Category: Uncategorized

Ain’t – Wikipedia

Ain’t is found throughout the English-speaking world across regions and classes, and is among the most pervasive nonstandard terms in English. It is one of two negation features (the other being the double negative) that are known to appear in all nonstandard English dialects.

Take ain’t instead of am/are not, add the double negative, and you’ve got ain’t no. Neither are features of Standard English; both, alone or in combination, are features of pretty much all nonstandard English.

Of the two, amn’t, aren’t > an’t > ain’t happened in the 17th and 18th century—certainly in time for it to travel everywhere English is spoken; ain’t is first attested in writing in 1749 per Wikipedia. The Double negative was present in Middle English, and in wide use in the 17th century. (“Up to the 18th century, double negatives were used to emphasise negation.”)

From what I’m seeing in Wikipedia, both ain’t and the double negative were attacked at the same time by prescription. But they were English-wide phenomena; their association with African American English is simply because African American English was somewhat less subject to prescription than white variants of the language.

1. Because so many Latin nouns do: Why do so many Latin words end in “-um” or “-us”?
2. Because Latin tended by default to treat place names as normal nouns, and ensure they could be inflected as normal nouns: it linguistically assimilated them if they were not originally Latin.

There has been some excellent speculation here on what guides the business decision by Quora on what languages to target:

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to What other languages should Quora support?
• Josephine Stefani’s answer to What other languages should Quora support?
• Clarissa Lohr: Why German and Italian? by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

In fact at that point in time (last month), the question What other languages should Quora support? overlapped with this. (Let’s keep it separate though.)

D’Angelo has said publicly that he’s not going after the Mainland Chinese market, which is hard for American companies to break into. (Even if Zhihu wasn’t already established, China would create it just so Quora wouldn’t get a foothold.) Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora are not going to be enough to sustain Quora in Chinese.

The factors in play are:

• cultural bias of VCs funding this (me)
• market niche opportunity (me, Josephine Stefani)
• googlability opportunity (Clarissa Lohr)—external searchers via Google being more critical for profitability than registered users

The factors are I believe of increasing importance from top to bottom.

• Cultural bias: Eurocentric, Islamophobic, and maybe still dismissive of Orkut: next up is Russian, maybe Portuguese.
• Market niche opportunity: Bigger markets: Arabic, Portuguese or Russian. (TheQuestion in Russian may be too well entrenched a competitor already.) Regional niches: Malay/Indonesian, Persian, Swahili. (Hindi not enough of a competitive niche, given the widespread use of English.)
• Googlability: Clarissa identified that anyone who is likely to register on Quora already knows English well; but lots of people google in German, including those not confident in English. I’m not sure which market the Googles pick up most, but I suspect it’s Russian and Arabic.
• EDIT: Correct that, per Josephine’s https://insurgency.quora.com/Cla… . Russian, Japanese.

My guess from all the above: unless they’re spooked by TheQuestion, and their VCs still hold a grudge against Orkut, Eurocentrism will again prevail, bolstered by the googlability argument: Russian and Portuguese.

Ich habe zehn davon.

(I got ten.)

EDIT:

Jetzt bleiben sieben.

(Now there’s seven left.)

Ah, a Modern Greek perspective in the question details.

I answered the corresponding Ancient Greek question at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has the word συγγεής two γ? I know it comes from σύν + γεν, and that later the ν disappeared, but why putting two γ? And why has the ν disappeared at the certain point in history?

Tl;dr:

• The velar nasal /ŋ/ is not identical to the alveolar/dental nasal /n/. It is, if you like, a cross between a /ɡ/ and an /n/.
• English, Latin, and many other languages have chosen to write it as an <n> before a <g>.
• Ancient Greek instead chose to write it as a <g> before a a velar: <gk, gch, gg>.
• Which is not absurd, given that the sound is a cross between a /ɡ/ and an /n/.
• Ancient Greek had geminated voiceless stops; /kk/, /pp/, /tt/. It did not have geminated voiced stops; any words with /dd/ or /bb/ are not native Greek words. So there was never any risk of orthographical <gg> being interpreted as [ɡɡ] instead of [ŋɡ].
• Modern Greek uses Ancient Greek historical orthography, so it was not going to respell the sound if it survived unchanged from antiquity. It still spells it as a <g> in front of a velar.
• So yes, it would indeed be strange to write Angelopoulos as <Angelopoulos>, Ανγελόπουλος. Standard Greek Orthography never has (though I think Soviet Greek orthography, which was phonetic, did).

