Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 327 other subscribersJuly 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
What religion are Greek people?
Which leads to the uncomfortable question, who counts as Greek people.
Well, if we leave out migrants from the past couple of generations, and talk about religions of long standing in Greece (using counts from the Wikipedia article linked, which also skip immigrants).
- The overwhelming majority is Greek Orthodox. 88% of 11 million as of 2011.
- The presence of Islam in Greece was substantial, and a large proportion of Greek Muslims were ethnic Greeks (particularly Crete). After the 1923 population exchanges, the only substantial Muslim population has been in Thrace, and is ethnically Turkish, Bulgarian (Pomak), or Roma. 100k.
- Jews have lived in Greece since Hellenistic times, and their numbers were substantially bolstered by the Sephardic exodus. Wiped out in the Holocaust, and those left did Aliyah. 7500.
- A Western Rite Catholic presence on the Greek islands (hence the Rebetika anthem Fragosyriani “Frankish [Catholic] girl from Syros”, written by Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Frankish boy from Syros). 50k.
- A minuscule Uniate (Byzantine Rite) Catholic presence: Greek Byzantine Catholic Church. 5k.
- An Armenian Orthodox presence bolstered by Armenians fleeing from the genocide. 20k.
- Some evangelism from Protestants since the 19th century. 30k.
- Some Hellenic Neo-Pagans. The peak body Supreme Council of Ethnic Hellenes has 2k members.
- Jehovah’s Witnesses: 28k.
Why does Grecani language not exist in Sicily (Magna Grecia)?
We know from Salvatore Cusa’s collection of church deeds from Sicily that Greek remained in use in official contexts until at least the 1300s—with the “correctness” of the Greek gradually degrading.
We know that the use of Greek in Calabria and Salento steadily declined, with much wider areas using Greek in the 16th century.
If the use of Greek was in gradual retreat over the past millennium throughout Southern Italy and Sicily, following the Norman conquest, then… well, then it happens to have retreated quicker in Sicily than in Southern Italy. The Calabrian enclave is certainly relatively inaccessible (that’s why it’s in the ‘Ndrangheta’s heartland).
What is the relationship between syntagmatic and paradigmatic?
They are the two relationships between linguistic elements that define how language works, according to structuralism. They are complementary.
The syntagmatic relationship is how linguistic elements can be sequenced. It’s syntax. And morphology. And phonotactics.
The paradigmatic relationship is which linguistic elements behave in the same way in syntagmatic relationships. It’s lexicon. And phonetics. And the… other bit of morphology.
The syntagmatic relationship gives you the structure of language; the paradigmatic relationship defines the function of individual bits of language.
Are there any true Spartans in Greece today?
There are two subgroups of Greeks in the general neighbourhood of Sparta, which were isolated from the Greek mainstream for a while, and who speak more archaic variants of Greek. You’ll hear people call them the descendants of Spartans. I don’t think it’s a meaningful thing to say; there’s been a lot of DNA traffic in the Peloponnese, and being a True Spartan is about the cultural norms that Bob Hannent alludes to—and which have not survived. Thank the Dioscurides.
One subgroup are the Tsakonians. Some derive their name from Laconians; some not. There is Doric in their language, but not as much as pop linguistics claims (Hubert Pernot was the most comprehensive student of Tsakonian, and a Doric skeptic). And Doric is not the most fascinating thing about the language anyway. And in terms of “national character”, they don’t seem to have been that different from their Greek-speaking neighbours.
The other subgroup are the Maniots. Their dialect is much closer to Standard Greek, but it still has distinctive archaisms. They have a reputation for ferocity, and were consumed by blood feuds; it took decades for the new Greek state to establish law and order in the area. Are they true Spartans? Well, they probably think so.
But yeah, having to provide an armed escort to people in case a sniper will get them during a blood feud (the xevgartis) may have been normal in Mani; but that does not make you King Leonidas.
