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Copulative A
The copulative ''a'' (also ''a'' copulativum, ''a'' athroistikon) is the prefix ''ha-'' or ''a-'' expressing unity in Ancient Greek, derived from Proto-Indo-European *''sm̥-'', cognate to English ''same'' (see also Symbel).. An example is ''a-delphos'' "brother", from *''sm̥-gwelbhos'' literally "from the ''same'' womb" (compare Delphi). In Proto-Greek, ''s'' at the beginning of a word became ''h'' by debuccalization and syllabic ''m̥'' became ''a'', giving ''ha-''. The initial ''h'' was sometimes lost by psilosis or Grassmann's law. Cognate forms in other languages preserve the ''s'': for example, the Sanskrit prefix ''saṃ-'' in the name of the language, ''saṃ-s-kṛtā'' "put together". Less exact cognates include English ''same'' and ''some'', and Latin ''simul'' "at the same time" and ''similis'' "similar". Other words in Greek are related, including ''háma'' "at the same time", ''homós'' "same", and ''heís'' "one" (from )., , . See also * Privative a An alpha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prefix
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can be either inflectional, creating a new form of the word with the same basic meaning and same lexical category (but playing a different role in the sentence), or derivational, creating a new word with a new semantic meaning and sometimes also a different lexical category. Prefixes, like all other affixes, are usually bound morphemes. In English, there are no inflectional prefixes; English uses suffixes instead for that purpose. The word ''prefix'' is itself made up of the stem ''fix'' (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix ''pre-'' (meaning "before"), both o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic period (), and the Classical period (). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language. From the Hellenistic period (), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek, which is regarded as a separate historical stage, although its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek. There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek, of which Attic Greek developed into Koi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Indo-European Language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the proto-Indo-European homeland, original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Symbel
Symbel ( OE) and sumbl ( ON) are Germanic terms for "feast, banquet". Accounts of the ''symbel'' are preserved in the Anglo-Saxon ''Beowulf'' (lines 489-675 and 1491–1500), ''Dream of the Rood'' (line 141) and '' Judith'' (line 15), Old Saxon ''Heliand'' (line 3339), and the Old Norse ''Lokasenna'' (stanza 8) as well as other Eddic and Saga texts, such as in the ''Heimskringla'' account of the funeral ale held by King Sweyn, or in the ''Fagrskinna''. Paul C. Bauschatz in 1976 suggested that the term reflects a pagan ritual which had a "great religious significance in the culture of the early Germanic people".First proposed at the Third International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics, at the University of Texas at Austin, April 5–9, 1976 (published in 1978), elaborated in Bauschatz, "The Germanic ritual feast" and ''The Well and the Tree''; Pollington, ''Mead-hall''. Etymology The prevalent view today is that Old English ''symbel'', Old Saxon ''symbal, sumbal'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Delphi
Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), in ancient times was a sacred precinct that served as the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient classical world. The oracle had origins in prehistory and it became international in character and also fostered sentiments of Greek nationality, even though the nation of Greece was centuries away from realization. The ancient Greeks considered the centre of the world to be in Delphi, marked by the stone monument known as the omphalos (navel). The sacred precinct of Ge or Gaia was in the region of Phocis, but its management had been taken away from the Phocians, who were trying to extort money from its visitors, and had been placed in the hands of an amphictyony, or committee of persons chosen mainly from Central Greece. According to the Suda, Delphi took its name from the Delphyne, the she-serpent ('' drakaina'') who lived there and was killed by the god Apoll ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Greek Language
The Proto-Greek language (also known as Proto-Hellenic) is the Indo-European language which was the last common ancestor of all varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean Greek, the subsequent ancient Greek dialects (i.e., Attic, Ionic, Aeolic, Doric, Arcadocypriot, and ancient Macedonian—either a dialect or a closely related Hellenic language) and, ultimately, Koine, Byzantine and Modern Greek (along with its variants). Proto-Greek speakers entered Greece sometime between 2200 and 1900 BCE, with the diversification into a southern and a northern group beginning by approximately 1700 BCE. Origins Proto-Greek emerged from the diversification of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), the last phase of which gave rise to the later language families occurred BCE. Pre-Proto-Greek, the Indo-European dialect from which Proto-Greek originated, emerged BCE in an area which bordered pre- Proto-Indo-Iranian to the east and pre- Proto-Armenian and pre-Proto- Phrygian to the w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Debuccalization
Debuccalization or deoralization is a sound change or alternation in which an oral consonant loses its original place of articulation and moves it to the glottis (usually , , or ). The pronunciation of a consonant as is sometimes called aspiration, but in phonetics, aspiration is the burst of air accompanying a stop. The word comes from Latin , meaning "cheek" or "mouth". Debuccalization is usually seen as a subtype of lenition, which is often defined as a sound change involving the weakening of a consonant by progressive shifts in pronunciation. As with other forms of lenition, debuccalization may be synchronic or diachronic (i.e. it may involve alternations within a language depending on context or sound changes across time). Debuccalization processes occur in many different types of environments such as the following: * word-initially, as in Kannada * word-finally, as in Burmese * intervocalically, as in a number of English varieties (e.g. ''litter'' ), or in Tuscan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllabic Consonant
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacritic in the International Phonetic Alphabet is used, . It may be instead represented by an overstroke, if the symbol that it modifies has a descender, such as in . Syllabic consonants in most languages are sonorants, such as nasals and liquids. Very few have syllabic obstruents, such as stops and fricatives in normal words, but English has syllabic fricatives in paralinguistic words like ''shh!'' and ''zzz''. Examples Germanic languages In many varieties of High and Low German, pronouncing syllabic consonants may be considered a shibboleth. In High German and Tweants (a Low Saxon dialect spoken in the Netherlands; more Low Saxon dialects have the syllabic consonant), all word-final syllables in infinite verbs and feminine plural n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Psilosis
Psilosis () is the sound change in which Greek lost the consonant sound /h/ during antiquity. The term comes from the Greek ''psílōsis'' ("smoothing, thinning out") and is related to the name of the smooth breathing (ψιλή ''psilḗ''), the sign for the absence of initial in a word. Dialects that have lost are called psilotic. The linguistic phenomenon is comparable to that of h-dropping in dialects of Modern English and to the development by which /h/ was lost in late Latin. History The loss of /h/ happened at different times in different dialects of Greek. The eastern Ionic dialects, the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos, as well as the Doric dialects of Crete and Elis, were already psilotic at the beginning of their written record. In Attic, there was widespread variation in popular speech during the classical period, but the formal standard language retained /h/. This variation continued into the Hellenistic Koine. Alexandrine grammarians who codified Greek orthography du ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognate
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and often it takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate or not. Cognates are distinguished from loanwords, where a word has been borrowed from another language. The term ''cognate'' derives from the Latin noun '' cognatus blood relative'. Characteristics Cognates need not have the same meaning, which may have changed as the languages developed independently. For example English '' starve'' and Dutch '' sterven'' 'to die' or German '' sterben'' 'to die' all descend from the same Proto-Germanic verb, '' *sterbaną'' 'to die'. Cognates also do not need to look or sound sim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion, diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age#South Asia, Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a lingua franca, link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Indo-Aryan languages#Old Indo- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
