides’ answer to How is Lexa Michaelides’ surname pronounced?

As Philip Newton points out, one of the giveaways that Lexa would pronounce it the English way is that she doesn’t use the feminine version of the surname, Michaelidou /mixailiðu/, which would happen within Greece/Cyprus, or by a first generation immigrant not eager to assimilate.

(Says the guy with the translated patronymic that replaced Hadjimarcou…)

The book reviewed here: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2008.07.58  proposes μέμαα, μέμονα “lust for”, “be eager”, “rage”. (The verb is related to mēnis, the rage of Achilles.) So, “striving for wine”. The book is about poetic etymologies, so it’s not clear to me this would be a linguistically correct derivation; but looks like it’s right, because you can always trust German scholarship:

In Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie. Band 3,1, Leipzig 1902 http://www.archive.org/stream/au… , “striving for wine” is given, but rejected. From what my poor German tells me, everyone accepts that –maos is from μέμαα , but they reject that oino– is about wine, suggesting that it was insteaed ϝινο- “strong”, οἰν-οψ “dark”, or οἰωνός “bird of prey”.

The derivation from μέμαα threw me, but it’s an old enough verb for it to make sense. I can’t find any other words ending in –maos.

I assume OP is asking about the West Anatolian dialects of Modern Greek, not Ancient Greek.

1. Not studied enough.

2. Not old. Pontic and Cappadocian are relic dialects, cut off from the rest of Greek for a millenium, and they are both archaic in phonology and morphology, and influenced by Turkish to a great extent. (Syntax in Pontic, which also picked up animacy from Caucasian languages; much more influence in Cappadocian, ranging even to vowel harmony.)

Western Anatolian dialects OTOH look a lot like mainstream Greek, and we know that Western Anatolian was islamised quickly; we assume they were resettled from Greece from the 16th century on.

3. Bithynian (NW Anatolia), from memory, is like Thracian (which I’m not counting as West Anatolian), though we know some Bithynian villages were settled from Epirus.

4. There were two villages on the Sea of Marmara settled from Tsakonia, though their Tsakonian was influenced by Thracian/Bithynian. Where are the Tsakonian villages in Turkey?

5. The dialect of Halicarnassus/Bordum (SW Anatolia) is pretty close to the Dodecanese.

6. The dialect of Smyrna/Izmir and its hinterland is not well studied at all, but seems to have been close to the Cyclades.

7. The only West Anatolian dialect that seems to have been old, and a relic from earlier times, was that of Livisi (Kayakoy village near Fethiye). It’s like Dodecanesian and Cypriot, but odd.

8. If Konya counts as Western Anatolia, then you can count the dialect of Silli as an old dialect as well; it’s a bit like Cappadocian.

Very, very good question, and I don’t know if I will answer it satisfactorily.

Yes, language evolves, and yes, particular features of language are “naturally selected” because they count as an improvement.

The catch is that humans have conflicting criteria for what is desirable in human language. These seem to result in an equilibrium: languages do not evolve too far in one direction, because to do that would fulfil one criterion but break another.

For example, easiness is a criterion; and lots of phonological change is aimed to make language easier to pronounce. But if that trend went unchecked, it would continue until all human language consisted of “uh”, and it does not: there are several countervailing criteria, including communicativeness, vividness, distinctiveness, and iconicity.

And that’s because language is not used for just one purpose (to communicate), or with one goal (to be easy—and easy phonology is not the same as easy morphology).

English has had a slow, lumbering evolutionary process to make vowel length predictable, which April McMahon goes through in her textbook on language change: Understanding Language Change . Since vowel length is entirely predictable in Scots, you could argue that Scots is the evolutionary endpoint of English.

Yet even within English, there has been backsliding in this process. British privacy with a short /ɪ/ follows the long-term evolutionary trend, to make vowel length easier to learn. But in this instance, the trend runs afoul of iconicity, which says that if privacy comes from private, the two words should sound the same. Hence American and Australian privacy use the same long /aj/ as private.

To add to Achilleas Vortselas’ answer for Greek,

The prefix παν- “all” is another intensifier, which was also in use in Ancient Greek. So πάμμαυρος “all-black” (which is not ancient), παμμάταιος “all-vain” (which is).

Greek also has superlative adjectives (so μαυρότατος “blackest”).

And a colloquial (negative) intensifying prefix is in fact… καρα-, which is Turkish kara– in OP’s question. This is mostly used with nouns, e.g. καράβλαχος (not “black Wallachian”, but “damn hillbilly”), but it does extend to verbs (καρατσεκάρω “black + English check: “I’ll damn well check”), and occasionally adjectives:  Google has 673 instances of καραάσχετο, Internet Greek for “damned irrelevant” (i.e. “this is irrelevant to the thread, but…”)

As other respondents have said, we do in word boundaries. I don’t do morpheme boundaries myself (I pronounce wholly and holy the same).

We *used* to have geminates, of course, which is why we have them still in spelling. That’s why -d- between two vowels only survives in native English words if it was a geminate, like ladder. If it was a single -d-, it turned into -th- : father, weather < Old English fæder, weder.