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
Greeks, which do you identify most with: Ancient Greece or the Byzantine Empire?
(Nice question, Aphrodisia Xanthopoulos! You and Aziz Dida should get together and plot more questions; the Greece feed has been getting boring lately.)
OP’s question touches on the old dichotomy in Greek identity between Hellene and Romios (Roman); see for example Romios or Hellene? It’s a dichotomy that may be dying down now, as the Hellenic/West European/high identity is overtly winning out over the Romaic/East European/low identity, but it’s certainly not dead yet.
I take some contrarian delight at being at odds with other respondents; but then, my construction of Greekness is as idiosyncratic as—well, Ioannis Psycharis’.
So. When I go to Athens, I see a little bit of Byzantine stuff, because Athens was a small regional centre; but the preponderance of stuff you see that isn’t crappy concrete high-rises in Athens is Ancient marble. Partly because of historical whitewashing: a lot of post-Classical stuff got shoved out of the way, to allow the marble to gleam in isolation.
And the marble looks like some highly advanced spacemen dropped this stuff off and left. It doesn’t gel with the Modern Greek landscape; it’s something Alien.
In fact, that’s how Modern Greek folklore accounted for all this marble. Built by the pagan giants of yore, before they collapsed under their own weight. And the Franks are the giants’ kinfolk; that’s why they come from their countries and genuflect before those ruins.
When I go to Salonica, on the other hand, I see late Roman and Byzantine stuff all around. That’s historical whitewashing too: the Ottoman and Jewish past of the city were allowed to pass from sight. But the landscape is immediately more recognisable, even with 1700-year old brick:
This doesn’t look like something space aliens dropped off. This looks like something that I can recognise ancestors of mine as having played a part in.
So. In answer to your question, I pick B over A: Byzantium over Antiquity. The Ancients created something that everyone in the West inherited, and that the West made a point of emulating. But they feel remote, and they don’t feel like ours alone. The history of the past 1000 years, however, is a history we can recognise ourselves in.
Yes, yes, I’m sure most Greeks disagree. But that’s how I feel.
In which countries are Greeks not well liked?
Καλώς ήρθες, Αφροδισία!
Not many countries now. If you dig into other questions, such as the perennial favourite What do the Balkan nations think of each other? What are the stereotypes? or What do Albanians think of Greeks?, you’ll see there’s some animus in (FYRO) Macedonia and Albania, and a lot less than there used to be in Turkey and Bulgaria.
Historically, the Romanians would have hated us because of the Phanariotes. But that’s a long time ago now.
When Greeks were new immigrants in the diaspora, they were bottom of the rung, and subject to the usual fear and loathing, especially when they came as young men without families, and thence were associated with crime. That’s Australia in the 1920s, or the US before then. (The main immigration wave to Australia was 1950s-70s, but it was not as predominantly male.) Again, ancient history.
What does Hortalotarsus mean in Latin or Greek?
No explanation offered in the original paper On Hortalotarsus skirtopodus, a new saurischian fossil from Barkly East, Cape Colony, though the author does indicate it was all about the distinctive Tarsus (skeleton) (back of the foot).
Nothing in Massospondylus, the accepted family name for the dinosaur.
The Spanish Wikipedia on Hortalotarsus offers “tarsus of a young bird”. Ancient Greek had a word ortalis (no h) meaning “fowl”, and its diminutive ortalichos meant “chick, young bird”.
Which means that if “tarsus of a young bird” was what Seeley was going for, it should have been ortalichotarsus.
What are the earliest documented texts in Albanian?
This came out of an exchange I had with Kelvin Zifla, over at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why do I experience a profound feeling when I read and understand old writings of my mother language?
It involves correcting Wikipedia, though I’m not bothering to just yet.
There are three definite oldest attested texts in Albanian.
- The oldest book in Albanian is the Meshari, a missal published by Gjon Buzuku in 1555.
- The oldest sentence in Albanian is the Formula e pagëzimit, a baptismal formula, embedded in a Latin letter written by Pal Engjëlli in 1462.
- In between the two, the earliest Berlitz phrasebook in Albanian is by Arnold von Harff, who wrote down a couple of dozen words and phrases while in Durrës in 1496, on his way to Jersualem. Kelvin has provided a link to them: Arnold von Harff: Pilgrimage from Cologne
Arnold von Harff included in his vocabulary a few variants of “Lady, may I sleep with you”, which makes him one of the first pickup artists of the Balkans. Oddly enough (or, as Kelvin puts it, not so oddly), he did not try any lines out in Durrës.
