Greek Particles (1990)

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.”<p>The range of meanings for the Greek <i>entautha</i>, <i>gar</i>, and <i>de</i> are all well-understood.

Editing audio interviews for podcast I sometimes remove lots of &quot;particles&quot; as the author calls them (I just call them &quot;ums and ahs&quot;), TFA poses a question. Do particles have &quot;meaning&quot;? Don&#x27;t think I ever heard a discussion of that in any linguistics class, but they do have an effect. Working in radio&#x2F;podcast you get quite a deep feel for speech as more than just words.<p>I&#x27;ve heard there are effective &quot;de-um&quot; 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 &#x27;de-um&#x27; as it&#x27;s so woven into their speech.

Unrelated but somewhat funny:<p>I read someone jokingly proposing we pronunciate &quot;particles&quot; and &quot;molecules&quot; like we do for greek nouns (think &quot;hercules&quot;).<p>And now with these &quot;articles&quot;, I&#x27;m going to do this in my head for one more day.

A.k.A hesitation markers, non-lexical vocables, disfluence or nonfluence, filler..<p>It&#x27;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.<p>Wikipedia posits that even neanderthals might have said Ummm.

When translating ancient Greek in class, one often slips into a weird translation-ese that would be pretty funny if you didn&#x27;t know what was going on. You end up saying things like: &quot;The going-into-the-temple men were on the one hand brave and on the other hand afraid.&quot;

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: &quot;Kings-bloody-cross&quot; (a railway station in Sydney), &quot;absa-f..king-luteley&quot; ...

&gt;&gt; 4. Hildegarde swallowed, yeah, an entire disk drive.<p>Well now I must know.

Strange article.<p>Pretty sure the ancient greek translation is wrong in part too.<p>They say: &#x27;theōrhiā&#x27; means &#x27;review&#x27;, whereas it is obvious to me that it means &#x27;theory&#x27;.

Well, I&#x27;m glad I read these comments rather than trumpeting my new found knowledge of Greek particles to all and sundry. You have my thanks.

I really wish English had something like Greek ge, which is something like a sarcasm&#x2F;snark marker. Socrates uses it a lot.