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Does the word Medical have any relation with the Medes people?
At first, I thought “oh come on!”
Then I thought “hey, I should check.”
Now I think “probably not, but it was worth checking”.
medical comes ultimately from Latin mederi “to heal, give medical attention to, cure”: Online Etymology Dictionary. In turn, this ultimately derives from the Indo-European stem *med– (Pokorny’s dictionary), “to measure; to give advice, healing”. The Greek cognate is Homeric μέδομαι “provide for, be mindful of”, and μήδεα “counsels”; the other Latin cognate is meditari “think or reflect on, consider”. The English cognate is to mete out.
Oh, the other Greek cognate? The name suffix –medes. As in Ἀρχιμήδης “Archimedes”.
Looks like Medes, doesn’t it. So where do Medes come from?
Online Etymology Dictionary has the unadventurous suggestion “from king Medos”. Blah, that doesn’t mean anything.
Wikipedia offers: Medes
The original source for different words used to call the Median people, their language and homeland is a directly transmitted Old Iranian geographical name which is attested as the Old Persian “Māda-” (sing. masc.). The meaning of this word is not precisely established. The linguist W. Skalmowski proposes a relation with the proto-Indo European word “med(h)-” meaning “central, suited in the middle” by referring to Old Indic “madhya-” and Old Iranian “maidiia-” both carrying the same meaning and having descendants including Latin medium, Greek méso, and German mittel.
That’s Pokorny’s dictionary : *medhi-. It looks like *med– , but is not the same.
So: medicos are those who mete out healthcare; the Medes are the guys who live in the mid part of Persia. And if that proposal is right, the similarity is coincidental. But for all we know, that proposal might be wrong…
Do languages other than English have a numerical concept similar to “dozens”, plural?
Modern Greek has borrowed duzina from Venetian, so that does get used.
What is more idiomatic is the suffix –arja added on to tens-words, meaning “approximately”. So ðekarja “around ten”, triantarja “around thirty, thirty-odd”, eksindarja “around sixty, sixty-odd”.
[EDIT: correction to hundreds]
Also ðjakosarja “two hundred-odd”, triakosarja “three hundred odd”, up to enjakosarja “nine hundred-odd”; “one hundred-odd” is (e)katosti or katostarja.
In what situations would you use an article in English where you wouldn’t in Modern Greek? And vice-versa?
Rather than make up an answer, I googled and am posting from the first blog I found:
Πότε δεν χρησιμοποιούμε το οριστικό άρθρο the
- Proper names in Modern Greek always take a definite article. It’s quite rare in English: rivers, families, plural countries.
- Nouns with generic reference take a definite article in Modern Greek and not in English: Gentlemen prefer blondes in Greek is Οι άντρες προτιμούν τις ξανθιές.
As for the indefinite article, it’s mandatory in English where it applies; it’s often optional in Greek. So I saw a car = είδα (ένα) αυτοκίνητο.
What Is a Byzantine Catholic?
A follower of one of the Eastern Catholic Churches. These churches are doctrinally Roman Catholic, but their ritual practice is a continuation of Eastern Christian practice (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and the Church of the East).
Byzantine Catholic in particular refers to a follower of a church that is doctrinally Catholic, but whose ritual is derived from the Byzantine rite Eastern Orthodox church. The Eastern Catholic Churches also include practitioners of other rites—West Syrian, East Syrian, Armenian, and Alexandrian.
The Eastern Catholic Churches churches are commonly known as Uniate, but the term has been rejected by the followers as derogatory. By far the largest congregation of Byzantine Catholics is the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; runners up are the Melkite Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian Catholic Church.
Does Italian administration in the Dodecanese prevent the expulsion of Muslim citizens, contrary to Crete?
Self-evidently yes.
The population exchanges of 1923 dictated that all Muslims in Greece move to Turkey, with the exception of Thrace, and that all Greek Orthodox in Turkey move to Greece, with the exception of Istanbul, Imbros and Tenedos.
In 1923, Crete was part of Greece—though the Muslims of Crete were already fleeing the island after autonomy was granted in 1897. So the Muslims of Crete left for Turkey.
In 1923, the Dodecanese were under Italian administration, and were not part of Greece. Therefore a small Muslim population remains to this day, in Rhodes and Kos.
Why doesn’t the verb take a third person singular form in past tense?
Brian is of course right, but I think he’s explained it a bit too quickly.
Armed only with Old English grammar and Middle English from Wikipedia, behold the past tenses of verbs in action.
I’m only going to pay attention to weak verbs, because that’s the pattern that has prevailed.
Old English:
- Present
- ic hǣl-e “I heal”
- þū hǣl-st “thou healst”
- hē/hit/hēo hǣl-þ “he healeth”
- wē/gē/hīe hǣl-aþ “we/you/they heal”
- Past
- ic hǣld-e “I healed”
- þū hǣld-est “thou healdest”
- hē/hit/hēo hǣld-e “he healed”
- wē/gē/hīe hǣld-on “we/you/they healed”
What do we see?
- The present tense has third person singular marking. It also has second person singular marking, and plural marking.
- The past tense has all of the above. But the first and third person singular mark is just an -e. And English is notorious for no longer pronouncing its final e’s.
Middle English:
- Present
- ich baþ-e
- þu baþ-est
- he/sche/hit baþ-eþ
- we/ȝe/þei baþ-en
- Past
- ich baþed-e
- þu baþed-est
- he/sche/hit baþed-e
- we/ȝe/þei baþed-en
- The endings are pretty much the same, except that the plural ending has now been mooshed into the same –en for both present and past.