In this map from Wikipedia, Tyros in the east is in Tsakonia, Oitylos and Gytheion in the south are in Mani, and Sparte is Sparta.
What is one random thing you like about Albania?
The way familiar words (Greek or Turkish) look in Albanian.
xham. suxhuk. trëndafill. And the word you just gave me: sufllaqe.
Does an equivalent of cursive exist in other alphabets?
Greek: there was a cursive modelled after Western cursive in the 19th/20th century. It fell out of use long before computers (I was never taught it in school); I have seen it in letters from the 50s.
The main differences to what you might expect: kappa looking like a <u>; pi as an omega with a loop (ϖ); tau as a tall slash; psi looking like a <y>.
This sample of the Lord’s Prayer, from Karl Faulmann Illustrirte Geschichte der Schrift, Wien 1880, is a little neater than I’m used to seeing, but it’s a fair representation:
That’s distinct from mediaeval manuscript writing in Greek, or the Italic of printing in the 16th through 18th centuries (which I keep referring to as “squiggle”).
Why do some Australians have accents similar to the English while others sound more like Crocodile Dundee?
I’m sure I’ve already answered this more fully elsewhere on Quora, but:
The distinction in Australian accents has historically been much more about class than region; the three distinctions identified 50 years ago were Cultivated Australian, General Australian, and Broad Australian.
Cultivated Australian was pretty much the same as British Received Pronunciation, except that its plural -es was formed as -əz instead of -ɪz.
Broad Australian is “Crocodile Dundee”. Or Steve Irwin.
General Australian is in the middle.
Cultivated Australian is much, much less prominent now than 50 years ago, when every doctor and lawyer on TV sounded like they’d just flown in from London. It’s fair to say it has been stigmatised.
What is the variation in the Greek pronunciation of ντ, μπ, γκ?
In brief:
The prenasalised pronunciation is older, as the spelling shows.
There are dialects that prenasalise and ones that lose the preceding nasal. E.g. Cyprus for the former, Crete for the latter.
Within Standard Modern Greek, prenasalisation has been associated with Puristic Greek, and un-prenasalised stops are becoming more common in casual speech; there are also associations with register, age, and class. This has been going on for fifty years. The cutoff Arvaniti & Joseph found in the linked paper was being born in 1955.
What does ‘Ζωή μου, σᾶς ἀγαπῶ.’ mean?
I’ve actually been puzzled by this myself.
I mean, I know the answer, obviously. It’s a politeness plural, patterned after French Vous (and Early Modern English you). And it’s been mainstream in Greek since the 19th century, although Greeks in practice avoid out when they can—because to them it’s much more about distance than respect.
What’s puzzling to me is, it’s kind of early for Byron to be using that form, before any mass influence on Greek of Western European languages, via media or mass education. Certainly no peasant in 1820 talked like that. Maybe the intelligentsia were starting to ape the French that way, and that’s who Byron was talking to.
How did USA end up with quite a few distinct dialects and Australia end up with more or less one, given their similar colonial pasts?
Speaking Our Language by Bruce Moore, Oxford University Press 2008, explained the homogeneity of Australian English as follows—as I summarised it in History of Australian English on my Hellenisteukontos blog:
Moore puts forward the formation of an Australian English as a dialect koine in Sydney, within two generations of settlement, and then diffusing out of there rapidly. (There were no administrative barriers between provinces like in the States, hence the astonishing regional homogeneity of Australian English.) This is common sense, and reflects other koineisations (and creolisations). New Zealand has done a better job than Australians of tracking their linguistic history, and the accent data from the first generation of native born New Zealanders, available through recordings done in the 1940s, was critical to proving that contention. Their accents were not yet fully levelled, and even children growing up in the same small town had slightly different accents. It was only the second generation of native born colonists who had a local norm to peer pressure themselves into, and knock out any deviation.
In line with that, it was only after the second generation that dialect loans from Northern English and Scots into Australian English were possible. In the first generation, such words were still sensed as outliers from the emerging Southern-England based koine, and ruled out.