In addition:

• Modern Greek pronounces <gk> and <gg> (historical [ŋk], [ŋɡ]) identically as [ŋɡ]. Just as it universally pronounces <nt> as [nd] and <mp> as [mb].
• Many Modern Greek dialects, and increasingly Standard Modern Greek, pronounce <gk>, <gg> (historical [ŋk], [ŋɡ]) as just [ɡ], dropping the initial nasal—just as they have done with orthographical <nt>, <mp>. So the usual pronunciation of the name Angelopoulos is actually [aɟelopulos] anyway (palatalised g). One more reason why it would not occur to anyone to write it with an <n>.

Hokay. Let’s dance.

1. Yes, my first name really is the same as my surname. Just like my three firstborn cousins.
2. I did not speak to my parents until I was 2. While I was being wheeled in by the nurse to see the doctor about it, I was reading out the room numbers to her.
3. I learned English from Sesame Street. Which has left me with a lifelong aspiration to to be Oscar the Grouch.

---

EDIT: The non-truth is #1; congratulations to Dorian Shkëmbi, Abigail (Abbey) Beach, and most especially Delaney Natale, who has clearly been paying attention:

I’m guessing 1, because I think I read somewhere that your first name is “Nick” and not “Nicholas”, which would technically make them different.

Yes, it’s a technicality. Sorry not sorry. But the birth certificate does say “Nick Nicholas” and not “Nicholas Nicholas” (thank the Gods), and I’m going with that.

#2 and #3 are related, and both are true. My parents were giving me mixed linguistic input, English and Greek—which is not a problem with language acquisition as such, it just means that kids take a few months longer as they disentangle the input. Because of it, I had acquired English just fine, but I wasn’t speaking to my parents who were giving me the confusing input.

I was however fluent in American, from Sesame Street (which child-minded me while my parents worked in the fish & chip shop downstairs); and when I’d worked out the nurses were not giving confusing linguistic input, I felt free to make like Count von Count, and count the room numbers. When my parents came in, I said mama, and that was the first word they heard from me.

Oh, btw:

In the early 1970s, following a counting session, the Count would laugh maniacally, “AH AH AH AH AH!”, accompanied by thunder and lightning flashes. He wouldn’t let anything interrupt his counting, and used hypnotic powers to temporarily stun people with a wave of his hands. This practice, however, was discontinued in the mid-1970s because of concern that young viewers would become frightened. In the mid-1970s, the Count became friendlier, did not have hypnotic powers, and interacted more with the characters (both live actors and Muppets). His laugh also changed from maniacal laughter to a more triumphant, stereotypical Dracula-style laugh.

He’ll always be maniacal laughter and thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening me, as far as I’m concerned.

And yet, I put down the Grouch as my role model. I know. It was a close run!

I couldn’t find the Oscar the Grouch and Yitzhak Perlman duet, so I’ll have to settle for this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=e8xlA33q9EI

tis eudaimōn? ho to men sōma hygiēs, tēn de psychēn euporos, tēn de physin eupaideutos.

Word for word:

Who good-daemoned? The: the on-the-one-hand body healthy, the on-the-other-hand soul good-resourced, the on-the-other-hand nature good-educated.

I’ll start by giving the passage on this change from Elementary Middle English grammar : James Wright, as a change specific to French loans.

§231. Initial e– disappeared before s + tenuis as Spaine, spȳen, staat beside estaat, stüdien, scāpen beside escāpen, squirel (O.Fr. escurel). Initial vowels also often disappeared before other consonants, as menden beside amenden, prentȳs beside aprentȳs, pistīl beside epistīl. Initial prefixes often disappeared, as steinen beside desteinen ‘to stain’, sport beside disport, saumple beside ensaumple.

Now, as OP points out, Latin > French and Latin > Italian went the other way.

The insertion of an initial e- before a cluster makes a word easier to pronounce; Latin statūs > Old French estat (Modern état) > English estate (state). Lots of languages do this; Turkish is another good example; French station > Turkish istasyon.

So why would English go the other way?

Notice that this change happened to French loans; it isn’t something that happened generically in the language, to Old English words. And ease of pronunciation is not an absolute in a language; after all, plenty of languages do have words starting with st-. Like Latin.

Or Old English.

If a change systematically happens to French words, it might not be motivated by making them easier to pronounce. It might be motivated by making them look more familiar—which can mean making them better aligned to the native phonotactics of the language.

So: did Old English have lots of words starting with an unaccented esc-, esp-, est-? From what I’m seeing at An Anglo-Saxon dictionary : based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth , no: just a couple of words starting with accented est-. As opposed to lots and lots of words starting with sc-, sp-, st-. And of course native stress was on the first syllable: an unstressed initial esc-, esp-, est– would have sounded doubly alien to Old English.

The rule was not regular and overwhelming: we’ve gone back to escape from scape, and we’ve kept apprentice. But—without knowing this for a fact—I think that’s what’s happened.

