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Is eudaimonia the only word for happiness in ancient Greek?
OP’s excerpt:
“Verbally there is a very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and faring well with being happy; but with regard to what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise. For the former think it is some plain and obvious thing like pleasure, wealth or honour…”
The original, 1095a:
ὀνόματι μὲν οὖν σχεδὸν ὑπὸ τῶν πλείστων ὁμολογεῖται: τὴν γὰρ εὐδαιμονίαν καὶ οἱ πολλοὶ καὶ οἱ χαρίεντες λέγουσιν, τὸ δ᾽ εὖ ζῆν καὶ τὸ εὖ πράττειν ταὐτὸν ὑπολαμβάνουσι τῷ εὐδαιμονεῖν: περὶ δὲ τῆς εὐδαιμονίας, τί ἐστιν, ἀμφισβητοῦσι καὶ οὐχ ὁμοίως οἱ πολλοὶ τοῖς σοφοῖς ἀποδιδόασιν. οἳ μὲν γὰρ τῶν ἐναργῶν τι καὶ φανερῶν, οἷον ἡδονὴν ἢ πλοῦτον ἢ τιμήν
All three instances of happy in the passage are translated as eudaimonia; the “being happy” word is just the equivalent verb, eudaimonein.
There are a lot of words for happiness, with different etymologies and connotations. The LSJ gloss of eudaimōn (literally, good-daemon) is “blessed with a good genius”. So: your guardian angel is good to you. (The “genius” is the old-fashioned equivalent of the guardian angel.)
Then again, happy in English originally means “lucky” (as in hap-penstance), which is what eutykhēs means. The etymology pushes the word down a certain track; but it it isn’t the full story of what the word means.
To my modern ears, eudaimonia means you’re in a good place, things have worked out well for you. (Etymologically, the daemon has seen to that, though you don’t need a guardian angel to end up in a good place.) And as Aristotle says, that’s not just because you happen to be a stud, loaded, or a celebrity.
EDIT: Lau Guerreiro, you have checked out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eu… as well, right?
What is the importance of Megasthenes in the Greek short book “Indika”?
This is a very poorly phrased question, Anon; hard to tell what you’re after.
Megasthenes (/mᵻˈɡæsθᵻniːz/ mi-gas-thi-neez; Ancient Greek: Μεγασθένης, c. 350 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek ethnographer and explorer in the Hellenistic period, author of the work Indika. He was born in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and became an ambassador of Seleucus I Nicator of the Seleucid dynasty possibly to Chandragupta Maurya in Pataliputra, India. However the exact date of his embassy is uncertain. Scholars place it before 298 BCE, the date of Chandragupta’s death.
Megasthenes’ Indica survives only in quotations from later authors, such as Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, and Arrian in his own Indica. The Wikipedia article links to
- Ancient India As Described By Megasthenes And Arrian by Mccrindle, J. W : an 1877 publication of the fragments;
- http://www.sdstate.edu/projectso… : PDF of the same
- http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Ind… : excerpt of Arrian’s Indica, citing Megasthenes.
Megasthenes and Ctesias are the first two Western sources on India, and Ctesias’ was Persian hearsay, so Megasthenes’ is the first account at first hand. It still had a lot of fairy tales such as “people with backwards feet, ears large enough to sleep in, no mouths, or other strange features”.
You’ll need someone with more expertise in history than my glance at a Wikipedia page, Anon, to work out how important Megasthenes’ account is historically. If that indeed is what you are after…
Why do Latin second declension neuter nouns look like singular feminine nouns in plural nominative and accusative?
I went to Sihler: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin
Indo-European fem sg: –e[math]H_2[/math]. Indo-European neuter o-stem plural: –e-[math]H_2[/math]. They are the same; as Sihler notes (p. 263) “identical in form with the nom.sg of -e[math]H_2[/math] stems (=first declension) and probably the point of departure for the creation of that stem.”—
(p. 266) “a connection particularly suggestive because of the otherwise puzzling lack of an overt case marker *-s on the nom.sg of the -e[math]H_2[/math]-stems.” (i.e. why is the feminine –ā and not –ās?)
