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Is “κάπου και που” in Greek about time or about place?
I’ll start by saying that the expression (lit. “somewhere and where”) is unfamiliar to me. Which makes me curious when it became common.
The related question, αραιά και που “sparsely and [some]where” refers to time: “occasionally, now and again”, rather than “in scattered locations, here and there”. The metaphorical use of spatial for temporal expressions is a linguistic commonplace.
The examples Google gives me of κάπου και που, on the other hand, are locative, temporal, or ambiguous:
- Τέσσερα χρόνια μετά, διαπιστώνουμε κάπου και που ότι φυτρώνουν “Κιμωλίες” σε όλη την Ελλάδα. Four years on, were see that “Chalk” sites are springing up here and there/(now and again) throughout Greece.
- Σε όλα τα ραντεβού πληρώνουμε, και κάπου και που μας κάνουνε κανένα τραπέζι ή κανένα μικρό δώρο. We pay at all our meetings, and (here and there)/now and again they take us out to dinner or give us a small gift.
- Συνέχισε με την επίσης κωμική τηλεοπτική επιτυχία “Dharma και Greg” και κάπου και που εμφανίζεται σε μικρούς ρόλους. She went on to the other successful comedy Dharma and Greg, and she appears here and there/now and again in minor roles.
- Μιλήσαμε για τις Λάκκες που κάπου και που έβλεπες σπίτια και πιο πολύ καλύβες We spoke about Lakkes, where here and there you would see houses, but mostly you’d see huts.
- ενώ παλεύει ακόμα με τις προσωπικές της εξαρτήσεις και κάπου και που κάνει και καμία τηλεοπτική εμφάνιση [Heather Locklear] is still struggling with personal addictions, and now and again makes the odd appearance on TV
So the impression I get is that it’s about both time and place. But because the expression is unfamiliar to me, I hereby request answers from people living in Greece.
EDIT: from comments
The που in που και που, αραιά και που, and presumably κάπου και που is the stressed interrogative locative, πού “where?” So something like “I see him—sparsely; and where?”, “I see him—where?, and where?”, “I see him—somewhere; and where?” All, I presume, as a rhetorical question, something like “I see him; God knows where.”
Compare the use of the stressed interrogative πώς “how?” in κάνει πώς και πώς να τον δει “he acts “how? and how?” to see him” = “he is very eager to see him” It’s something like, he’s asking out loud, giddy with excitement “how [will it happen]? how [will I act]?”
How many times was the City, I Polis, taken: two or three?
… I come into this knowing only an outline of Byzantine History, and Wikipedia. But, to focus on what the question details say:
- Constantinople fell to the Crusaders in 1203/1204, to the Niceans in 1261, and to the Ottomans in 1453.
- The Siege of Constantinople (717–718) by the Arabs was unsuccessful.
- The Siege of Constantinople was planned to take advantage of the Twenty Years’ Anarchy, when one Byzantine Emperor was deposing another.
- Leo III the Isaurian seized power five months before the siege began, in March 717.
- Leo III also introduced Byzantine Iconoclasm as official policy (nine years later), which threw the Empire into religious strife for the next century.
I think what you’re asking, Dimitris (and it is usually hard to make out) is whether Leo III’s ascent to the throne was a kind of “taking over” of Constantinople, like 1204, 1261, and 1453?
Iconoclasm, Wikipedia says, was a long time coming: it wasn’t an idea that just popped into Leo III’s head in 726. (The Byzantine historians say that it did, in response to a tsunami he read as divine disapproval of icons. But our historians know that’s not how history works.) So there were rabble outside Constantinople’s city walls that wanted an iconoclast in the palace. And most of them would have been on the borders with the Caliphate, since iconoclasm may have been inspired by the aniconic preference of Islam.
But Leo III took over in 717 as just another usurper. He didn’t take over with a ten-year plan to reform Orthodoxy. If I had a denarius for every time a usurper took power in Constantinople (let alone Rome), I would have a whole bunch of denarii. The fact that Leo III had iconoclast supporters doesn’t mean Constantinople fell to the iconoclasts, any more than Julian’s ascent meant that Constantinople fell to the pagans. They were just another faction internal to Byzantium.
Why are the Persian Wars important to the Greeks?
- The only time the city-states of Ancient Greece rallied to a common cause
- Therefore, a formative event in the understanding of Greek identity (not least, because it was defined as not-barbarian)
- Leaving out the inconvenient fact that the Greeks of Ionia had long accommodated themselves to Persian rule
- A formative event in the history of writing history—it was the driver behind Herodotus; and hence, in the history of writing Greek history
- A defensive war that the Greeks won (so, a Good War)
Which people have half Gothic half Slavic blood: Sorbians, others, or no one?
