Today, I felt sad for the Greek language. As I was describing on Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes?, Greek has withstood the pressure to make like the Western languages for millennia. Oh, the common folk borrowed words from Latin and Turkish and Italian and Albanian, but scholarly […]
Perusing the entry for τιμάω in Liddell–Scott, the negative meaning you mention is not Epic, and first turns up in Plato and Aristophanes; LSJ describes it as an “Attic law term”. The transition is: to honour (since Homer) to award (as an honour) (in Tragedy) to award a penalty to someone, including a fine or […]
Part of the problem is going to be that the terminology can get idiosyncratic to a language. I was not familiar with the terms endoclisis and mesoclisis, though I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere a description of an Italian dialect that sounds like what you’re describing as mesoclisis. If we treat the Indo-European preverb as a […]
Excellent answer from Alket Cecaj, Alket Cecaj’s answer to Why are the taxes so high in Greece? Clientelism is how it started The government must provide; there isn’t a native notion of ground roots enterprise and small government. If the government must provide, well, that costs money. So far, as Alket argued, that’s no different […]
Well, I had no idea what the answer was. But I did know that evolution in Greek is εξέλιξη, as an element-for-element calque: both mean “out-twisting”. And ενέλιξη means “in-twisting”, which should correspond to Latin(-derived) involution. And I looked up the definition of ενέλιξη, and it gave me a bunch of geometrical stuff: ενέλιξη (from […]
Here’s a laundry list. Some to a greater extent, some to a lesser. Some as cultural assimilation, some as more straightforward displacement. Pelasgians (or whatever the pre-Hellenic population of Greece was) Minoans (who are presumably the same as the Eteocretans) Eteocypriots Lemnians (assuming that their language, which looks related to Etruscan, is not Pelasgian) The […]
The other answers are good, but I like to step back with questions like these, to the cultural context. In former times, expertise and professional use of language were elite activities; people who would use language professionally had an education that encompassed the literary canon and rhetoric; and the dominant literary aesthetic prioritised an extensive, […]
Kaylee Lowe’s answer to How can I get Esperanto taught at my school? Read now for the general principles at work. This answer is the added detail. Kaylee Lowe correctly points out the added constraint of standardised testing and curriculum support; you can’t just waltz in to a school with a copy of Jen Nia […]
All Balkan languages have borrowed substantial Turkish vocabulary, and all Balkan languages have borrowed some Turkish affixes. However, the Balkan Sprachbund is defined through the convergence of grammars, rather than just their borrowings from a common source. It is defined by shared morphological categories and syntactic constructions: a convergence such that, if you replace a […]
Greeks in recent years have established contact with the Pontic-speaking Muslims of the Of Valley, who remained in Turkey after 1923. (Their autonym for the language, unsurprisingly, is Romeyka.) They are renowned as devout Muslims, prominent in Islamic learning. (One might ruefully speculate that they feel they have something to prove.) Any promotion of the […]