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Are you Greek? And if yes then where in Greece are you from?
A far from straightforward question for those of us in the Greek diaspora.
My dad does not speak a word of Pontic Greek. But this Pontic revival song, sung by Stelios Kazantzidis towards the end of his life, shook him:
stixoi.info: Πατρίδα μ΄ αραεύω σε
Five houses have I built; unhoused from all.
A refugee from my cradle; God, I’ll go mad.
My motherland, I seek you, like a man accursed.
In exile, I am Greek. In Greece, an exile.
I left houses built between forests and riverbanks.
Wells built of marble, water flowing like tears.
And here now I thirst, and have no water to drink.
I am ashamed to ask for any, to moisten my lip.
And can I say, it’s nice to see Wikipedia Pontic orthography on Youtube. ja > æ in Pontic; the scholarly transliteration is α̈, and the lay translation was ια, assuming you knew this was Pontic and not Standard Greek already. Pontic Wikipedia has decided to use εα instead. Πέντε οσπίτεα έχτισα, Κι ας ολεα ξεσπιτούμαι. But do use ’κ’ for ‘not’. ’κ’ /kʰ/ ‘not’ ~ κʼ /k/ ‘and’ is a pernicious minimal pair.
It’s also nice to see not just Russian Pontians (who arrived from Russia in the 90s) on YouTube echoing the sentiment, but also the Albanians who’d arrived in Greece at the same time. Sometimes, there is value in YouTube comments after all.
And yes, it’s even more complicated for the second generation of that diaspora. (By the fourth generation, of course, it’s ancient history, a splash of colour up the family tree.)
I am in some regards Greek. In some regards, I am nothing of the sort.
And parochialism lives and thrives in Greece, as it does in Italy (Campanilismo). “Where are you from” is still the first question you get asked. I identify as Cretan, though my father is Cypriot. Town of Sitia.
Vitsentzos Kornaros closed off his romance Erotokritos, the pinnacle of Cretan Renaissance literature, with the verses:
I would not hide, and be unrecognised.
I will reveal myself, so all may know.
The poet’s Vincent, and by clan Cornaro;
may he be found unblemished, when Death takes him.
In S’tia was he born, in S’tia bred.
There did he write and labour what you’ve read.
As nature bids, in Candia was he married.
His end will be wherever God decides.
I was only bred in S’tia for four years, age of 8 to 12. Those are pretty critical years though.
Why use the term straight instead of heterosexual?
Let me answer a different question.
As I wrote on A cis lament for the Greek language and How to say transgender in Greek, the Greek language has a Greek term for transgender, diemphylikos. Trans Greeks were involved in coining it.
The Greek peak body of LGB (with only token T) uses diemphylikos.
Greek trans groups, including the very people who came up with diemphylikos, refuse to use it, and use transdzender and trans instead.
Why? Because they did not want a self-designation that sounded like a medical diagnosis.
And while my cis Greek linguistician heart bleeds to hear it, I understand that.
That’s also why gays don’t call themselves homosexuals.
And as frustrated as they have had reason to be with heterosexuals, that’s also why they don’t call heterosexuals heterosexuals, or for that matter why heterosexuals don’t call themselves heterosexuals. It’s not a colloquial term. It is a scholarly term.
Oh, and as enough answers have already said: words change meaning, and more importantly, words change connotations. People really don’t think of straight as either defensively positive, or derogatorily negative. It’s just the colloquial term for heterosexual now; the social circumstances around it have changed, and so has the understanding of it. If the connotations of conventionality and rectitude were paramount, the expression straight but not narrow would be unintelligible.
The Ancient Greek Language: Is it similar to Modern Greek? The first link states that modern Greek descended from ancient Greek, however the second link says otherwise. What is really the truth? (links are down in the “answers” area)
I’m to take seriously a doctor’s tongue-in-cheek commentary in a medical journal, as evidence that Modern Greek is not descended from Ancient Greek? Quoting a phrase book as his authority?