Now, to get to Modern English, we do the following:
1. Get rid of pronouncing the final –e, in late Middle English (though we’ll keep it in the spelling of this verb’s present tense):
- Present
- ich bathe
- thu bath-est
- he/sche/hit bath-eth
- we/ye/thei bath-en
- Past
- ich bathed
- þu bathed-st
- he/sche/hit bathed
- we/ye/thei bathed-en
2. Get rid of the plural agreement ending (Brian’s step 2):
- Present
- ich bathe
- thou bath-est
- he/sche/hit bath-eth
- we/ye/thei bathe
- Past
- ich bathed
- thou bathed-st
- he/sche/hit bathed
- we/ye/thei bathed
3. Get rid of the thou forms completely:
- Present
- I bathe
- he/she/it bath-eth
- we/ye/they bathe
- Past
- ich bathed
- he/she/it bathed
- we/ye/they bathed
4. Switch the -(e)th ending to -s (Brian’s step 1):
- Present
- I bathe
- he/she/it bathe-s
- we/ye/they bathe
- Past
- ich bathed
- he/she/it bathed
- we/ye/they bathed
Shazam, Modern English.
And that’s why there’s no third person ending on the past tense. Because the original third person ending was just an -e.
In fact, in Old English and Middle strong verbs, there wasn’t even the final -e: they had no third person ending from the very beginning:
- Old English
- ic stel-e “I steal”
- ic stæl “I stole”
- he stæl “he stole”
- we stǣl-on “we stole”
- Middle English
- ich sing-e “I sing”
- ich sang “I sang”
- he sang “he sang”
- we song-en “we sang”
What is the Modern Greek equivalent of the English phrase “I know, right?”
Good question. The English phrase expresses acknowledgement of the interlocutor’s surprise at something the speaker has just said.
The Greek idiomatic equivalent, I’d say, is Είδες; “See?”
How is “o po po” written in Greek?
Ω πω πω. You will also see ωπωπω, and πω πω πω and πωπωπω are more frequent. They’re interjections, so their spacing has not been normalised.
The initial ω is so spelled by analogy with ancient Greek ὦ “O!”, though it’s not strictly speaking the same thing. No idea why πω has an omega, maybe the vague notion that it’s a long drawn out exclamation (so it needs what was in antiquity a long vowel). The unrelated (?) babytalk word ποπός “bum, bottom” is spelled with an omicron.
Babiniotis’ dictionary, god bless it, has a lot of idiosyncratically antiquarian orthography, and it chooses to spell πωπω as ποπό, with reference to the ancient exclamation πόποι! Inasmuch as exclamations can reasonably have etymologies, that is not an insane analogy to do. But Babiniotis is a hundred years too late in trying to revise Greek spelling. And if you spell it ο ποπο, people will rightly assume you’re talking about bottoms.
EDIT: to my astonishment, the more orthographically prudent Triantafyllidis dictionary also has ποπό: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής.
I know why Triantafyllidis, as opposed to Babiniotis, did this: orthographic simplification. If you can’t find an omega in Ancient Greek, don’t use one in Modern Greek.
Google ποποπο and πωπωπω, and you’ll see that the people aren’t buying the orthographic simplification: people still write πωπωπω. Here’s a forum post on why the simplification sucks: πω πω! πωπώ! ποπό! (μπλιαχ) πο-πό! (ακόμα πιο μπλιαχ)
How does the Modern Greek pronoun το modify verbs?
As a pronoun, το is the clitic accusative neuter third person pronoun, and it corresponds to “that” or “it”. So, ξέρω “I know”; το ξέρω “I know that”.
Which means that, in the first instance, το is not modifying the meaning of a verb; it is completing it by providing an explicit object.
You could argue that in this context, το is pretty vague, and it is. Moreover, “know” is a transitive verb—you always know something.
The distinction here is subtle. “I know that” is explicitly referring back to something just said. By not giving an object, “I know” implies a more generic statement (and therefore is somewhat more defensive): “I know stuff (including that)”, “I am clueful in general”.
On the other hand, if you’re answering a question, such as “what time is it?”, you would answer δεν ξέρω “I don’t know”, just as in English, and not δεν το ξέρω “I don’t know that”. The pronoun does not refer readily to indirect questions. You would answer δεν το ξέρω referring to a specific entity; e.g. ξέρεις το τραγούδι που λέει ο Αστερίξ; “Do you know the song Asterix sings?”
Can someone translate from Greek the phrase “apeasa vrohe ston dromo, ke agao then stathika, san poli stin agallia sou, irtha ke zastathika”?
I commend your taste in music, Anon, though not your transcription skills.
stixoi.info: Το σακάκι μου κι αν στάζει, 1970. Lyrics: Akos Daskalopoulos. Music: Stavros Kouyoumtzis.
Μ’ έπιασε βροχή στο δρόμο μα εγώ δε στάθηκα
σαν πουλί στην αγκαλιά σου ήρθα και ζεστάθηκα
Κι αν με χτύπησε τ’ αγιάζι το σακάκι μου κι αν στάζει
σου το λέω δε με νοιάζει μια και είμαστε μαζί
I got caught by the rain on my way, but I did not stand still.
Like a bird I came into your embrace and warmed myself.
Even though I got hit by the frost, even though my coat is dripping,
I tell you I don’t care, because we’re together.