No idea whether the Sorbs are part-Gothic, or even how you could tell.
I have another, more obscure instance though.
Gothic survived in Gothia (Principality of Theodoro) in the Crimea, up until the 16th century.
Gothic shifted in the Crimea to Greek. In fact, the Gothic speakers that Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq recorded were giving their Gothic nouns with Greek articles.
Of the Greeks of the Crimea, in turn, many shifted to speaking Crimean Tatar language. Their variant of Tatar is called Urum language (i.e. Rum, Roman—that is, Greek).
The Greek Orthodox population of Crimea, who called themselves Rumei in Greek and Urum in Tatar, were resettled in 1778 to the area around Mariupol in the Ukraine: the Greek-speakers in the surrounding countryside, the Tatar-speakers in the town. Mariupol is (just) under Ukrainian control, and borders the Russian separatist areas.
Greek and Urum are both under language shift to Russian (this is eastern Ukraine). And one would expect that they are intermarrying with ethnic Russians.
And, one would think, there would be some Crimean Gothic blood in that ethnic group of Greek/Urum speakers originally from the Crimea.
So… yes. There’s a likely “Other”.
What would have world lost (apart from some more password combinations) if it had not used capital letters?
Not a whole lot. Consider:
- Only very few scripts even have a case distinction: Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian. Georgian and Cherokee are picking up case now, but that’s not because they need to, that’s because they’re being culturally influenced from hegemonic scripts.
- Languages vary wildly in what they choose to capitalise. German capitalises nouns; most languages don’t. Modern languages capitalise starts of sentences; mediaeval languages did not, and editions of Classical Latin and Greek, and Mediaeval Latin, do not. The only words consistently capitalised are proper names.
- It’s nice to single out proper names, since they can be confused out of context with common nouns; hieroglyphics used cartouches for that reason. But it’s not essential.
So, what would the world have lost? A little bit of ambiguity around proper names in European languages—which non-European languages have never found to be that much of a problem.
Of course, you would also have missed out on Studly caps and CamelCase. But human civilisation coped without them until the 1970s…
Can you follow root words and follow the immigration routes?
Famously, yes in the case of Romani:
http://am.uis.no/getfile.php/Ark…
Through the common vocabulary of all the Romani dialects, we can trace their migration from India, through Iran, Georgia and Armenia, to Greece/Anatolia, to Romania. After Romania there is a dispersal throughout Europe: there is no further common vocabulary between Romani dialects.
(from: Romani people, though this map seems to use historical and not just linguistic evidence)
What do the Turkish loanwords merak and meraklı mean in your language?
In Greek, μεράκι means:
- yearning
- love-sickness
- pride in one’s work (in the phrase με μεράκι “with merak”)
A μερακλής on the other hand is a bon vivant, a connoisseur, someone who knows how to have a good time and who appreciates the finer things in life.
And the verb μερακλώνομαι is to be in a euphoric mood, usually associated with drinking.
I’ll now defer to the definitions of the Triantafyllidis dictionary:
meraki:
- Intense desire: I have a ~ to go to Paris. If a child has no ~ for studying, don’t force him.
- Intense love and care for something, especially an activity: Old time craftspeople worked with ~, not robotically like modern builders.
- (plural) Intense pleasant sensation that comes from entertainment (cf. kefi): Tonight he drank a bit more and came to ~.
meraklis:
- Someone characterised by meraki, intense love or care for something. A ~ cook/barber/tailor/cabinetmaker. He is a ~ about his work; he doesn’t do anything shoddily. Retsina and meze fit for ~’s.
meraklono:
- To be overcome by a very intense pleasant feeling: He was ~-ed by the song and started dancing.
- To cause meraki in someone. The drink ~-ed him and he started singing.
- (passive) To have an intense desire for something: He ~-ed for a sweet/for a trip.
BTW, I’m OP, and I am going to formulate a grand unified theory of how the meanings grew when the answers come in.
Some linguists say there are 91 English spelling rules and some say there are none. Who is right?
Agreed with Brian (more or less). Despite the inconsistencies and hypercorrections and weirdness, English spelling is not random. If you see a new word, you have reasonable chance of coming up with a consistent pronunciation; and if you hear a new word, you have a (somewhat less) reasonable chance of coming up with a consistent spelling.
Language is a complex system. The rules aren’t as ironclad as the rules of mathematics (what real-world system’s rules are?) But what happens in language is not random either. There are known trends and tendencies in language, and rules can be formulated to account for them. It’s just that the outcomes are not fully predictable.
