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What are some of the names of the most important Ancient Greek newspapers?
Ah, Anon, Anon…
A newspaper by any modern understanding of the concept presupposes widespread literacy, and, you know, paper. The Roman Acta Diurna were a daily gazette of government decisions published, Asterix style, in stone, and there may even have been equivalents in Greece for publishing what the assemblies had decided that day; but they really aren’t quite what you’re after.
Newspapers hit the Greek-speaking world at the end of the 18th century. Wikipedia credits Efimeris (1790) as the first; Hermes o Logios was certainly the first influential one. And newspapers flourished during the Greek War of Independence (the first newspaper in Greece started August 1, 1821 in Kalamata: Σάλπιγξ Ελληνική). Those papers were not in the vernacular—nothing was; but neither were they in Ancient Greek: they were in Katharevousa, because someone other than classicists had to be able to read them. And I’m reasonably sure that’s been the case throughout the 19th century, and up until the 60s. (What was the last Katharevousa holdout, Estia, is now the last polytonic holdout.)
The most excellent and commendable Akropolis World News is probably what you’re after: it’s a weekly post of a paragraph of world news, in actual Ancient Greek.
What are all the animal forms that Zeus took in Greek Mythology?
Lucian Dialogues of the Gods has Zeus speaking to Eros:
The pranks you have played me! Satyr, bull, swan, eagle, shower of gold — I have been everything in my time; and I have you to thank for it.
Those are the most famous ones
- Bull: Europa
- Swan: Leda
- Shower of gold: Danae
- Satyr: Antiope
- Eagle: Ganymede
Theoi Greek Mythology & the Greek Gods is a wonderful encyclopaedia of Greek Mythology, and going through it we can add:
LOVES OF ZEUS 1 : Greek mythology; LOVES OF ZEUS 2 : Greek mythology; LOVES OF ZEUS 3 : Greek mythology
- Demeter: snake
- Persephone: serpentine drakon
- Mnemosyne: shepherd
- Nemesis: swan
- Asteria: eagle (Ovid)
- Aegina: eagle
- Alcmene: Alcmene’s husband
- Eurymedousa: ant
- ?!
- Callisto: Artemis
- Phthia: dove
… Ant?!
(Credit: PortalComic on DeviantArt)
Why does the third generation of Greek immigrants in Belgium use only French, while their counterparts in Germany speak excellent Greek?
Really, the question boils down to, why are Greeks in Belgium assimilating faster than Greeks in Germany.
At a guess, critical mass: lots more Greeks in Germany, so much more community life, much more community use of Greek.
I don’t know enough to speculate further, and I invite others to. Other factors could include:
- Demographics of the migrant groups. If, say, the German Greeks are all factory workers, and the Belgian Greeks are all European Union functionaries, then the German Greeks will have more cultural, social, and ideological blockers to assimilation, and the Belgian Greeks will have fewer. (I have no idea if that is the case.)
- Attitudes of the host population. If, say, Belgians all bed Greeks as a competitive sport, whereas Germans avoid Greeks in the street, there will be less assimilation on the German side. (I’m reasonably sure that’s not the case. But Germany did assume that Greek migrants, like Turkish migrants were all guest workers who were going to go away, and to everyone’s surprise they never did. If the assumption was not in place in Belgium, there would have been less resistance to assimilation.)
Who composed the National Hymn of Palestine. Not an Arab?
There’s plenty of evidence online that Arafat got Mikis Theodorakis to write A National Hymn of Palestine, when he visited Greece in 1981:
- The Jewish problem, according to Theodorakis
(Haaretz interview, 2006) - THEODORAKIS, A MAN OF PEACE (Theodorakis website)
- Μίκης Θεοδωράκης (Theodorakis website)
- PLO Commissions ‘national Anthem’ by Greek Composer (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1982)
It’s also quite clear that this anthem, which online evidence says had lyrics by Mahmoud Darwish and was presented in Algiers in 1988, is not the current national anthem of the Palestinian Authority.
Frustratingly, I can’t find any details online about what Mikis’ anthem was. But it’s neither Fida’i/Biladi, the current anthem, nor Mawtini, the old unofficial anthem.
BS in English Linguistic and literature are different courses?
Not A2A.
Michael Masiello, who is awesome in every way, is right in the question he answered, but wrong in the question I think OP intended.
