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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.

Courtesy Wikipedia: Columbo

Columbo’s unsettling, uneven-eyed stare was due to Falk’s glass eye in the right eye socket. It remained a mystery for 25 years whether the character had one as well, until 1997’s “Columbo: A Trace of Murder”, whereupon asking another character to revisit the crime scene with him he jokes: “You know, three eyes are better than one.”

In my considered opinion, Portuguese sounds like a drowsy headcold.

I randomly surveyed a representative sample of objective language critics (my wife), and have the additional answer “tongue-twisted”.

Like a lot of Ancient Greek verbs, aphiēmi has an impossibly broad range of meaning. Literally, it means “send from”. If you look at the range of meanings in LSJ (which is Classical Greek rather than Biblical Greek, but that helps us avoid the temptation of theologically influenced glosses), you’ll find:

I. send forth

II. send away

II.1.b. let go a person, release a person; and as a ditransitve, release a person from  something, acquit someone from something.

As others have said, releasing someone from a debt is the same thing as forgiving someone’s debt. (In fact, one of the instances of “release a person” given is from Polybius, “release them untaxed”, i.e. let them not pay their taxes.) But the concept involved is  forgiving a debt (or “trespass”), not  forgiving in general.

I lived in Irvine from 1999 to 2001, though it doesn’t sound like much has changed since. I was in my late 20s, an urbanite, with no car. It was horrid.

Irvine had just gotten Safest City in America status, with zero murders in the past year. After a few months there, I took to saying that it all made sense: people have to be alive before they can be killed.

1. Because Greek was the language of pioneers of STEM in antiquity.

2. Because Greek was the scientific language of the Roman Empire, and as such kept contributing to the naming of scientific concepts.

3. Because Latin (with the Greek layer of scientific vocabulary included) was the scientific language of the West from mediaeval times up until the 1800s.

4. Because even when Graeco-Latin stopped being the scientific language of the West, enough of the scientific vocabulary had already been contributed into Western languages by Graeco-Latin, that new terms kept drawing from that source—for consistency and associated prestige, well into the 20th century.

Nothing to do with Latin being dead (which, as a scientific language, it wasn’t), stable (Neo-Latin wasn’t), or concise (if you want concision, you go to Greek, which handles compounds a lot more flexibly than Latin). Nothing to do with Latin being secret: all intellectuals in Europe understood it, and it was the language of the church that persecuted Galileo, as well. (Yes, Latin kept the Unwashed Horde out of science. Contemporary English-based jargon does just as well.)

-o, -onis is the native Latin declension. –on, -onis is not native Latin, so it is a morphological import from Greek.

So if it drops the -n, the word or name has been felt to be common or salient enough to be nativised as Latin. If it does not drop the -n, it is felt to be a Greek loanword, and is being spoken, as it were, with a Greek accent.

Apollo was a well established god in the Roman pantheon; in fact Wikipedia indicates he was already in Etruscan, as Apulu. So his name was assimilated into Latin, and dropped the -n. Orion was not a well established figure in Roman mythology; so his name stayed looking more like Greek.

Same story with famous vs not so famous Greeks. Plato, Crito, Zeno, but Euphorion, Solon, Philemon. And yes, it’s a very arbitrary dividing line, and accordingly you will find names with both endings: Euphorio or Euphorion, http://latinlexicon.org/definiti…

Of course, this only applies to the Greek –ōn, -ōnos declension (Latin -o, -onis); if it’s a different declension, Latin will stick with –on; eg Xenophon, -ontis.

It’s a Diaeresis (diacritic) or tréma, so named because it divides up two vowel letters to be pronounced as two syllables, which would otherwise be pronounced together as a single syllable (and typically a single vowel). So Zoë is pronounced Zo-ee, as distinct from rhyming with Joe.

It looks identical to the Germanic umlaut, but the umlaut is used to change the pronunciation of a vowel, and historically derived from a small <e>. The diaeresis OTOH has been two dots since it was invented for Hellenistic Greek.

The outlier dialects, Tsakonian, Pontic, Cappadocian, Mariupolitan: not mutually intelligible, with Tsakonian clearly the furthest away. In terms of the Swadesh list (100 words), Tsakonian has 70% in common with Standard Greek.

Cretan and Cypriot both have 89% words in the Swadesh-100. With dialect attrition, there are versions of Cypriot and Cretan that Athenians can understand, and versions that they can’t.

The other dialects of Greek are mutually intelligible, although there are some isolated instances of berserk phonological change; Samothracian was the one that has surprised me the most, since Northern Greek is not normally that far from the standard.

To give a pragmatics answer to why you would use either a conditional model or a present model in questions, to begin with:

In many cultures, and English is one, indirect requests are considered more polite than direct requests. An indirect request implies a direct request, but it gives the listener the (fictional) option of backing out by misunderstanding it, and it also gives the listener the (conventional) option of offering to fulfil the request, rather than being seen as complying with a demand.

“Pass the salt”. (Oh, that’s a direct request. Can’t get out of that. I have been put on the spot. Damn blunt furrner. Should get Trump to slap an armband on him.)

“Can you pass the salt?” (I can. Why would he ask? Might  he need salt? Why, in that case, let me spontaneously and completely off my own initiative offer the salt! I feel so  empowered!)

“Could you pass the salt?” (I could, hypothetically, if the need arose. Why would he ask? etc etc…. Oh, and he might not have needed the salt after all, since he was being so hypothetical about it; so kudos to me for being so proactive and able to anticipate his needs!)

Cultures do funny things with requests, since they can be seen as confronting and invoking a power differential. Greek, by contrast, usually limits the indirectness to a question (“Will you pass the salt?”), but it uses other means of toning down the threat to the listener’s face. Like sticking a diminutive on the object requested. Μου δίνετε το ονοματάκι σας; “Will you give me your eensy-teensy name?” There’s nothing eensy-teensy about most Greek names; but that creates the fiction that the request for the name is hardly any imposition at all: I’m only asking for this one tiny thing…