“A historical connection between o-stem neuter plurals and the feminine –e[math]H_2[/math]-stems was made easier when it was discovered that in Hittite, as in Greek, the “plural” of the neuter was in a very real sense singular, as it construes with 3sg verbs. Before that discovery, there was room for debate over whether Greek syntax of the πάντα ῥεῖ ‘all things flow’ type was an innovation. But now it is clear that it can only be an ancient trait. The reinterpretation of a neuter plural as some kind of derivative (collective) singular is thinkable if *kʷekʷle[math]H_2[/math] (to *kʷekʷlom ‘wheel’) was not so much ‘wheels’ as something like ‘wheelage’, or perhaps indifferently one or the other. But the evolution of a whole new stem type and concord class (‘feminine’) from a single form is not easy to trace in detail.”
What linguistic studies have been done on the words spoken when “speaking in tongues”?
Christine Kenneally (born in Melbourne, Australia) is an Australian-American journalist who writes on science, language and culture. Trained as a linguist, she has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Slate, New Scientist, and Australia’s Monthly, among other publications.
Christine Kenneally is someone I resent the hell out of, because she went to the same linguistics department as me (she was a couple of years ahead of me), and she’s famous and I’m not. 🙂
Before she switched from linguistics, she did an honours thesis on glossolalia, under Mark Durie. Mark Durie has also since switched from linguistics; he’s now a pastor (Charismatic Anglican), and is prominent in anti-Islam polemics.
Christine’s conclusion was that the linguistics structures of glossolalia match Anglo stereotypes of foreign languages: CV structure, simple phonetics, simple vowels. Nothing linguistically exotic. It’s like asking someone to “speak African” if they know nothing about African (including click languages).
Anecdote had it that the supervisor–supervisee relationship was an uncomfortable one.
What language did the ancient Minoans of Crete speak? Was ancient Greek, or something very different?
Other respondents have answered about Linear A, of which we know only that is probably inspired Linear B, and it was very unlikely to have been Greek.
We also have a few inscriptions, from Classical times, in Eteocretan language, a non-Greek language written in Greek characters. It’s reasonable to assume it’s the same language was what the Minoans spoke, though it’s not definite.
We only know two words from what little parallel Greek–Eteocretan text we have, and we know that it doesn’t look like any language we know from the region, including Semitic or Indo-European. We also know that it had syllabic consonants: lmo is a word in Eteocretan.
(From Praisos 2)
What is the Greek name of violet?
The flower violet is ἴον /íon/ in Ancient Greek.
In Modern Greek, μενεξές /menekses/ < Turkish menekşe < Persian بنفشه /banafše/ and βιολέτα < Italian violetta are more common.
EDIT: the colour: in Ancient Greek ἰάνθινος “violet-flowered” or ἰόεις. Just as well, because ἰώδης is “rust-coloured = verdigris, green” (from the similar noun ἰός).
Modern Greek? You’ll occasionally find the derived terms μενεξί, βιολετί. But good old French μώβ (mauve) is the default for all variants of purple; and before it, I’m pretty sure it was λουλακί “indigo”.
Should Persian (Farsi) officially switch to the Latin script?
Choice of script is always about ideology. Always. It’s not about linguistic rationality. In fact, when the missionaries or linguists come to town and start devising orthographies for previously unwritten languages, one of the language communities’ frequent concerns is that their orthography should look different from the tribe down the road.
Latin swept the Middle East as a vehicle of Westernisation in Kemal Atatürk’s time. That was Kemal’s ideology: it was hardly ideologically neutral, any more than Arabic script was. Yes, Ottoman Turkish orthography was pretty damn clumsy; but that wasn’t the main reason for the switch.
And yes, there has been a merry-go-round of script reform in the former Soviet Union, from Arabic to Cyrillic to Latin. But that’s not primarily about rationality either. It’s about (a) the old link to Islamic culture being broken by Communism, and (b) the new links being drawn to Pan-Turkism. Nothing neutral there either. Moreover, given the disruption introduced through Communism, scripts there now have the Lindy effect (thanks to Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer for introducing me to the notion): the scripts are now not long enough entrenched to resist replacement.
But Persian? Why does Persian use Arabic? Because Islam. And because no Kemalism or Pan-Turkism. And because Westernisation is not as compelling to them as it was to Kemal in 1920.
I have a soft spot for Greeklish, the adhoc online Latinisation(s) of Greek (Nick Nicholas’ answer to How are Greek characters written with Latin script?). But we’re not talking YouTube comments here. We’re talking the entire literary culture of Modern Persian, all the way back to Fedrowsi. Kemal made the decision that Turkey could break with its Ottoman literary past. I’m not seeing even the most ardent Zoroastrian emigré say they’d want that.