Linguistics and literature are indeed quite different fields of study. In fact, they have become more separate. Linguistics was invented to help literature study (rhetoric); and literature scholars draw on the toolset of linguistics to understand the aesthetics of the texts they are studying.
On the other hand, linguistics by its nature cannot prioritise one kind of text over all the others, or make value judgements over what is beautiful in language. (Anything I know about Michael’s field, I know from my own reading, before I got into linguistics.) If anything, linguistics sets itself up in opposition to the lay judgements of language that are built on social rather than structural notions; and it prioritises the spoken rather than the written.
As a result, linguistics has ignored social and cultural structures (until very recently), and sociolinguistics is a field we owe to sociologists, not linguistics. Historical linguistics of literary languages is now a niche field; and linguistics ignore at the tools of literature, even when they really shouldn’t. (Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are the differences between linguistics and philology?)
No, for example, you can’t use the presence of infinitives in the Mass of the Beardless Man to prove that infinitives survived in Greek in 1500. The Mass of the Beardless Man is a parody of the Greek liturgy, which was written a thousand years before. As the tools of literature will tell you, that means it will use the older linguistic structures of the text it is based on.
So much for the walls of separation between linguistics and literature as disciplines. But OP has spoken of “English Linguistic” and courses. This implies not only that they are not a native speaker of English, but also that they are asking about the teaching of English linguistics and literature in universities outside of the Anglosphere.
When the Europhobic linguists of the University of Melbourne made it clear that they would never hire a linguist working on Greek (enjoy your funding cuts, guys), I moved upstairs to work as IT support and research assistant in the School of [European] Languages. A BA in French would be a course in French Language and Literature. As far as I know, Australian linguistics don’t speak of French Linguistics and Literature; and in general, linguists in language departments are (a) lonely, (b) mostly sociolinguists. But I know that that wording is used in Greece, e.g. English Linguistics and Literature.
So you can offer language and literature, or even linguistics and literature, in the same course.
What does that mean?
Well, (a) the linguists are still lonely. They don’t have much overlap or common interest with the literature scholars. In fact, I was research assistant to the one non-sociolinguistics linguist upstairs, and friendly with his colleagues; and there was a lot of mutual incomprehension.
(b) The course will consist of language modules, literature modules, culture modules, and linguistics modules, in different proportions depending on the country and current fashions. (The literature lecturers 50 years ago got into French because they want to know about Molière. Most of their students, lecturing now, were more interested in postcolonial literature. And their students may just be interested in aerospace engineering.)
Those different modules will be offered by different specialists, and will not be informed by each other. So intellectually, they will be different. But it makes no sense for the students or the university to split them into separate courses: as a student of French, you should know both the language and the culture — and if you’re more intellectually driven, that means you should know both the linguistics and the literature.
Which Greek author wrote the Labours of Hercules in Greek mythology?
You know, I don’t know. Luckily, Wikipedia does: Labours of Hercules.
Some ancients tells us that Peisander of Camirus wrote the official account of the labours as an epic. Some other ancients (via Clement of Alexandria) tells us that Peisander got his material from some other guy called Pisinus of Lindus.
Neither of these particularly matter to you, because neither guy’s work has been preserved. The writeup we do have of the labours is the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, a first/second century AD compendium, which is our go-to source for a lot of the fine print of Greek mythology.
Where did the names of the gods come from in Greek mythology?
Many are Greek, though they’re old and obscure enough to be headscratchers. If they aren’t Greek, they certainly aren’t going to be Hebrew or Persian (Greeks were in Greece a long time before they were anywhere near either); the origins of non-Greek names are more readily sought in old Anatolian and Middle Eastern civilisations, like Ugaritic or Lycian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze…
Zeus is the Greek continuation of *Di̯ēus, the name of the Proto-Indo-European god of the daytime sky, also called *Dyeus ph2tēr (“Sky Father”). The god is known under this name in the Rigveda (Vedic Sanskrit Dyaus/Dyaus Pita), Latin (compare Jupiter, from Iuppiter, deriving from the Proto-Indo-European vocative *dyeu-ph2tēr), deriving from the root *dyeu- (“to shine”, and in its many derivatives, “sky, heaven, god”). Zeus is the only deity in the Olympic pantheon whose name has such a transparent Indo-European etymology.
