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Category: Mediaeval Greek
What does the Greek word παράκλητος (paráklitos) mean? What was the original Aramaic/Hebrew word?
I’ll add to the other answers there’s a subtle nuance in paráklētos. A nuance so subtle, you’ll most often see it discussed in explanations of paráklētos, and the evidence for the distinction can be shaky. Paráklētos follows the pattern of preposition + verbal adjective; it literally means “by-called” (hence, helper or advocate, some you call […]
Why did the Byzantine record the name of Osman Ghazi as Otoman?
Here’s some data, from Gyula Moravcsik’s Byzantinoturcica, a dictionary of all Turkic names and words that ended up in Byzantine Greek. The names are in roughly chronological order. Osman is named as: Atman (George Pachymeres, Nicephorus Gregoras) Atouman Atoumanos Atoumanes (Notitiae Chronicae, Chronicon Turcorum) Otmanos Otmanes (Hierax, Chronica Minora) Otoumanos (Chalcocondyles) Othmanos Othman Otthmanos Otthmanes […]
In Koine Greek, how are verbs conjugated based on their tense (if there is any pattern at all)?
Not quite clear what your question is. Assuming I’ve understood it: Koine Greek, like other languages, has a notion of principal parts. There are six tenses you need to know for a verb; once you know them, you can derive the remainder. The six tenses are all indicatives: present; future; aorist active; perfect active; aorist […]
Was the Greek population in western Asia Minor continuous from Byzantium, or did it migrate back to Asia Minor in Ottoman times?
Motivated by discussion with Dimitra Triantafyllidou at Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are major languages which declined/extinct during Turkification of Anatolia? Citing from discussion there: The received wisdom, from: Vryonis, Speros, Jr. The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. Berkeley: University of […]
What are major languages which declined/extinct during Turkification of Anatolia?
All the answers posted are very good, and a more substantial contribution than I will make. I agree that in all likelihood, by the time the Seljuks came to town, the indigenous Anatolian languages were long gone, and it was all about the retreat of Greek and Armenian. But I was A2A’d. So I’ll talk […]
What language first introduced punctuation such as the period, comma, exclamation point, and question mark?
See Punctuation on Wikipedia. David Crystal has a lovely book out on the history of punctuation: Making a Point. As Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer indicated, there were anticipations of punctuation for a while; the notion of systematically indicating pauses (period, comma) was a Hellenistic Greek invention, which became systematic in the late Empire. Punctuation as we […]
Was Procopius referring to second half of 6th century, when he says that “some of these rascals were still Animists” or much earlier times in Arabia ?
Procopius, de Bellis I xx: At about the time of this war Hellestheaeus, the king of the Aethiopians, who was a Christian and a most devoted adherent of this faith, discovered that a number of the Homeritae on the opposite mainland were oppressing the Christians there outrageously; many of these rascals were Jews, and many […]
Why wasn’t Greece ever islamified like Syria and Turkey?
Greece was affected: in 1800 half the population of Crete was Muslim, and those were converts, not settlers from Turkey. There’s a very simple answer to why Greece, and much of the Balkans, did not have the same outcome as Syria or Egypt: Greece was conquered by the Ottomans. And the Ottomans had the Rum […]
Is there a connection between the two lower case sigmas in Greek and the two lower case s in traditional German writing (black letter / cursive)?
The two certainly originated independently. Blackletter started elongating the medial s in the 8th century (Long s); Greek started using the pre-8th century lunate sigma as a final form, from the 11th century on (Letters). Both Greek and Latin scripts invented lowercase at the same time, but there was no real cultural contact between West […]
In the New Testament, what different semantic shades can the verb agapao (“love”) take?
A non-theological response: I’m grabbing all the definitions of agapaō from ἀγαπάω, DGE Diccionario Griego-Español, and highlighting those for which they give New Testament or Septuagint instances. As you can see, there’s a fair area of coverage for the verb; theologians have tried to pin it down in a nice schema, but a concept as […]