Particles

allthingslinguistic:

kuttithevangu:

andromedalogic:

when I was studying Greek I would get frustrated and annoyed because often, at the beginning of a sentence or clause – or just scattered haphazardly throughout – there would be three or four “particles” with no specific meaning. the literal translation might be “so thus and”, but of course you couldn’t put that down. they were just placeholder words, colloquial linguistic padding.

now, of course, I realize that I start sentences with “okay but like”.

you can sing the praises of the Greeks all you want, but the fact is, Plato wrote with all the elegance and grace of an off-the-cuff tumblr post.

my professor literally told us to think of all the “ἤ̂ δ᾽ ὅς”es in the Symposium as “so then he was like”

I swear, “particle” is just linguist-speak for “I’m not really sure what this small word does but speakers sure do seem to use a lot of them.” It’s not even a coherent class and the ones that have discourse-y functions are the hardest to pin down. 

And of course, languages differ in the extent to which they commonly write the discourse-y particles, while registers of the same language can often be distinguished based on particle use – “well” is more formal than “but like”, and the most formal varieties of English barely use discourse particles at all. But as we can see from Ancient Greek, not all formal written traditions avoid particles.