Over an answer with contributions from several good minds that know both languages, including some (like me) with academic training in linguistics?
Really?
A guy that says
Latin is experiencing something of a revival as a subject for serious study, and it lives on in the everyday language of much of southern Europe.
?!?!
Latinene loquuntur in Siciliâ? Praeclarum! Eamus pizzam edendum!
I registered to the Lancet. Resuscitating dead languages says all of the following:
And Greek? My phrase book asserts that “Modern Greek is not nearly as difficult as it looks”. Possibly, but ancient Greek looks more dead than old Latin. To the burden of alien letters and baffling accents has to be added changes in pronunciation. Physicians-in-the-making may pick up all sorts of things on vacation by the Mediterranean but not, I fear, medical etymology. The science writer Lancelot Hogben tried to present the derivation of common scientific terms in a systematic way, but his book is out of print. Before a classically educated generation of physicians dies away entirely perhaps one of them could do something thorough for medicine, as an educational tool.
He is not saying Modern Greek is not similar to Ancient, let alone that it is not descended from Ancient Greek. (Good Christ.) He’s saying that it’s changed a fair bit, and it has. But he’s not saying it in a way that deserves to be taken seriously.
Burden of alien letters and baffling accents? Vacation by the Mediterranean?! This is not an argument. This is not particularly funny either, and as an Australian, I thought I got British humour.
At least he namechecks Hogben. I loved that guy’s conlang.
It is true that David Sharp, vacationing in Malia sans doute and sneering at the locals’ alien letters and baffling accents, would not hear all the Greek vocabulary of medicine from the local peasantry waiting upon him. (He wouldn’t hear none of it, either.) And yes, Ancient Greek is dead; just as Shakespearean Fricking English is.
But if you want an answer on whether Ancient and Modern Greek are similar, take the counsel of your learnèd fellow Quorans in How different is the Ancient Greek language from the modern Greek language? Can any Greek-speaking people testify if they understand classical Greek of Homer, et al? (and its two dozen merged questions), over a medico who thinks the following counts as wit:
When last I saw the Aegean it looked more like the froth on lager, but around the time of the Trojan wars it was a “wine dark sea”. Poor translation, colour blindness-or did wine in Homer’s day really look like that? The Nauticos project has identified amphorae in this ruined ship—indeed the Mediterranean sea-bed is littered with these huge pots. Those accident-prone ancient merchant seamen did not hug the coastline, as long suspected, but intrepidly carried wine (and olive oil too) across far deeper waters, spilling some en route.
And don’t get me started on Illiterature and medicine, the squib that somehow prompted David Sharp’s squib:
My advice is to drop a sicknote on literature-and-medicine lecture days in college, and with journals hasten to the educational delights of obituary pages. I’m sure there is nothing wrong with literature, and that even the most delicate child can be trusted with it; and I’ll defend to my last gasp anyone’s right to read it (although, maybe, not to write it). But literature’s relevance to coping with people in the Monday morning surgery queue is nil—unless they happen to be very old Russians.
Screw you too, buddy.
That squib by John Bignall does not even mention classical languages: how on earth did David Sharp used it as a springboard for his excursus?
This curricular fad relates largely to living languages but perhaps dead ones have more to offer directly since so many medical terms come from Latin or ancient Greek, with the occasional mongrel admitting to both types of parent.
… That’s a segue?
I am brand new to the ways of the Lancet. Do they do this kind of thing a lot in their squibs?
Coz if they actually paid attention during those literature-and-medicine lecture days in college, their squibs might be better literature. Certainly funnier. And with less WTF segues.
and I’ll defend to my last gasp anyone’s right to read it (although, maybe, not to write it)
Indeed.