Should Greek write Tαβου instead of Tαμπου (for taboo) and Bιδεο instead of Bιντεο (video), as done in Cyprus?
A: no. 🙂 Transliteration reform has already happened in Greek, and it’s concentrated around simplifying vowels. No more omega for long o’s or eta for long i’s or <ai> for long e’s, as in Φλωμπέρ <Flōmper> = Flaubert, Σαίξπηρ <Saixpēr> = Shakespeare.
But at least those reforms have made phonological sense. This wouldn’t.
And B: I question the premiss. Cypriot stops work differently to Standard Greek stops: Standard Greek has a contrast of /(n)d/ ~ /t/ (ντ ~ τ), whereas Cypriot has a contrast of /nd/ ~ /t/ ~ /tʰ/ (ντ ~ τ ~ ττ). As a result, video and taboo are transliterated in Cyprus as βίτεο, ταπού <viteo, tapou>: <t> is considered there closer to /d/ than <nd> is.
Cypriot does not use βίδεο, ταπού: in Cyprus as in Greece, they would represent /viðeo, tavu/.
But that’s not because Cypriot is more rational than Standard Greek, with its <vinteo, tampou>: it’s because Cypriot is phonologically different, and is far enough from Greece to have its own transliteration norms, even if Standard Greek is the official language there. It’s also why Schubert in Cyprus is spelled Σιούπερτ <sjoupert> and not Σούμπερτ <soumpert>: <sj> = /ʃ/ in Cypriot.
How are Greek characters written with Latin script?
To add to Aaron Walton’s answer: chat and YouTube comments use ad hoc romanisations of Greek, which are called Greeklish. Greeklish is kind of unstable, and there are two different families of transliteration, phonetic and orthographic.
Bizarrely, I can’t find a mapping anywhere. FWIW, this is my Greeklish alphabet:
abgdezhqiklmnjoprstufxyw.
EDIT: Many thanks to Uri Granta for linking to http://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/doc… . It is a very good overview of the sundry ideological issues around Greeklish, including the huge ideological split between phonetic and orthographic transliterations.
Is the word Synagogue Greek and the word Havra Spanish?
Thanks to all respondents.
As Dimitris said, χάβρα is the colloquial Greek word for synagogue, typically derogatory (unsurprisingly 🙁 ). It is used in two expressions I know of:
(Antisemitism alert, with apologies to respondents)
1. As Dimitris also said, χάβρα Ιουδαίων, “a synagogue of the Judaeans”, meaning “confusion, free for all”. Pretty rich, you’d think, for Greeks to accuse Jews of something they freely practice. The word for Jews is not colloquial but learned, which makes me think the expression is pseudo-ecclesiastical, meant to sound like something said in church.
2. When Greeks say fuck (γαμώ) as an expression of anger towards someone, they pick a blasphemous target, to give it that extra taboo-breaking frisson. The targets are almost always internal to religion, and are always associated with the interlocutor. Thus, γαμώ το Χριστό σου “your Christ”. (Your Christ, not mine.) Similarly, την Παναγία σου “your Virgin Mary”.
Because Greece has been pretty much a monoculture religiously for a while, you don’t hear other religions targeted much. But from literature (Kazantzakis), I know the counterpart addressed to Muslims: γαμώ τα γένια του προφήτη σου “your prophet’s beard”.
When my dad was angry (which was rare), he’d say γαμώ τη χάβρα σου: “fuck your synagogue”.
No, my father is not, to the best of my knowledge, antisemitic. (Any more than the people who say “fuck your Christ” are atheists.) I’d be surprised if he even knows what a havra is. It’s just this thing he’d have heard people say.
The Triantafyllidis dictionary lazily derives Greek havra from Turkish havra: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής. The Babiniotis dictionary goes further: < Turkish havra < Hebrew hebra.
Chi in Greek is of course /x/, so chavurah /xavurah/ and χάβρα /xavra/ are pretty damn similar; and it’s hard to tell whether the word went straight into Greek from Hebrew, or via Turkish.
[EDIT: Duh. Vowel Harmony. Turkish first.]
I’d never checked the etymology of χάβρα, and am glad that in between shunning Jews and ridiculing them, my people at least noticed their own word for a gathering.