u/RaisonDetritus

I understand that the change of a c to a k is necessary to preserve a hard consonant in English phonology, but I can’t explain why my brain struggles to accept the spelling change.

What’s especially weird is that the spelling to mic breaks normal spelling conventions by having a long i-sound in that environment, but it doesn’t cause as much dissonance to me as miked does.

I know that this is an abbreviation of to microphone, and this might be why this word behaves so unusually. But something tells me there’s a deeper explanation for the linguistic dissonance I’m feeling. And to clarify, I’m only talking about spelling. The word itself feels totally normal when spoken out loud.

I’m only seeing Athenian ships. What determines which ships appear in each nautical region?

Because the comments here are leading me to the latter instead of the former. The comments seem to be overrun by a bunch of people who would rather post on r/Conservative but are too lazy to get the flair.

ETA (7/6/2026 7:38 PM EST): No, I will not be linking to any specific examples because I don’t want to open up any individual Redditors to flaming or dogpiling. So do not take my refusal to give specific examples as evidence of trolling or making things up.

I’m going through Homeric noun declension drills, and I’m wondering if there’s any utility in utilizing iota adscript over subscript. So βουλῆι, βουλῆιιν, βουλῆισι instead of βουλῇ, βουλῇιν, βουλῇσι as I typically see.

For reference, I do pronounce the long diphthongs with a slight off-glide, and my main goal is to really separate stems from inflectional endings.

This sub is a living, breathing example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I have seen so much actual nonsense in the comments that it actually makes my brain hurt.

ETA: For reference, this is the post that set me off: https://www.reddit.com/r/ENGLISH/s/WsO4Jn57Pr. There are so many comments on there that are misguided or just plain wrong.

I fail to cleave ships a good amount of attempts even though I’m striking them straight on at full speed. Is there something I’m missing?

ETA: To clarify, yes, I’m damaging ships to where I see the white anchor symbol. But they still often fail to cleave.

I will say, there seems to be some disagreement about whether Lilia ever actually perceived her own death given her ability to experience her life out of sequence. I don’t want to get into that here. For the purposes of this conversation, I’m assuming that there did indeed come a point where Death collected Lilia’s spirit like she does with everyone else.

I’m wondering if anyone can explain the morphology of what’s happening in Homeric first declension nouns of type αἰχμητής, -ᾱo, ὁ, (ἀιχμητᾱ-). The stem has a long ᾱ-ending, and in the voc. sg. it shortens to ἀιχμητά.

Here’s what I think I understand, and I’m definitely open to correction or clarification on this as well:

Declensions are formed by attaching case endings to a noun stem. Long vowels can be naturally long or the result of contraction. However, it’s not correct to think of the stem ending of ἀιχμητᾱ- as two successive short α’s, and so we don’t say that the voc. sg. is formed by “dropping” an α from the stem.

So what is the morphological mechanism that results in a long stem vowel shortening in the vocative? Does it relate to the morphology of older Greek varieties, or even to PIE morphology from even further back?

Thank you very much. I hope I was able to properly explain my question.

I’m wondering if anyone can explain the morphology of what’s happening in Homeric first declension nouns of type αἰχμητής, -ᾱo, ὁ, (ἀιχμητᾱ-). The stem has a long ᾱ-ending, and in the voc. sg. it shortens to ἀιχμητά.

Here’s what I think I understand, and I’m definitely open to correction or clarification on this as well:

Declensions are formed by attaching case endings to a noun stem. Long vowels can be naturally long or the result of contraction. However, it’s not correct to think of the stem ending of ἀιχμητᾱ- as two successive short α’s, and so we don’t say that the voc. sg. is formed by “dropping” an α from the stem.

So what is the morphological mechanism that results in a long stem vowel shortening in the vocative? Does it relate to the morphology of older Greek varieties, or even to PIE morphology from even further back?

Thank you very much. I hope I was able to properly explain my question.

I’m wondering if anyone can explain the morphology of what’s happening in Homeric first declension nouns of type αἰχμητής, -ᾱo, ὁ, (ἀιχμητᾱ-). The stem has a long ᾱ-ending, and in the voc. sg. it shortens to ἀιχμητά.

Here’s what I think I understand, and I’m definitely open to correction or clarification on this as well:

Declensions are formed by attaching case endings to a noun stem. Long vowels can be naturally long or the result of contraction. However, it’s not correct to think of the stem ending of ἀιχμητᾱ- as two successive short α’s, and so we don’t say that the voc. sg. is formed by “dropping” an α from the stem.

So what is the morphological mechanism that results in a long stem vowel shortening in the vocative? Does it relate to the morphology of older Greek varieties, or even to PIE morphology from even further back?

Thank you very much. I hope I was able to properly explain my question.

Excerpt from “Virtue” by George Herbert:

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

This is clearly archaic English. I’m just having difficulty parsing what closes means in this context.

Excerpt from “Virtue” by George Herbert:

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

I understand this is archaic English. I’m just having a difficult time parsing that line, especially close being used as a noun.

After watching “Dorothy’s New Friend”, I was struck by how immediately Barbara recognized Gutmann as a Jewish last name. I did some research on it and found out that it was commonly taken by Ashkenazi Jews as a surname. I’m familiar with how Yiddish is a descendant of Old High German, but there’s nothing about Gutmann that would strike me as recognizably Jewish unless one was already aware. I would just think it’s German.

Granted, I’ve known plenty of Jews, but I’ve never lived in a historically Jewish population center like NYC or Chicago. And how would the Mortimer Club have even found out about Mr. Gutmann’s name and ethnicity had Sofia not even mentioned it?

ETA: Apparently the spelling Gutman is more directly associated with Ashkenazi Jews than Gutmann is.

I just finished year two of college-level French, and I would like to start dabbling in older versions of the language, especially the troubadour/trouvère repertoire of poetry and music.

Is there a standardized way of pronouncing these varieties in the academic world? The only thing I really know is that the orthography is far less opaque compared to the modern language, so it ends up being more phonetic. I really just want to settle on a workably functional and natural pronunciation so that I can comfortably read aloud.

Any resources or advice would be great!