Having looked at Die Pilgerfahrt des Ritters Arnold von Harff von Cöln durch Italien, Syrien, Aegypten, Arabien, Aethiopien, Nubien, Palästina, die Türkei, Frankreich und Spanien, which includes his Greek Berlitz phrasebook, I was moved to depict his travels in comic strip (in Greek). The results of which are available at A comic strip on Arnold von Harff by Nick Nicholas on Gallery of Awesomery. I daresay it’s worth learning Greek for!
That’s the three definite texts. Here are the three bogus texts.
1. Joachim Matzinger in 2011 was finishing up a project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, on early attestations of the Albanian verb, under the supervision of Stefan Schumacher. They were doing press, as one does when you wrap up a project. This is one example: Austrian Scholars Leave Albania Lost for Words.
And here’s another: Zbulohet libri në gjuhën shqipe, më i vjetër se “Meshari”. Which includes the breathless phrase:
Professors Stefan Schumacher and Joachim Matzinger from the Academy of the Austrian Studies have managed to discover a document which is thought to belong to the 14th century, in which Latin letters are used for the Albanian.
Oddly enough, no evidence of that on Matzinger’s CV.
So, this is what happens when journalists encounter medical science:
Best of PHD Comics :: The Science News Cycle | Best of PHD: Science and the Media | Tapastic Comics
Well, what do you think when linguistic research collides with the Albanian press?
The world is a smaller place than it used to be. I got in touch with Dr Matzinger. You guessed it: he never said any such thing:
First of all, no, we did not discover any Old Albanian document! For years there’s this rumor created by some Albanian journalist who totally misunderstood and misinterpreted what we said many years ago in an interview at the very beginning of our project. Unfortunately, this “news” pops up periodically, cuz the internet doesn’t forget! Anyway, it’s a hoax and be sure if I’ll ever discover some hitherto unknown Old Albanian document I’ll spill my beans at this instant……!
2. The curious case of the Bellifortis manuscript. A German treatise on military technology, written in 1402–05. The treatise has a fair bit of astrology in it.
As Wikipedia reports, Todericiu and Polena in 1967 identified some gibberish on the last page of the manuscript interspersed in a Latin poem, as Albanian. Robert Elsie, one of the main Albanologists in the West, wrote a paper on their claimed Albanian: http://www.elsie.de/pdf/articles…. His take is less negative than Wikipedia makes it seem—the manuscript is said to have belonged to Scanderbeg, and he thinks the gibberish is at least inspired by Albanian.
Myself, I’m not convinced. I will admit that the Latin poem is pretty out there and obscure, as you’d expect of magic. But the claimed Albanian is not just obscure, it’s loopy; and it reminds of nothing so much as the claimed attempts to interpret the Phaistos Disk as Basque.
I mean, you tell me. This is some of the Latin:
This is the beauty of the twelve shining signs.
The virgin boy should be initiated on a sunny day in the
first hour in the morning, holding the round thing in the left hand
of (his) disharmonious body, but in the right hand may he take up a torch,
pronouncing twelve times that which is paraphrased.
After an interval, look for what is being sought after,
ascribed earlier. Present is the subtle thing which is being tried.
He who understands, knows it. A simple expression is sufficient.
And may the twelve heights of heaven, and also the virtues which
are contained in them, bind the prescribed things.
And this, supposedly, is the Albanian which follows it, as rendered by Todericiu and Polena:
A star has fallen in a place in the woods, distinguish the star, distinguish it.
Distinguish the star from the others, they are ours, they are.
…
Do you see where the great voice has resounded? Stand beside it
That thunder. It did not fall. It did not fall for you, the one which would do it.
They’re both gibberish, but they’re not the same order of gibberish.
Elsie thinks they’re on to something with:
- yze OAlb. izë = star
- zabel Alb. zabel = grove, forest
- yan Alb. janë = are (3pp)
- yon Alb. jonë = ours
- ragam Alb. rragam = rock
- mathy Alb. i madh = big
- perbra Alb. përbri = nearby
- aus Alb. afsh = ardour
- wasram Alb. vashëri = group of girls
- echem Alb. ehem = I sharpen, prick (fuck?)
