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Category: Modern Greek
Why do Greeks break plates when dancing?
See: Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer to Why do Greeks break plates? As pointed out in Valya Doncheva’s answer to Why do Greeks break plates when dancing?, there are old folk antecedents to the practice—and indeed, similar practices are not uncommon among people who get drunk in general, as witnessed with any rock group that ever trashed […]
What is the Greek population in Melbourne?
The census data for 2016 has been released as of 27 June 2017, and is available in breakdowns from Census DataPacks. And the Australian Bureau of Statistics loves their Microsoft Excel. It isn’t immediately obvious from the zip file what’s going on, but with perseverance, it turns out that 162,103 people from the Greater Melbourne […]
Which languages use a bare dental click for a plain no? Did this originate from a single language and spread to others?
Dental clicks – Wikipedia Dental clicks may also be used para-linguistically. For example, English speakers use a plain dental click, usually written tsk or tut (and often reduplicated tsk-tsk or tut-tut; these spellings often lead to spelling pronunciations /tɪsk/ or /tʌt/), as an interjection to express commiseration, disapproval, irritation, or to call a small animal. […]
Why shouldn’t Greece’s regions have autonomy?
The fact that Greece modelled itself after France, as a strongly centralising state, is not a reason why there shouldn’t be autonomy. Autonomy can work financially, after all; the autonomy of the Val d’Aosta after WWII, forced on Italy by de Gaulle proposing to invade, was part of the reason the Valley did so well […]
Can we exclude that in the not so distant past Tsakonian was familiar to those from North of Sparta to South East of the Arcadian capital Tripoli?
We can’t exclude it. Tsakonian is an absurdly archaic variant of Greek, and that speaks to long-term isolation from the rest of the Greek speaking world. It would have to be longer-term isolation than Old Athenian, the cover-term for the enclaves of Greek (Athens, Aegina, Megara, Kyme) blocked off from the rest of the Greek-speaking […]
What would a native Greek speaker differ in if they spoke French, dialect, tone, or accent? Would there be a difference?
… You know, I’ll take the challenge. I have a PhD in linguistics and I know the IPA backwards, but my accent in foreign languages is horridly Greek. From Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does Genesis 1:1-3 sound like in your language? : Vocaroo | Voice message Don’t assume that polyglots always have a great […]
What is the Greek word for “one’s lot in life?”
I vaguely recall a story which hangs on the following premise: there’s a Greek word which can either mean lot or some type of food (omelette?). This one continues to have me stumped. Both the Homeric moros and the Classical moira “fate” are derived from the word for “share”, just as “lot” in English is. […]
Why are there so few forests on Crete island?
The forests of Crete were renowned, and were going strong even in Venetian times: Cretan Renaissance literature abounds with pastoral scenes, and tales of deer hunting. These are the kinds of mountains I grew up seeing in Eastern Crete: They do have shrubbery. But actual trees are long gone. The first time I saw trees […]
What is the word similar to “Bingo” or “Hallelujah”, used by Greeks, in modern Greek?
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!”, […]
Will the Greek understand what the words “philistine” and “spartan” mean in the figurative context, in Greek?
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 = […]