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Month: June 2017
Why did the Byzantines call Western Europeans beef-eaters?
Because Byzantines did not eat beef as often as Western Europeans did. See Karen Carr’s answer to What was the basic diet like in the Byzantine era (circa 530) under Emperor Justinian and Empress Theoradora? They occasionally ate lamb and mutton, chicken, and pork; rarely beef. Or the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. meat: The […]
What is the origin of rhyming poetry? Is it strictly European-based?
In fact, though Rhyme – Wikipedia is very coy and tentative about stating it, there is good evidence that European rhyme originates in Arabic rhyme, via the Andalus; Arabic has used rhyme extensively since the sixth century. There is occasional rhyme in Classical Greek and Latin, but that is an effect, not a structuring principle. […]
How to say transgender in Greek
In A cis lament for the Greek language, I posted on the difficulties of rendering transgender and intersex in Greek. The solution I reported there seems not to have been the settled solution. I did some further reading since, and this is an expanded version on the challenges that were involved. The first challenge to […]
What terminology from “The Guardian” newspaper’s list of 35 misused word definitions do you often use wrong?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/05/the-35-words-youre-probably-getting-wrong Ah, I see we have an instance of that special being we call in Greek the glōssamyntōr, the “language defender”. Harold Evans, Fleet Street editor, eh? Of the Street that gave us Lynne Truss? And in turn the immortal book review of Lynne Truss, Bad Comma? (“An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a […]
What got you into linguistics and languages?
A high school Latin grammar. One of the many school textbooks my uncles and aunts left behind in my granddad’s shed, which I read in primary school. I was fascinated by the declension tables and the familiar lexicon, and I taught myself enough Latin to stumble my way through Cornelius Nepos. (“His simple style of […]
Did ancient Greek scholars ever adapt Roman numerals?
Greeks did not adopt Roman numerals, like, ever. (“Roman Numerals? We taught those beef eaters everything they know!”) Where the West uses Roman numerals, Greek continues to use Greek numerals; see examples in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is it possible to shorten the ordinal numbers in modern Greek? I’m honestly not aware of any tradition […]
What obstacles will I run into transitioning from Attic to Koine Greek?
Like Michael Masiello said, no real obstacles: things are simpler. There will be fewer Attic futures and Attic second declensions. In fact, they were historically called Attic not because they were alien to Doric (Doric loved the “Attic” future), but because they were alien to Koine. So λαός, σκανδαλίσω, not λεώς, σκανδαλιῶ. Some Latin loan […]
Is it possible to shorten the ordinal numbers in modern Greek?
The traditional way of doing that is to use a Greek numeral; you could use them indiscriminately for ordinals, cardinals, and in antiquity even multiplicatives. So World War II, Henry VIII: Βʹ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Ηʹ, which are in fact read out loud as Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Όγδοος, with ordinals and not […]
Do Greeks have more in common with the Turks than they do with the French or Germans?
For much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Greek identity was a tug of war between a Romaic and a Hellenic construct, between an identification with Ancient Greece via Western Europe (or vice versa), and the folk culture informed by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. The Hellenes have won, but that victory is fairly recent. […]
Are there any features, besides vocabulary, of human languages that only appeared relatively recently?
Written registers are a reasonably recent thing in human language, so the peculiarities of written language would qualify as innovations. The catch is, the characteristics of written language I can think of are matters of degree, rather than categorical differences from spoken language. But they include things like syntactic complexity, anaphora referring back a long […]