One of my regrets when studying Classics was that I didn’t learn very many of the old schoolboy mnemonics that helped successive generations learn Latin and Greek paradigms. The only one I really remember is “Dick’s fat duck’s fur” for the irregular Latin imperatives dic ‘say!’, fac ‘do!’, duc ‘lead!’ and fer ‘carry!’. It recently [...]
Just two briefly mention two substrate hypotheses which I’ve come across in the last 24 hours: Theo Vennemann posits a Semitic substrate for Proto-Germanic, an encounter made possible by Phoenician colonization of the North Sea area. Among the supposed loanwords are the names of the Germanic gods Pol and Baldur, none other than the Semitic [...]
In Romani: a linguistic introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Yaron Matras gives several examples of how the Roma people have been very inventive with names for the countries and people encountered on their westward migration (pp. 26–27): Characteristic of Romani is – alongside replications of nations’ self-ascription (e.g. sasitko ‘German’, njamco ‘German’, valšo ‘French’) – the widespread [...]
Sheldon Pollock, one of the most prominent scholars of Sanskrit literature today, has contributed a jeremiad entitled ‘Crisis in the Classics’ to the journal Social Research Vol. 78 No. 1 (Spring 2011) on the decline of classical philology in India. The article is available as a PDF and its 28 pages have so much good material that [...]
During the evening service on Easter (the so-called Agape Vespers), the Orthodox Church has a tradition of reading the gospel passage for that day (John 20:19–25) in many different languages. In Greece, one of the versions sung is a rendering by St Nicodemus the Hagiorite (1749–1809) which casts the passage in the Homeric Greek and [...]
One of the fun aspects of reading Old Church Slavonic texts is encountering vocabulary that has disappeared from most modern Slavonic languages, but which persists as a loanword into Romanian even in the everyday conversational language. I thought I had found another example in Matthew 20:30–34: и сє дъва слѣпьса сѣдѧшта при пѫти слъішавъша ꙗко [...]
The Winter 2007 issue of The Classical World featured a collection of papers under the heading ‘The Linguistic Edge: Using Linguistics to Enrich the Teaching of the Classics’: Joshua T. Katz, ‘What Linguists are Good For’ Egbert J. Bakker, ‘Time, Tense and Thucydides’ Mary R. Bachvarova, ‘Actions and Attitudes: Understanding Greek (and Latin) Verbal Paradigms’ [...]
For the past several weeks I’ve been working with North and Hilliard’s classic Greek Prose Composition to brush up on my Greek. It has only now occurred to me that if all those composition workbooks I encountered as an undergraduate thought to specify prose composition, then there must have been exercises of writing verse in [...]
As I am working hard to expand my Romanian vocabulary and am furiously absorbing words from all the various texts I read, I was reminded of this XKCD strip. The foreign learner often has no way to know that the vocabulary he learns from older texts is now obsolete. When I recently compared, for example, [...]
While the intonation of Romanian in the Republic of Moldova does not greatly differ from across the border in Romania’s province of Moldavia, several decades in the USSR instilled the Moldovan language with a great many Russian calques. I was quite taken aback the first time I heard someone use the exhortation daţi să… ‘let’s’, a translation of Russian давай instead of the standard Romanian hai să. Doing a little research on the topic, I came across an article by Angela Arama that is a strident call to do away with these calques and return to a more traditionally Romanian way of speaking.