Spelling in English is an even more complex system than language, because it is more fragile, and subject to a wider range of pressures. Individual errors or wilfulness can have much more of an impact, deliberate antiquarianism can have much more of a say, and spelling gets stuck at a particular historical point more readily. But it’s still not random. It’s just far less predictable.
That does not mean you give up. It means you work harder, and give up and shrug only when you have to.
English spelling is maddening, and the more you learn about the history behind it, the madder you get. My latest exasperation: heaven could have ended up a long initial vowel (from the nominative hēven) or a short initial vowel (from the oblique hĕvenes). We pronounce it with a short vowel, and we spell it with a long vowel. Argh!
But I cannot accept that English spelling is boring. English spelling can teach us a lot.
Including how not to come up with a spelling system…
Are there any Greek towns built along the Acheron river in Greece?
I don’t know the answer, but I do know how to read Greek Wikipedia: Αχέρων – Βικιπαίδεια
The Acheron was considered a river of Hades in antiquity. Which makes sense, given that Epirus, where it is located, was nowheresville to the Ancient Greeks. This also exaggerated their sense of its importance: far from being the second greatest river in the world, as Plato claimed in Phaedo (and the greatest was Oceanus itself), the Acheron is only 58 km long.
The Acherusian lake, which the Acheron flowed into, seems to have been associated with much of the spooky stuff by the Ancients, including the gates of Hades. The lake was drained in the 1960s, by the British concern Boots Ltd, and that has changed the flow of the river.
The Acheron in Antiquity
The Acheron now
Haralambos Gouvas, the local who drew the map above, thinks it’s pointless to try to correlate the Homeric geography of the Acheron with its modern geography.
From what I can tell, there are just small villages along the flow of the river. Ammoudia, Preveza (formerly Splantza), at the mouth of the Acheron, has a population of 330. Glyki (Γλυκή Θεσπρωτίας) has a population of 434; Kastri, Thesprotia has 760; Valanidorachi (Βαλανιδόραχη Πρέβεζας) has 334.
The only ancient towns there of note seems to have been Cichyrus/Ephyra and Pandosia (Epirus).
Which is the origin of Aromanians?
Ah yes. There isn’t enough of a bulls-eye on my back in Quora already.
There are two schools of thought on the origin of Aromanians, as discussed in Wikipedia:
- A1. The Aromanians are descendants of Greeks (or at least, Greek-speakers) who were Latinised during Roman rule.
- A2. Slight variant on this: the Aromanians are descendants of Roman colonists and soldiers, who spoke Latin from the beginning.
- The Aromanians are not indigenous to the southern Balkans, and came from up north.
- B1. Romania—which would make them transplanted Romanians
- B2. Thrace, which would make them transplanted Thracians
As you will not at all be surprised to hear, Greeks prefer A1 (which makes the Aromanians Greek), and Romanians prefer B1 (which makes the Aromanians Romanian). Wikipedia seems to be weighing towards B2, which seems a little more plausible—less distance for the Aromanians to move.
What actual evidence do we have? Not a whole lot.
One piece of evidence is the Jireček Line, which divides up where Latin was probably the majority language from where Greek probably was, according to evidence from inscriptions. The Jireček Line runs north of FYRO Macedonia, much of Albania, and through central Bulgaria; that means it runs north of Aromanian territory. This corroborates B1 and B2.
A second piece of evidence is the torna, torna fratre phrase, discussed at length in Proto-Romanian language. In 587, during a military campaign in Haemus Mons (Balkan Mountains, central Bulgaria), a muleteer yelled at his mule “turn around, brother!” in proto-Romanian, in what the chronicler Theophylactus Simocatta calls “the local language”; the army used Latin for military commands, and the muleteer’s proto-Romanian “turn around” was misunderstood as the Latin command to retreat. Note that the meaning “turn” of Romanian toarnă is archaic, but torna is still Aromanian for “turn”.
The episode suggests that in 587 in central Bulgaria, proto-Romanian was the local language. The Haemus Mons pretty much is the Jireček Line, so that evidence also corroborates B2. “Haemus Mons” does not corroborate A1, even if the Greek PhD thesis about it (L’Aroumain et ses rapports avec le grec / Achille G. Lazarou) claims it does. (And the reprobate Westernising linguists I hanged out with in Greece did not have a lot of respect for Lazarou’s thesis: he had an agenda.)
So, no proof that Aromanians aren’t indigenous to Greece, FYRO Macedonia and Albania. But the theory that they migrated from what is now northern Bulgaria, if not Dacia itself, during the great migrations of the early middle ages, is somewhat more plausible.