Lest anyone take this article at face value, please note that it was published in _Speculative Grammarian_, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”
The range of meanings for the Greek entautha, gar, and de are all well-understood.
arnsholt 22 minutes ago [-]
Classical Greek is well outside my field, but one of the things I love about SpecGram when it deals with things I do know, the jokes also have a kernel of truth to them. And in other classical languages I'm more familiar with, there is (IMO) an argument to be made that the texts should be translated more "orally" than they frequently are. There are probably many reasons for this, but I think one of them is that because they are Classical and Important there's a sense of reverence that makes us want to translate them Seriously(tm).
Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).
dash2 17 minutes ago [-]
So what trend in modern linguistics is this guy satirizing? Do they like to pretend that well-known things like entautha and oun are mysteries?
ggm 3 hours ago [-]
A.k.A hesitation markers, non-lexical vocables, disfluence or nonfluence, filler..
It's entertaining how many different labels uh, well kinda um.. names I guess, er, anyway how many er ways to say these thingamabobs there, er, well are.
Wikipedia posits that even neanderthals might have said Ummm.
veqq 1 hours ago [-]
> A.k.A hesitation markers, non-lexical vocables, disfluence or nonfluence, filler
It's satirical.
readthenotes1 3 hours ago [-]
Don't keep us hanging, what might the Neanderthals have said?
Peteragain 2 hours ago [-]
Apparently Tai uses quite a bit of infix (not prefixes, or suffixes, but infixes). In in English we have infixes, but they are all expletives of the Nixon style: "Kings-bloody-cross" (a railway station in Sydney), "absa-f..king-luteley" ...
BiteCode_dev 31 minutes ago [-]
Unrelated but somewhat funny:
I read someone jokingly proposing we pronunciate "particles" and "molecules" like we do for greek nouns (think "hercules").
And now with these "articles", I'm going to do this in my head for one more day.
sapphicsnail 2 hours ago [-]
I really wish English had something like Greek ge, which is something like a sarcasm/snark marker. Socrates uses it a lot.
arnsholt 17 minutes ago [-]
Oh, but English does have a sarcasm marker! It's just not a word, instead it's typically marked by using non-standard pronunciation like creaky voice or lengthening vowels. The problem is of course that this stuff doesn't have an orthography, thus the use of stuff like /s online.
nonrandomstring 1 hours ago [-]
Editing audio interviews for podcast I sometimes remove lots of
"particles" as the author calls them (I just call them "ums and ahs"),
TFA poses a question. Do particles have "meaning"? Don't think I ever
heard a discussion of that in any linguistics class, but they do have
an effect. Working in radio/podcast you get quite a deep feel for
speech as more than just words.
I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work
with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood,
excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So
often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between
multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational
leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven
into their speech.
internet_points 48 minutes ago [-]
(The article is satire. Particles are an ill-defined class, they may have "meaning" or change the meaning of something, like "up" in "look up!", or they may say something about the speaker's attitude towards the statement or they may be required syntactically e.g. when posing a question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle#Modern_me... )
MartinGAugustin 2 hours ago [-]
Padding can be degradation-resistant
verisimi 2 hours ago [-]
Strange article.
Pretty sure the ancient greek translation is wrong in part too.
They say: 'theōrhiā' means 'review', whereas it is obvious to me that it means 'theory'.
baruz 1 hours ago [-]
I assume you’re joking, but θεωρίᾱ does mean a “looking at” or “a beholding” or “contemplation” from the verb θεωρέω, “to look at” or “observe.” Aristotle liked to use it for speculation or “theorizing” in the mental sense, but apparently that was due to Pythagoras’s influence.
Checked my Bolchazy-Carducci reprint of Crosby and Schaeffer, and they do indeed immediately gloss θεωρίᾱ as “review.”
arnsholt 2 hours ago [-]
The Speculative Granmarian is the premier journal of satirical linguistics, so that’s probably intentional. =)
The range of meanings for the Greek entautha, gar, and de are all well-understood.
Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).
It's entertaining how many different labels uh, well kinda um.. names I guess, er, anyway how many er ways to say these thingamabobs there, er, well are.
Wikipedia posits that even neanderthals might have said Ummm.
It's satirical.
I read someone jokingly proposing we pronunciate "particles" and "molecules" like we do for greek nouns (think "hercules").
And now with these "articles", I'm going to do this in my head for one more day.
I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood, excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven into their speech.
Pretty sure the ancient greek translation is wrong in part too.
They say: 'theōrhiā' means 'review', whereas it is obvious to me that it means 'theory'.
Checked my Bolchazy-Carducci reprint of Crosby and Schaeffer, and they do indeed immediately gloss θεωρίᾱ as “review.”