While I agree with your sentiments, I must correct you in that Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage, never had! Our societal safety also isn't all that it was, but to be sure it's much stronger than the US. For the other nordic countries I can't tell, though I seem to remember that Denmark has a minimum wage and Norway doesn't. As for Finland I have no idea.
While I do not doubt that your spouse, this is besides the point, the point is that Min Nan pronounces the first phoneme of the word for “tea” with a dental stop, other chinese variants/languages realize the same phoneme with a dental affricate.
I do not know if the article author/cartographer ever studied linguistics or phonetics, but this is the main takeaway from the map for me, a linguist, the pattern is the message, not the somewhat imprecise data points.
While being no expert on the historical development of the english personal pronouns (I do read some old english and maintain some fluency in modern ditto, not my first language), the linked Wikipedia page clearly states the opposite: singular they came into use after the plural use.
This is a minor nitpick, as I suspect that third person personal pronouns where in a state of flux during the middle english period, replacing some inherited pronouns with pronouns borrowed from old norse. More so, language isn't defined by it's history but from how it is used presently!
I myself wouldn't use singular they, it goes against my “language intuition
” (probably formed by my native language which wouldn't allow that construction), others feel free!
Apropos salt in coffee, the way I heard it when growing up was that coffee brewed (or rather boiled) on meltwater didn't quite taste right, add some salt and presto! Having tried that myself I can easily believe that, meltwater doesn't taste the same as well-water. For the record, I tried myself, and yes, when boiling instead of brewing some salt will work, in brewed coffee though, not!
I grew up in Norrbotten (north of the gulf of botnia, northernmost part of Sweden). This was (and still is a thing). Anyway, my mother is from the province of Hälsingland (in the middle part of Sweden), there one eats ”ostkaka” (cheese cake), which is almost the same thing, but heated in the oven and eaten with jam. I therefore suspect these to be ”relic-dishes” and that this type of dairy product was once more widely spread.
And for those who have neither heard or eaten kaffeost, the most similar thing I can think of is Halloumi, though unsalted and made from predominantly cow's milk.
No, Anglo-Saxon (or more correct Old English) is not a north-germanic language. Germanic languages per se are traditionally split into three branches: west- east- and north-germanic. English, as do German, belongs to the west-germanic branch. Though it is true that English for a time was heavily influenced by Old Norse (which as a precursor to the modern scandinavian languages sits on the north-germanic branch).
A couple of linguists (one Norwegian) do argue that Old English/Anglo-Saxon died out in the wake of the Danish invasions, and that Middle English (and hence modern English) descends directly from Old Norse (with a large amount of vocabulary borrowed from Old English): https://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/4-english-s...
I think you are misunderstanding what Poul Anderson was doing there. He was proposing that without the Normans, English would have drawn on the German lexicon. As the link in the sister comment argues, Old Norse had replaced German as an influence well before the 11th century. So Anderson's construction of hypothetical English vocabulary should have been based on Norse, not German.
>He was proposing that without the Normans, English would have drawn on the German lexicon.
That's not what's going on here, he's limiting the vocabulary to existing English words which derive from Old English and inventing some new words using existing morphemes of Old English origin.
(if you're going to look outside English btw the nearest neighbor languages are Frisian and more distantly Dutch)
Σπᾰρτῐᾱ́της is a perfectly fine greek noun and was used in antiquity to denote the ”homoioi” of spartan society, it is not a made up word by Bret Devereaux. Historical sources <em>do</em> consider helots to be spartans, just not citizens or ”homoioi”.
I would suggest reading the posted blog-post. The author <em>do</em> know what he is talking about and–in my opinion—quiet an engaging writer.
In turn, I would suggest not assuming that I haven't read the blog post.
"Σπαρτιάτης" is used in Greek (modern and ancient) to mean a (male) inhabitant
of a place called "Sparta". What the blog author claims is that there are _two_
words, one of which means free citizens of Sparta and the other, helots. He says
that one of those words is "Spartiate" and that the other is "Spartan".
This is a distinction that is impossible to make with a single word in Greek.
The words he uses, "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are two Latin transliterations of
the single Greek word "Σπαρτιάτης", that has one single meaning, as I explain it
above.
Furthermore, the distinction between free and enslaved inhabitans of Sparta is,
in all historical sources, made clear by using two words with different roots:
"Spartan" for the free citizens of the city, "helot" for the enslaved people of
the surrounding territories of the city-state. Nobody else than the author calls
one "Spartan" and the other "Spartiate". That's entirely the blog author's
made-up terminology.
So what I'm saying the blog author has made up is the distinct meaning of
"Spartan" and "Spartiate". I do not claim that he has made up the word
"Spartiate", as you seem to assume in your comment. Please correct me if I
misunderstood your comment, and not you mine.
Apologies for seemingly misunderstanding your post and in turn not making my point very clear! But, surely “spartiate” (or rather Σπαρτιάτης) isn't a made up word? Also, as I understand your reply the classical sources exclusively use that word for the “homoioi”? If so I understand your original point and have learned something new today.
And a small edit: It was your last parenthesis that confused me, I would have written it as:
“or even "Spartiate", a term distinguished by the author of the blog as distinct from "Spartan"…”
Apology accepted. I'm not a native English speaker as you are not a native Greek speaker. Which btw should give you pause before trying to teach me a lesson about my language. I've deleted a comment that made that point more forcefully and I'll now leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how I know you're not a native Greek speaker.
"Homoioi" (όμοιοι) means "equals" or "peers". That's what Spartans considered each other and they'd use that word in context, but used the demonym "Spartan" to refer to their fellow free citizens of Sparta as did everybody else. The helots were called either helots or ..."the Spartans' slaves".
Avoiding unicode, or anything but 7-bit ASCII is like using chiseling text into a stone instead of pen and paper because the pen might break. Fix the pen! Or replace it with a computer (and we're back full circle)!
It is not morally objectionable avoiding, it's just stupid.
And on a tangent to a tangent: The Old norse word for ‘boat’ is usually ‘bátr’, not the expected inherited ‘beitr’. The former is a loanword from Anglo-saxon and the inherited ’beitr’ is only found in poetry. While anecdotal, it is interesting that a culture so associated with seafaring as the viking-age Scandinavia borrowed the word for boat.