- biliat OAlb. biliat = the girls
Even though he agrees it’s gibberish. Dunno. I think if the words are small enough, and the interpretation strained enough, coincidence is guaranteed.
3. The winner, by a wide margin, is the claim by Musa Ahmeti that he discovered a manuscript in the Vatican Library dated 1210, by a Theodore of Shkodra. Per Wikipedia,
The work is a manuscript decorated with golden miniatures and colored initials, divided in three parts. Pages 1–97 deal with theology, 98–146 with philosophy, and pages 147–208 with a history of the known world from AD 153 to 1209. On the final page of the manuscript we find a note by the author “With the assistance and great love of the blessed Lord, I finished this in the year 1210 on the 9th day of March.”
Theodore of Shkodra is in fact mentioned in a book article by Robert Elsie: Albanian Literature.
The manuscript has not been seen since; all that Ahmeti has released is that colophon:
“Me ndihmën dhe dëshirën e fort të lumturit Zot, përfundova në vitin 1210, ditën e 9 të marsit”. [Mee nihemmen ??e dessirnnee e phorte e t’Lumm-numittee ªOT – e mbaronjj n’vittee MCCX – ditnee e ix – t’Marxxittee. : Theoodor Scodraanitee]
I’ll leave it to Albanologists to work out if that’s plausible Old Albanian. Dr Matzinger, at least, dismisses it as a “pure hoax”. And lay Albanians have given up waiting as well, to judge from the second article cited in Kritika-Diskutim.
I mean think about it. Noone has ever written Albanian before. Noone is promoting Albanian as a language of book-learning: there is no Alfred the Great or Dante Alighieri on record, saying we must write in Albanian, and no missionary program such as that which gave us Old Church Slavonic.
And out of nowhere, in the 13th century, we have a luxury manuscript in Albanian, with learned philosophy and theology, as well as an up to date world chronicle? Who would read it? Who would commission it? And why would it be forgotten again so quickly, and stashed away on a shelf in Rome?
We have, Xhevat Lloshi claimed in 1999, indications that someone was writing Albanian down in the 13th century:
The first attempts to write the albanian language are to found in the 12th – 13th centuries. It is understandable that the first documents may have been trade, economic, administrative and religious wrtitings compiled by low-rank clerics. A Dominican friar, Guillelmus Adae [Guillaume Adam], knows as Father Brocardus, noted in a pamphlet he published in 1332 that “the Albanians have a language quite other than the Latin, but they use the Latin letters in all their books”. [Cited from Formula e pagëzimit]
Guillaume Adam was bishop of Bar, Montenegro (Albanian: Tivar) at the time. Robert Elsie has cited that pamphlet (Elsie, Robert (2003). Early Albania: a reader of historical texts, 11th-17th centuries. Harrassowitz. pp. 28–30); it’s presumably the Directorium ad Passagium Faciendum per Phillippum regem Franciae in terram santam anno 1332. But what does he mean by books? Theodore of Shkodra? And how much of an Albanian literacy programme was going on?
And there may be a marginal note somewhere yet to be unearthed, in the libraries of Venice or the Vatican. But they’re likelier to be wills or notes than a full fledged theological treatise. Matzinger at least, in his communication to me, doubts they will be any older than the baptismal formula. Even if Lloshi is right, and they’re a century earlier than the baptismal formula, I doubt they’ll be much longer than the baptismal formula.
Which area of modern Greece, proceeded in preparation for statehood (independance), that was cancelled, in later stages?
Crete was autonomous, though the Cretans always intended union with Greece as far as I can tell. Samos was autonomous as well, though I have no reason to think they intended statehood.
There was a very short lived Provisional Government of Western Thrace, set up in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, to try and prevent a Bulgarian takeover.
Outside of modern Greece, there was talk of an independent Pontic republic, and of an autonomous Greek republic in Southern Russia.
If atom is Ancient Greek for uncuttable, what is Ancient Greek for divisible?
Democritus was going with the notion that, if you kept cutting a substance in half (as Dimitra Triantafyllidou explains the verb), an atom is where you got to when you couldn’t split it any more.
tmētos and a-tomos are both adjectives derived from different variants of temnō “cut, split”. There is no adjective *tomos “cuttable” corresponding to a-tomos “un-cuttable”; but there is no meaning difference that I can tell between the two.
