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Category: Mediaeval Greek
To whom Constantinople and Byzantium legacy belong to, Greece, Turkey or Bulgaria?
To anyone who claims it. I mean, seriously, what are you going to do? Sue the claimants you don’t like in the Hague? It belongs to the Greeks, who continue to call the City Constantinople and the empire Byzantine, Andrew Baird nothwithstanding, whose literary and church culture is suffused with Byzantium, and whose language if […]
How do modern Greek Orthodox feel about the Iconoclastic events?
Well, let me put it this way (answering the related question, “how do I feel about Iconoclasm”.) The town of Agios Nikolaos, Crete is named after an old church of St Nicholas. The church is still around, now built into the grounds of a hotel: Byzantine Temple of Agios Nikolaos – Travel Guide for Island […]
What is the etymology of Istanbul?
Uncontroversially: from the Greek εις την Πόλιν [is tim polin], “to the City”—The City being the informal name of Constantinople in Greek, to this day. There is at least one similar Turkish placename: İstanköy is the Turkish for Kos (εις την Κω /is tin ko/). There are some uncertainties about why it ended up as […]
Does the Greek word for obey in Ephesians 6:1 and Colossians 3:20 mean obey without question or is there room for discussion?
Ephesians 6:1: Τὰ τέκνα, ὑπακούετε τοῖς γονεῦσιν ὑμῶν ἐν κυρίῳ, τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν δίκαιον Colossians 3:20: Τὰ τέκνα, ὑπακούετε τοῖς γονεῦσιν κατὰ πάντα, τοῦτο γὰρ εὐάρεστόν ἐστιν ἐν κυρίῳ Naive answer: certainly in Modern Greek, υπακούω is straight out “obey”. Etymologically it means “under-listen”; and the first gloss given in Liddell–Scott is “hearken, give ear”: […]
How was Biblical Greek pronounced?
What they all said. In the modern-day context it doesn’t matter all that much; in terms of historical reconstruction, you’re trying to pin down jelly, since the pronunciation was in flux during the period, though it seems to have been closer to Modern than Attic (though far from identical). The reconstructions in Greek: A History […]
What is the etymology of the Russian word vishnya (cherry)? There seems to be a connection to the Turkish word.
The answers given here have opened up a secondary conundrum. It’s uncontroversial that Turkish got the word from Bulgarian. The controversy is whether the Slavic word came from Greek, the Greek word came from Slavic, or the similarity is a coincidence. The Greek word could easily have come from Bulgarian; and if it’s a Slavic-wide […]
Is there a big difference between Modern Greek and Medieval Greek?
Non-zero, but not huge. Mediaeval Greek is not the normal term used, because the Greek linguistic situation doesn’t align well with the Middle Ages. Let me explain. The learnèd language of Byzantium was Attic Greek, with varying degrees of enthusiastic hypercorrection and exoticism. The officialese language of Byzantium was closer to Koine, with plenty of […]
How did names like Anatoly and Arcady become names in Russia?
Partial answer: from St Anatolius: Anatolius of Laodicea and Anatolius of Constantinople. Saints’ names are the default source of given names in Orthodoxy. The question then becomes, why this saint’s cult was so much stronger in Russia than in Greece—I’ve never heard of a Greek called Anatolios, and the Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit has only […]
Is the modern pronunciation of Greek accurate for koine?
It’s close. This is from memory, so I could be wrong in a couple of details. 1st century AD Koine was the same as Modern Greek in the following: Stress accent, not pitch accent Diphthongs pronounced as single vowels Most vowels with modern values Most consonants with modern values No aspiration It differs as follows: […]
Would the Byzantines have spoken Ancient Greek or something closer to modern Greek?
Modern Greek. Being literate in Greek has always meant being literate in Ancient Greek; so all our evidence of the vernacular is tainted, right up until the Cretan Renaissance (and there it’s tainted in a different direction, of conventionalised dialect). In the period between the Arab conquest of Egypt (when the papyri run out) and […]