The answer, by the way, is yes. Modern Greek is similar to Ancient Greek, in the way that Modern English is similar to Middle English.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
siþen þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at troye
þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondez and askez
þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt
watz tried for his tricherie þe trewest on erþe
hit watz ennias þe athel and his highe kynde
þat siþen depreced prouinces and patrounes bicome
welneȝe of al þe wele in þe west iles
Does “nigh” have the same etymology as “near”?
The five answers given quote the facts, but I’m afraid they don’t understand the facts.
Nigh comes from the original Old English word for “near”.
Near comes from the Old Norse for “nearer”. It came to England with the Vikings.
They are not the same etymology. They are related (cognate) words, just as shirt from Old English and skirt from Old Norse are related: but the last time they constituted the selfsame word (ignoring that one is a comparative) was in proto-Germanic. In 800, when the Vikings came to England, English nēah and Norse nær were two separate words from two separate languages.
My thanks to Syarif Fadhlurrahman for his clarification in comments.
Near comes from Old English with some influence from Old Norse. It’s not totally from Old Norse:
‘nigh’
ON: ná
OE: neah‘nearer’
ON: nær
OE: near‘nearest’
ON: ‘næst’
OE: ‘niehst’Granted, Oxford assigns only the Old Norse etymology, but I don’t see why. Perhaps due to non-adjectival use? (Old Norse ‘naer’ can function as adverb and preposition)
Updated 2017-08-16 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy. and
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
What would it be like to have a made up language as your first language?
If you’re being brought up to speak Esperanto or Klingon or Lojban or (in the case of Itamar Ben-Avi) Revived Hebrew [yes, I’m calling Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s work a made up language], the main issue you’d run into is not having anyone but your parents, and maybe occasionally your parents’ weirdo friends, to use the language with.
That is actually a very common dealbreaker for kids with Esperanto, and the parents end up acquiescing; there may be 10k denaskaj Esperantistoj (native speakers of Esperanto) that are still engaged with the language, but there are a lot more that aren’t. This got addressed in the surveys behind Peter Forster’s book The Esperanto Movement. I haven’t asked him personally, but I think it’s a big reason why Alec Speers gave up and D’Armond Speers acquiesced, with Klingon. Itamar, unfortunately, was not given the option, which is why he could only talk to his dog as a kid.
(I know someone bringing up his kid to speak Lojban, and my Facebook feed has intermittent reports of how it’s going; but I haven’t been following it. Lojban is certainly going to be a lot more alien than Klingon.)
A second issue, which I’ve heard for Esperanto and which D’Armond certainly reported for Klingon, was the lack of vocabulary that you can use with a kid around the house. It’s not necessarily that Esperanto lacks such vocabulary, but that Esperantists usually don’t learn that vocabulary, because that’s not the context in which they use the language. Just as people who learn foreign languages formally usually don’t end up learning the word for armpit. So you may grow up with circumlocutions or ad hoc words.
Chomskyans may mutter darkly that if you are brought up to speak a made up language, that will warp your language acquisition FOREVAH, and that bringing up a kid to speak Klingon is somehow child abuse. I even heard that from non-Chomskyans.
Poppycock. Kids survived being brought up in slave plantations creolising their parents’ pidgins without sustaining brain damage; the brain is a flexible thing, far more flexible than knob-twiddling universal parameters gives it credit for; and in any case, no kid is being brought up with no exposure ever to natural languages in parallel. (Not even Itamar. Poor kid.)
What influence has Bollywood had in Greek music?
Material drawn from forum thread ΙΝΔΙΚΑ ΚΑΙ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ. There is a book on the influx of Bollywood tunes into Greek music:
Ινδοπρεπών αποκάλυψη. Manuel Tasoulas & Eleni Ambatzi. 1998. Ινδοπρεπών αποκάλυψη [Revelation of the Indian-styled]. Athens; Περιβολάκι, Ατραπός.