The -able is only implicit in a-tomos: it’s quite literally “uncut”, as a permanent state of affairs, ergo “uncuttable”.
There is no necessary -able notion in tmētos: it actually is defined in LSJ as “cut, shaped by cutting”. LSJ defines some –tos adjectives as “X-ed” (dartos “flayed”, gyristos “rounded, curved”), some as “able to be X-ed” (dēlētos “able to be shown”, detos “that may be bound”), and some as both (dektos “accepted, acceptable”, and Manolis Fanourgakis’ word, diairetos “divided, divisible”).
But yeah, if you want an opposite to atomos in Greek, tmētos is the closest you can get; and in the right context, tmētos could have been interpreted as “cuttable” (i.e. divisible) rather than “cut”.
diaireō means “take apart, cleave in twain, divide”; so it could have been used instead of temnō for what Democritus had in mind (adiairetos, “undivided, indivisible”). But while diaireō in classical times could still refer to chopping things, it was more commonly used about dividing things for sharing, distributing. atomos is explicitly about chopping things.
How do you translate the word ‘dreamer’ in Greek?
This couldn’t be another Google Translate question from…
…. yes! Anon! Strikes again!
ονειροπόλος. Which actually originally meant interpreter of dreams. The Triantafyllides dictionary Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής says the meaning switch is via French rêvasseur—which implies, at least, that this Homeric word was reimported into Modern Greek, incorrectly, to fill a gap identified by a French word. And that makes it an instance of those false friend borrowings Aziz Dida has been asking for (What are some “mistakenly borrowed” words in your language (“false friends)?)
No, Anon. No pronunciation key for you. I don’t think you’ve earned it.
Why does the Greek alphabet have the letters Xi (ξ) and Psi (ψ)?
So… what did I find when I was looking at the history of the Greek alphabets, in Jeffrey’s monograph?
http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/…
The second problem is that not all the sibilants were present in all the dialects. Most Greek scripts initially avoided xi, and wrote /ks/ as ΧΣ; Jeffery (1990:32) suspects the Ionians held on to it because /ks/ in Ionic could be realised as [kʃ] (which is speculative), and under the influence of neighbouring non-Hellenic languages like Carian which did have /ʃ/. (Circumstantial evidence for this lies in the separate Ionic invention of sampi as yet another sibilant, after they’d skipped san.) Once the Milesian alphabet was adopted by Athens, xi was reintroduced to the rest of Greece as /ks/.
So: possibly, xi was an attempt to make use of a Phoenecian letter with a /ʃ/ pronunciation (actually samekh was the /ʃ/ pronunciation: the letters got mixed up). It stuck around in Ionic, maybe because they had a use for the sound; and then accidentally came back into the standardised Milesian alphabet, which was Ionian.
That does not explain psi, which was not necessarily Phoenecian to begin with. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps… reminds me, it was /kʰ/ in Western Greek, and /ps/ in Eastern Greek. My suspicion: /kʰ/, which makes more sense for Greek, came first; and was reinterpreted in Eastern Greek as a counterpart to xi, since Eastern Greek already had a chi.
I don’t have a basis for that; but whatever happened, xi, as the definite Phoenecian letter, came first, and psi followed.
EDIT (cc Vladimir Menkov): Kicking myself, checking Wikipedia on an unrelated matter:
The unusual use of special letters for the consonant clusters [kʰs] and [pʰs] can be explained by the fact that these were the only combinations allowed at the end of a syllable. With this convention, all Greek syllables could be written with at most one final consonant letter.
Damn. It’s so obvious…
Why does the Greek language sound like Spanish?
Originally Answered:
Why do Spanish and Greek sound so similar?
OP is right, and Joseph Boyle gets it, while Yiannis Tsiolis and Eve Vavilis are in fact being misled by already knowing Greek. (Ditto Laura Hale for already knowing Spanish, porque tiene una mujer española).
The question can’t be answered by someone who already knows Greek;* they’ll be looking for words they recognise (as did Laura); which is not the point. The question is not about similar words, it is only about the languages sounding similar.
(*OK, I don’t know Spanish as well as Greek, though I did hear a lot of Univision while living in SoCal. But I’m a linguist! Yay me.)