That wikipedia artcle quotes from Burkert’s Greek Religion, so let’s see what etymologies he mentions as likeliest:
Greek:
- Hera: hōra “timely”? “ready to get married”?
- Poseidon: Lord of… the Earth? of the Waterways? Source of Waters?
- Athena: Athens may have come first, -ene is a location suffix.
- Apollo: God of the Apellai initiation ritual
- Artemis: probably from Asia Minor; proposals include “healthy”, “butcher”, and “Bear Goddess”
- Ares: Chaos of War.
- Hermes: from herma, a cairn of stones (with phallic cultic connotations)
- Demeter: not in love with the traditional etymology “Earth Mother”, but somehow it connects to cereals.
Not-Greek:
- Aphrodite: Proceeding from the foam? Adaptation of Phoenecian Ashtoreth? Phoenecian “dove” or “fertile”?
- Dionysius: Zeus’ Something, but Zeus’ Son is guesswork, and the second bit may be non-Hellenic. The other names are certainly non-Hellenic: Bacchus is Lydian, Thyrsus Ugaritic.
- Hephaestus: Not Greek, and there has been speculation of Etruscan (via Lemnos) and Lycian origins.
What is the difference between Creole and Patois?
Originally Answered:
Is creole and patois the same thing? Why or why not?
In a prescientific sense, of course. Patois is what French people called the corrupted gibberish that white people spoke in France, and Creole is what French people called the corrupted gibberish that brown people spoke in the colonies.
Thank god for science, right?
A creole in linguistics is the development of a pidgin language, as it becomes learned by children, and starts acquiring more of the irregularities and patterns of normal languages. Creoles often resulted when French colonials spoke broken French to dispossessed colonised peoples, and those peoples turned that broken French into their own language. Haitian Creole for example. So a creole is a particular stage in the development of new languages.
You’ll occasionally hear the suspicion that English was at one stage a creole, though the breakdown of inflection when the Vikings came to town is not quite the same scenario.
Dialects are regional variants of languages. You might occasionally hear linguists use patois as a more regionally restricted subclass of dialect. But patois has a snooty derogatory connotation to it, and dialectologists tend not to think of their objects of study in that way; so you won’t see them use it.
Do the Ancient Cretans have their own Cretan mythology?
Like Niko Vasileas said, we don’t have deciphered writings from the Minoans, so we don’t know for certain much of anything. But:
- We know the Greeks were Indo-European, and the Minoans likely were not.
- We know much of Greek mythology has Indo-European content in it.
- We know some things about Minoan religion from their sculptures and frescoes: Minoan religion. And they don’t look Greek.
- We suspect there was at least some Mother Goddess stuff going on in Minoan religion. Or at least a lot of stuff involving boobs and snakes.
- We know there were some faint echoes of something in later Greek mythology, including the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, but also the infancy of Zeus in Crete.
But no, the pre-Greek Cretans would have had their own mythology. The Dorian Cretans would have had Greek mythology, though maybe with some admixture. The people speaking Eteocretan language a thousand years after Minoa may have had Greek mythology, or they may have had syncretism: there is a bilingual Eteocretan–Greek inscription (Dreros 1) in a Delphinium, a temple of Leto, Apollo and Artemis.
Could the names for the rivers Potomac, Thames, have any etymological connection with Greek potamos (=river)?
As for Greek potamos, I’ve checked in Dictionnaire-Etymologique-Grec : Chantraine (It’s online?! Download while you can!!!)
Its likeliest source is as a noun derived from e-pet-on “to fall” (so, waterfall, torrent); but the meaning means that rivers always fall, which doesn’t sound right. The alternative derivation given, proposed by Wackernagel, is a relation to German Faden “embrace” (which would indeed go back to Proto-Indo-European pot-). More detail in Frisk’s etymological dictionary.
No, I don’t know how “embrace” is more plausible than “waterfall”.
EDIT: Frisk’s dictionary is at the same place. (For now.)
Oh! Faden “embrace” is related to the Greek verb pet-annumi, and its noun petasma, “spread, broadening”. So “something that gets wider”. Ok. And the Old English parallel is flōdes fœðm, “spread of the flood”?
Derivations Frisk rejects: potamos < *topamos, cf. Lithuanian tekù “to run”; and some guy who inevitably said “I dunno, therefore Pelasgian”.