At a first stab (so to speak):

Plutarch • Life of Caesar

After this speech to Metellus, Caesar walked towards the door of the treasury, and when the keys were not to be found, he sent for smiths and ordered them to break in the door. Metellus once more opposed him, and was commended by some for so doing; but Caesar, raising his voice, threatened to kill him if he did not cease his troublesome interference. “And thou surely knowest, young man,” said he, “that it is more unpleasant for me to say this than to do it.”

ταῦτα πρὸς τὸν Μέτελλον εἰπών, ἐβάδιζε πρὸς τὰς θύρας τοῦ ταμιείου. μὴ φαινομένων δὲ τῶν κλειδῶν, χαλκεῖς μεταπεμψάμενος ἐκκόπτειν ἐκέλευεν. αὖθις δ’ ἐνισταμένου τοῦ Μετέλλου καί τινων ἐπαινούντων, διατεινάμενος ἠπείλησεν ἀποκτενεῖν αὐτόν, εἰ μὴ παύσαιτο παρενοχλῶν· „καὶ τοῦτ’“ ἔφη „μειράκιον οὐκ ἀγνοεῖς ὅτι μοι δυσκολώτερον ἦν εἰπεῖν ἢ πρᾶξαι“.

The Greek literally says: “and little boy, you are not unaware that it would be harder for me to say it than to do it.”

The quote is attributed to an “official at the Roman Treasury” (I could kill you faster than I could threaten to kill you.) Plutarch says: “When the tribune Metellus tried to prevent Caesar’s taking money from the reserve funds of the state, and cited certain laws, Caesar said that arms and laws had not the same season.” I guess that makes Metellus an official at the Roman Treasury.

Can I say? Apparently Carlin is a podcaster who tries to make historical figures sound sexy and badass, but I don’t think he’s improved on the original.

Humphry Smith’s answer is right, but let me spell it out a bit more.

We come up with stem suffixes in proto-Greek, to explain the diversity of case endings of classes of nouns—a diversity between dialects of Greek, as well as trying to make intuitive sense of where they came from. The nouns in your details, neuter teîch-os, masculine triē´r-ēs, proper name Themistokl-ēˆs, are all explained by proto-Greek stems ending in –es-.

Why do we do that? Because if you look at the cases other than the nominative, they’re pretty similar. We account for that by saying they’re actually underlyingly the same.

A few things to keep in mind whenever we’re reconstructing proto-Greek:

• First: Attic contracts vowels (mooshes them together); Epic Greek tends not to contract them, and proto-Greek is more obvious if we move back from Homer rather than Attic. So (interleaving the masculine noun triērēs where it’s different):

Attic:

teîch-os
triē´r-ēs
teích-ous
teích-ei
teích-ē
triē´r-eis
teich-ōˆn
teích-esi

Epic:

teîch-os
triē´r-ēs
teích-e-os
teích-e-ï
teích-e-a
triē´r-e-es
teich-é-ōn
teích-e-ssi

See that -e- in the Epic? You can’t see it as clearly in the Attic. That’s part of the reason why it’s an -es- noun.

Oh, and Themistocles? The uncontracted form is Themistoklé-ēs. The only difference between Themistoklé-ēs and triē´r-ēs is that Attic contracts the last two vowels.

• Second: Proto-Greek -s- between vowels is deleted. (In Latin, its equivalent turns into -r-.)

So our Epic paradigm now becomes:

teîch-os, triē´r-ēs
teích-es-os
teích-es-ï
teích-es-a
triē´r-es-es
teich-és-ōn
teích-es-ssi

And that’s where the -es- stem comes from.

The catch is that horrid nominative singular, teîch-os, triē´r-ēs.

• Third: When you’re reconstructing nominals, always leave the nominative singular till last. They tend to be… different.

The masculine nom. sg can be understood by compensatory lengthening. As you’ll know from other third declension nouns, the nom. sg. masc ending here should be -s. The stem is -es. So Proto-Greek nom. sg ‘trireme’ would have been triē´r-es-s. When the first s drops out, the vowel before it lengthens to compensate: triē´r-es-s > triē´r-ē-s.

That leaves the neuter singular -os. In fact, cracking open my copy of Sihler: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin §296, the nominative singular is as old as Proto-Indo-European: it’s –os all the way back.

Now, whenever you see o in Proto-Indo-European, you immediately think of the ablaut alternation of ø/e/o. Sihler notes (§297) that “Scholars have long maintained that the nom./acc. form -os, albeit of securely PIE date, is secondary; presumably the zero grade nom./acc. of the the type krewH̥2-s [Greek krea-s] is a relic of a more original state of affairs.” What he’s saying is that the -o-s looks suspicious, and it may be a ø/e/o alternation; the word for ‘meat’, which has nothing rather than e or o in front of the -s, was the original way of doing those neuters.