To someone who knows neither language, Greek and Spanish will indeed sound similar, for the reasons Joseph gave: [θ] and [ð] (although that’s not what jumps out as a similarity to me), the same vowels, lack of long-short vowel contrast, open syllables including words mostly ending in vowels, n, or r.
It’s really the vowels and syllable structure that does it. The structure fits Esperanto quite well, which is why some Esperantists recommend Greek/Spanish as the model to follow; and others resent them, as encouraging a rat-tat-tat rapid fire pronunciation, because they lack long vowels.
The intonation is probably going to be completely different; you won’t mistake a Mexican for a Cretan. But if you pick not-too-sing-song accents in each language, and turn the volume down so you can’t make out the words too clearly, yeah, they do sound alike.
What are the benefits of learning Modern Greek?
My superiors in every way, Michael Masiello and Robert Todd, have given you the high-minded reasons to, and I commend them.
But whenever someone offers to convert to Judaism, it is a Jew’s duty to try and talk them out of it three times. And in that spirit, I assume that, by asking for benefits, you really do want to get into a calculus of pros and cons.
Well.
- Communicating with the locals. Not really. Everyone you’re likely to communicate with as a tourist will speak excellent English. You really have to go to Upper Podunk and seek out someone’s grandfather to use your Berlitz phrasebook.
- Successful business ventures in Greece. Yes for some kinds of business, and at some stages in history; the current stage isn’t it.
- Gaining the good will of the locals. Yes. See my own gushing reactions to Martin Pickering on this very forum. They really do appreciate the gesture.
- Accessing Ancient Greek literature. No. If you want to start with something easier than Thucydides, make like Robert did, and start from Koine. It’s still recognisably the same language, and there’s no shortage of materials.
- Accessing Byzantine literature. No. Learn Koine and Ancient Greek for that too. For the purposes of this argument, I’m counting late mediaeval vernacular literature as Early Modern Greek.
- Understanding English etymology. No. Go to the source for that: Ancient Greek. Unless your surname is Portokalos. In which case I should warn you: Greeks in Greece did not find you funny.
- Learning a different language for the sake of it. Yes. But like my betters have said, if you do that, pick the language that intrigues you: you’ll be much more motivated to stick with it. All languages are wonderful, and all literatures are great, because humanity is great and wonderful. You won’t learn them all (though people like Judith Meyer and Philip Newton come close.) Learn what will reward you with warm fuzzies. That’s a benefit too.
- Accessing Modern Greek literature. Yes. But beware: to get all the subtleties going on, you’re going have to learn enough Greek to pick up on not just what the authors are saying, but why they’re picking the words and grammar they’re picking. Language politics was always close to the surface in 20th century literature. Magister Masiello named Cavafy and Kazantzakis: they’re at opposite ends of the language debate, and the language debate informs their style.
- Doing Modern Greek Studies. Yes. Google Translate will only get you so far, and it won’t get you far with Google Books, let alone actual Book books.
- Understanding the Greek people. Yes. Language being the primary vehicle of culture.
- Understanding the neighbouring people of Greece. Actually, yes, at least a bit. Not just because we share syntax with them, but because we’ve been their annoying neighbours, and (truth be told) their cultural hegemons for a fair while.
Btw (I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, I just didn’t have an excuse for it): if you’re learning Greek for its literature, and you get enough about the essence of the language debate, you’ll understand why Seferis lionised the unlettered prose of Makriyannis as a lost ideal of Greek writing. His fabled sentence Οι τούρκοι υποψιασμένοι· να ’βλεπαν ρωμιό, κιντύνευε—is Ebonics if you translate it into English. (The Turks be suspicious; they saw a Greek, he in danger.) And that’s not to denigrate African-American vernacular; that’s to point out how culture-bound (and prejudiced) stylistics is.
Once you’re enlightened, you can see why Seferis had had a gutful of hypotaxis and conjunctions in quotidian Modern Greek, and was yearning for a lost litotes represented by that sentence. And once you’re even more enlightened, you’ll realise (as came to me in a flash last night) that Classical Greek had that same litotes: ὑποψιασθέντες δὴ οἱ τοῦρκοι· ἑωρακόντων ῥωμαῖον, κινδυνεύοι.
I posted that because I felt like it; but if you’re going to appreciate 20th century Greek literature, that’s the level of language savvy you’re going to need…