Bollywood productions were very popular in Greece in the 1960s; my mother remembers watching them as a teenager. Greek music also has some resemblance with the kinds of music featured in Bollywood productions, via the family resemblance chain Greek–Turkish–Persian, Arabic–Indian.
As a result, the 1960s saw a substantial number of Bollywood songs repurposed as Greek hit songs. Not particularly obscure songs either: they include some of the most memorable songs of the 60s. Λίγο-λίγο θα με συνηθίσεις. Καρδιά μου καημένη. Αυτή η νύχτα μένει. Όσο αξίζεις εσύ. Είσαι η ζωή μου.
That trend appears to have dried up since the 60s. Popular Greek music does now occasionally borrow songs from the Arab world; e.g. Katy Garbi’s 1996 hit Περασμένα ξεχασμένα, which is a cover of Hisham Abbas’ Wana Wana Amil Eih.
(Ο κλέψας του κλέψαντος: Διαμάχη Ελλάδας-Αραβίας για τραγούδι της Καίτης Γαρμπή – People Greece has the producer of the song admitting that he got the song on a pirated tape in Jordan, and that he preferred to seek forgiveness rather than permission.)
But. The question is about Bollywood songs.
As one poster in the forum thread says,
Αυτό που κάνει εντύπωση είναι πόσο το ύφος άλλαξε όταν μεταφυτεύτηκαν αυτά τα ινδικά λουλούδια στο ελληνικό χώμα!
It’s impressive how much their style changed when these Indian flowers were transplanted to Greek soil.
Two CDs have circulated, Ο γυρισμός της Μαντουμπάλα “The return of Madhubala” and Το τραγούδι της Ναργκίς “The song of Nargis”, pairing 30 Indian originals and their Greek covers. Here’s the six Greek songs I recognise by title. I’m interested to read what readers make of the contrast.
DUNIA ME HAM AAYE HAIN: MOTHER INDIA, 1957. Naushad / Miina & Usha
Mangeshkar.
Καρδιά μου καημένη / Μπ. Μπακάλης, 1960 / Στρ. Διονυσίου – Γ. Κάλη
ΥΑ ALLAH, YA ALLAH DIL LE GAYA: UJAALA, 1959. Shankar – Jaikishan / Lata Mangeshkar – Manna Dey
Λίγο – λίγο θα με συνηθίσεις / Απ. Καλδάρας, 1963 / Μιχ. Μενιδιάτης
ULFAT KA SAAZ: AURAT, 1953. Sankar – Jaikishan / Lata Mangeshkar
Αυτή η νύχτα μένει / Στ. Καζαντζίδης / 1959 / Στ. Καζαντζίδης
DUNIAVALON SE DUUR: UJAALA, 1959. Sankar – Jaikishan / Lata Mangeshkar – Mukesh
Όσο αξίζεις εσύ / Απ. Καλδάρας / 1963 / Μαν. Αγγελόπουλος
GHAR AAYA MERA PARDESI: AWAARA, 1951. Sankar – Jaikishan / Lata Mangeshkar
Είσαι η ζωή μου / Στ. Καζαντζίδης / 1959 / Στ. Καζαντζίδης – Μαρινέλλα
AAJAO TARAPT HAI ARMAN: AWAARA, 1951. Sankar – Jaikishan / Lata Mangeshkar
Μαντουμπάλα, 1959 / Η επιστροφή της Μαντουμπάλα, 1964 / Ήρθα πάλι κοντά σου, 1959 / Στ. Καζαντζίδης / Στ. Καζαντζίδης – Μαρινέλλα
You’ll notice that half of these were sung by Stelios Kazantzidis. I used to snob off Kazantzidis when I was a kid, and I’m sure a lot of his contemporaries snobbed him off too, for picking Indo-Gypsy songs (ινδογύφτικα, as Tsitsanis maliciously called them).* It takes time for an outsider to get what he speaks to in the Greek soul. It takes maturity to recognise that those Indo-Gypsy songs resonate deeply with the Greek soul for good reason.
