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Not yet in my speech, but you’re pointing out something interesting.

If you pronounce them as a single word, cuzall, cuzawesome, yeah, that’s a proclitic, and that’s grammaticalisation. I don’t.

I do pronounce ’cause as a single syllable often, many do. That’s a reduction, but I think it’s still independently stressed for me, and it’s certainly with a full vowel: coz /kɔz/ (Australian English), not cuz /kəz/. If you’re doing it as a schwa, that’s consistent with more extensive reduction of the word.

If you don’t mind: what’s your English dialect?

At an absolute minimum in Europe, four times. Each time there was a technological advance in book production, the superseded tech books were copied and discarded. Tech advances included:

• The introduction of papyrus
• The introduction of the codex
• The introduction of parchment
• The introduction of lowercase

It’s a very good question.

Normally, creoles and pidgins are put in the too hard basket of linguistic family trees for precisely that reason. It’s very hard to argue for a single parent language, as pidgins, and the creoles that arise from them, really are mixed languages, with grammar from the one, vocabulary from the other, and structures from the lowest common denominator. So people are reluctant to say Tok Pisin is either Austronesian or Germanic; they typically put it in a category of its own.

A further complication is that there is almost always a single acrolect (“White”) parent, with the possible exception of Bislama; but any number of basilect (“Black”) parents. Pidgins typically arose in plantations, where slaves or workers spoke a lot of different languages and were torn from their social context. So adopting a pidgin was a matter of necessity.

Linguists tend to dodge the question, and creoles are so distinct from both basilects and acrolects, not to mention so much more similar to each other, that the question is not really that useful. But Multiple Parents is certainly closer to the truth than Single Parent.

Original: Can anyone provide Latin or Greek versions of my Turkish name Mirac Tükenmez?

Hello, not-so-Anonymous!

So. Mirac, Arabic Mi’raj, is Ascension, as in the Ascension of Muhammad into Heaven. This corresponds to the Christian Ascension of Christ into Heaven—as in, one could reasonably use the same name.

The Greek for Ascension in that sense is Analēpsis. Literally, Taking Up. It’s not something Christ did on his own; he was Taken Up by God the Father. Without the trinitarian complications, that would be even more clearly the case for Muhammad.

There is no Ancient Greek name or Saint’s name I can find that derives from Analēpsis. If there were such a name, it would be Analēptos Ἀνάληπτος, “the Taken Up One”.

Tükenmez “Inextinguishable”? Ἄσβεστος Asbestos, of course. Yes, that’s what asbestos means.

Analeptus Asbestus?

I’ll add one variant. I was googling in case anyone has ever used the word Ἀνάληπτος as a name. I found that one guy took the word Ανεπανάληπτος “Unprecedented!”, and turned it into a moniker: Ανέπ Ανάληπητος, Anep Analeptos.

It’s not as good an option, and it’s a Greek in-joke. But there you go.

EDIT: It just occurred to me: people aren’t realising that the pronunciation of Mirac in Turkish is pretty close to Mirage in English. But Mirac in Turkish is a male name. Mirage in English is female, and sounds most like a stripper’s name…

If i ever met someone from the Unicode technical committee again, I’m showing them this question, and yelling THIS! YOU MADE THIS HAPPEN!

1. Rebuses do not make an international language.
2. This is not the first attempt at an international symbolic language. Not by a very long shot.

For a look at this kind of thing done right (or at least, much more right), see Bliss Symbolics: Start . Being used by a whole lot of linguistically handicapped people.

The critical decision was not to call the new decimal currency the pound. The pound was an option: Cyprus already had a decimalised pound, for example. But that option wasn’t taken.

As indeed it wasn’t taken in the other dominions. Canada, for example, went decimal and dollar in 1858. Decimal because My God, do you really want shillings and pence? And Dollar, because they’re next door to Dollarland.

Her Imperial Majesty wished her loyal dominion of Canada not to use the same name as Dollarland, and tried to make Canada call them royals instead. Which is a translation of the Spanish real, and which is also a suitably Imperial name for a currency.

Did not happen. Overruled by the otherwise loyal dominion’s legislature itself.

At the time Australian decimalisation was put forward, and the option of the pound wasn’t taken, Australia was in the torpor of 17 years of rule by arch monarchist Robert Menzies. Menzies thought that Canadian royal thing was an excellent idea, and wished to see it emulated.

We sneer now, we unruly latte-sipping Australian elites, at how forelock-tugging our antecedents were back then. But when Menzies’ successor Harold Holt tried to implement the royal, he got death threats. He backed down, and went with what Canada had gone with: the dollar. Shortly thereafter, so did New Zealand.

Like everyone else said, that’s why you try to have a sane Secretary of Defence.

Anon mentioned Nixon during Nam: Anonymous’ answer to If a president decided to go rogue and wants to nuke a country, what would happen? Anon doesn’t mention Nixon during the death throes of his presidency, when Schlessinger his SecDef was convinced Nixon really was at risk of going rogue and saying “Fuck it, let’s go blow up a country.”

Schlessinger quietly got word out that any such orders from Nixon were to be ignored.

I think Haldeman was already in jail by then. That would normally have been his job. Thank God Schlessinger did Haldeman’s job.

You’re looking for an app to type polytonic Greek on iOS. For example:

• AGK Ancient Greek Keyboard (Polytonic Greek) on the App Store
• Write Greek Polytonic on the App Store

Thanks, Khateeb!

When I was in second year phonetics in university, our exam was to do just that. Our lecturer would say some sounds, we had to write them down in IPA.

With some provisos.

• Most diacritics would count, but some of them, such as the forward/backward, raised/lowered diacritics for vowels, would not: too subtle. For that matter, we would not be expected to tell apart the 5 different versions of schwa, and I’m not sure anyone does.
• I think we were off the hook for learning the most obscure articulations: epiglottals, alveolo-palatals, and that weird Swedish combination ɧ.
• The consonants were pronounced between vowels: awa, aɥa, aɰa, aca, aka, aqa. That’s optimal for telling the difference between consonants; the auditory cues for the differences are in the transition into and out of consonants. Final unreleased consonants, such as you routinely get in Cantonese, I have found utterly impossible to hear the difference between.

I don’t have a great ear. But under ideal test conditions, and limiting ourselves to distinct IPA letters? Yes. We do.

From Sam Murray

Sam Murray’s answer to What are the best Phish songs?

If you are new to Phish, I highly recommend listening to the podcast Analyze Phish by Harris Wittels and Scott Aukerman. These two comedy writers argue about the merits of Phish, explore different songs, and relate them to various their artists. Harris Wittels died a few years ago from an overdose, but the gist of the podcast is him trying to convince Scott Aukerman to like Phish. The Earwolf link is here but you can also get it on iTunes.

Lots of links in your answer, Sarah, but I’ll start with the erudite explanation.