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Day: December 13, 2016
Why are Greeks so extreme nationalist?
OP is Albanian, and I’m not surprised he got attitude from Greek-Americans. Dimitris Almyrantis is a Greece Greek, and I’ll presume he hasn’t spent time in Australia or America. That is not intended as a veiled attack on Dimitris, whom I esteem even when I disagree with him. (Especially when I disagree with him!) But […]
What was the reason people created the Europe Idea while it is not separate from Asia?
What people created the notion of Europe? Ancient Greeks. Where did the Ancient Greeks live? On the border between Asia and Europe. The Ancient Greeks had not circumnavigated the Arctic (and they didn’t believe a word Pytheas said). The Ancient Greeks did not know anything about the Urals. The Ancient Greeks did not even know […]
How would you use a different alphabet to write your native language?
This is a much-beloved topic of mine. There are a suite of ad hoc romanisations of non-Roman alphabets, devised for the ASCII-based internet (and phones). Greeklish is the Greek one. And Greeklish varies widely from practitioner to practitioner, mainly as to whether it’s a transcription (capturing the sounds of letters in Roman characters), or a […]
How many countries in the world say “Tata” when you say bye. And how did that happen?
It’s almost a word when we were kids. It is a word from when you were kids. It originated as a “nursery word”, as the OED puts it (i.e. baby talk), meaning both “good bye” and “walk”: 1823 S. Hutchinson Let. Sept.–Oct. (1954) 261 Baby I believe has not learnt any new words since Mrs […]