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Day: September 1, 2016
Why wasn’t Greece ever islamified like Syria and Turkey?
Greece was affected: in 1800 half the population of Crete was Muslim, and those were converts, not settlers from Turkey. There’s a very simple answer to why Greece, and much of the Balkans, did not have the same outcome as Syria or Egypt: Greece was conquered by the Ottomans. And the Ottomans had the Rum […]
Why do we lose our accents when we sing?
Originally Answered: Why do British/ Irish/ Australians when singing have the same American accent as American singers? Brian Collins and Robert Charles Lee, I disagree. They do too. And I do have a tin ear, but I’m not the only one to think so: Non-American pop singers (e.g. New Zealanders) tend to subconsciously adopt an […]
Why are uppercase i, lowercase L and the number 1 similar looking?
An unfortunate number of coincidences. The coincidences all ended up converging in Sans Serif Latin script, because a vertical line is a simple thing, and any simplification of glyphs can’t get any simpler than a | . The letter I started as Phoenecian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodh, which did not look like a |: But by the time […]
Does word gerokronoliros (γεροκρονόληρος) contain non-Greek (borrowed) elements? What is its meaning and etymology?
I checked LSJ: no γεροκρ- anything. And there wouldn’t be: γερο- for “old” is Modern Greek, the Ancient Greek would be γεροντο-. I googled γεροκρονοληρος, as Dimitris Sotiropoulos suggested in his exchange with Konstantinos Konstantinides. The good thing about Google, is that it assumes you misspell things. So it tries taking words apart. I didn’t […]