It’s just the icing on the cake that the Greek songs and the Indian originals repeatedly share the Arabic word دنيا (dunya), ‘world’, and its connotations of it being in opposition to Heaven.
* All the more maliciously, because Manolis Angelopoulos, who sang #4, was Roma. And of course of the two names the Roma were traditionally given in Greek, tsinganos and ɣiftos, ɣiftos is the more negative. In fact, rendering ινδογύφτικα as “Indo-nigger songs” would not be that inaccurate.
Is it mathematically possible to create a language where terms describing complex ideas can be made up starting from simpler ideas, with simple logical reasoning in real time, so that knowing vocabulary is not necessary?
I’m sceptical to what extent mathematics enters into any reasoning about human language (and Lojbanists actually highlight that language is not reducible to truth-conditional logic). But much of what you’re saying is the bet behind Natural semantic metalanguage, which tries to define every concept ever in a language that looks like English, but that has only an extremely small number of primitive words.
NSM was a thing of cruel, adamantine beauty back in the 70s and 80s, when it had just 14 primitives. It was also of course utterly unusable as a practical tool for eliciting meaning. It’s now up to 63.
A favourite party trick of Anna Wierzbicka’s undergrads, at least in my day, was to try to hold conversations in NSM. It can be done. It can’t be done efficiently enough to count as a real conversation; but it does meet a generous definition of “in real time”.
How do you say ‘the thing about the eagle’ in ancient Greek?
I have been edified by the margent:
I have found out that the Iliad means ‘The thing about the lion’ and I was just wondering how one would say, ‘The thing about the eagle’.
No. No it doesn’t, and you need to slap whoever told you that in the face. Iliad means ‘The thing about Ilium’, where Ilium was an alternate name of Troy. ‘The thing about the lion’ would be Leontiad, Λεοντιάς, -άδος, ἡ.
And ‘the thing about the eagle’ would accordingly be Aeëtiad or Aëtiad, Αἰετιάς/ Ἀετιάς, -άδος, ἡ.
Yes, I use Latinate transliterations. Deal. 🙂
Why do many people say that Koine Greek is close to Modern Greek and distant from Attic, while grammatically it seems to be very close to Attic and still some significant distance away from Modern Greek?
Well has Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer put it:
Is the glass half-full or half-empty?
Here’s some ways in which Koine is closer to Modern Greek:
- Phonetics: there’s lots of disagreement about precise dates, but in lower-class Koine, potentially as few as two sounds were left to change over between Koine and Modern Greek, ɛ > i (η) and y > i (υ, οι). Accent was already likely stress- and not pitch-based, and vowel length was lost.
- Morphology: No dual, moribund optative. No Attic declension.
- Syntax: At the very start of hína replacing infinitive
- Lexicon: Substantial move forwards in both meanings of words, and Latin loans. Some of it straightforwardly legible by Modern Greek speakers.
Here’s some ways in which Koine is closer to Classical Greek:
- Phonology: Gemination was still present.
- Morphology: Still has dative, perfect, future, infinitive, third declension, athematic conjugation
- Syntax: Still has clause-chaining strategies using participles
- Lexicon: Still basically legible for someone reading ancient Greek
Phonetically, it’s almost Modern Greek. Morphologically, it’s identifiably Ancient, though there has already been some simplification. Syntax and lexicon are in between.
Why do I not appear to have a regional accent?
Without knowing anything whatsoever of your circumstances, OP, I’ll guess you’ve picked up some supraregional dialect koine somehow.
Like, I dunno, RP, or whatever has replaced RP in England these days.
It’ll have a lot to do with your upbringing and your socialisation, as others have said. This kind of accent mixup is very commonplace in children of military personnel, who move around a country frequently; hence the term “army brat”. And of course prestige variants of a language are produced all over a language community, unified by ideology or class rather than regional identification—even if their origin is often regional.