The quote as given does not appear in the Ancient canon, or even the Mediaeval canon. Nor in fact does the phrase βίᾳ ἤρχεσαν “they had ruled with force”. The phrase is a little odd; it’s very much a tendentious summary of what happened in Athens with the Thirty Tyrants, which would be out of […]
From OED, the dialectal survivals like Yorkshire thaa reflect unstressed variants of thou (which were short); thou is a long vowel that has gone through the Great English Vowel Shift—just as house has an /aʊ/ vowel, and is still pronounced huːs in Scots. The irregularity is you, and apparently the yow pronunciation was around in […]
If a language is agglutinative, or has a halfway decent derivational morphology, you can keep making up words based on other words for as long as you like, and those words will be perfectly acceptable. So there is not much of a limit. There is a limit in how many building blocks of words (morphemes) […]
The in-universe explanation (to treat Greek mythology like fantasy fiction, and that’s not that absurd really) is He was renamed Heracles [“glory of Hera”] in an unsuccessful attempt to mollify Hera. (Heracles – Wikipedia) Stepping behind the curtain, in his monograph on Greek religion (p. 322), Walter Burkert says the name might be a coincidence; […]
To elaborate on Niko Vasileas’ answer and Michael Anderson’s answer: Nominative Iōn, Genitive Iōn-os, Adjective Iōn-ikos or Iōn-ios refers to the tribe of Ionians. Adjective Iŏn-ios refers to the sea, and is traditionally derived from the lover of Zeus, Io (mythology): Nominative Iō, Genitive Ious < *Iŏ-os. Io, transformed into a cow, is supposed to […]
I’m reiterating what my fellow Greeks are saying, but to be really really explicit: The metaphorical meaning of Philistine (Φιλισταίοι) to mean someone anti-intellectual is absent from Greek. The typical words would be άξεστος “uncouth”, χωριάτης “peasant”, (learnèd) άμουσος “un-Mused, alien to the muses”, (Turkish) χαϊβάνι “animal”. Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής says that άμουσος = […]
To add some further nuances: When an interlocutor has finally understood something we’ve been hinting at—one of the contexts “Bingo!” is used in English—Greek uses α μπράβο! “Ah, well done”, with the emphasis on the “ah”. Kind of like “there you go”. More exasperated variants of “finally! at last!” (Dimitrios Michmizos’ answer) are έλεος! “Mercy!”, […]
http://nypost.com/2017/06/11/inside-gwyneth-paltrows-ridiculous-goop-summit/ What does fluency mean in a conlang like Klingon? Actually “fluency” is something of a misnomer I committed. What does good style mean in a conlang like Klingon? People clearly do differentiate between good Klingon and bad Klingon; on what basis do they do so, when the language is made up, and we don’t […]
If you want to make sense of English vowel pronunciation, Middle English phonology – Wikipedia is always a good place to start. Do had a long ō. (As it still does, allowing for the Great English Vowel Shift.) The Middle English 3rd person of do was dōeth, if the verb was a main verb, and […]
Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue? Two sources named: John Uebersax’s answer to Did Socrates really say “if you get a bad wife, you’ll become a philosopher” in any original texts like Plato’s or Xenophon’s dialogue? Diogenes Laertius, […]