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Month: December 2016
What is the Latin translation for “I am broken, the only one who can fix me is the one who broke me”?
Fractus sum: solus qui me fregit me reparabit. (or, less elegantly: me reparare potest: “can fix me”, as opposed to “will fix me”.) Answered 2016-12-14 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-Latin-translation-for-I-am-broken-the-only-one-who-can-fix-me-is-the-one-who-broke-me/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
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 […]
Why are most poems written with rhymes?
As Jakobson once said, though artlessly,poetry claims th’ axis of combination. The repertoire of sounds, in crafty array,are how the Muse stakes her signification.Without form woven in sonority,poetry loses its essential claim:ends up as prose with gilded metaphor,but does not merit the enchanter’s name. The Homeoteleuton as a devicewas known to Greeks as such a […]
What did Greeks contribute to the world in the last thousand years?
As Pieter van der Wilt said in comments: Well nothing really very outstanding. The great achievements of mankind during the last 200 years come mainly from highly industrialized nations (UK, France, Germany, USA, etc…). Greece is a small country with a fairly high level of creativity. All nations are great, because humanity is great. The […]
What is the best way to say “innovative agile support” in Latin?
Remixing the others’: Ut succurramus innovantes agiliter: To support by agilely innovating. Answered 2016-12-11 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-say-innovative-agile-support-in-Latin/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Should “Türkiye” become the official name for country of “Turkey” in English language?
Yok, Mehrdad dostum. İstemiyorum. Assimilating country names into a target language is something I have a lot of affection for. I don’t regard it as disrespectful, but as familiarising; I regard the alternative as exoticisation. I get greatly annoyed when I hear Greeks speak of themselves in English as Hellenes, or refer to Hellas. We […]
How different are the dialects of your mother tongue within your country?
How does one measure it? I’ve already responded to something similar: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does the Greek language have a variety of regional dialects? and Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which of the Greek dialects sound harsh to a standard Greek speaker? The most deviant “dialect” of Greek, Tsakonian, is not mutually intelligible with Greek, […]