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Why do I experience a profound feeling when I read and understand old writings of my mother language?
Oh. This is a fascinating question, Kelvin. And Faleminderit to you, shoku!
I don’t get that feeling with Ancient Greek. I don’t get that feeling with Old, Middle, or Early Modern English. I do get a slight feeling of something with Early Modern Greek.
Allow me to speculate.
A lot of it is missing what you haven’t had. With Greek, we have had the glorious 3000 year history of the language pummelled into us. At least in my millieu growing up, that did not inspire yearning and beauty; it inspired annoyance. It was an imposition. To the extent that I like Ancient Greek writing at all, that came much later.
With English, Shakespeare is part of the ether all around you; there’s a joy to reading him, but it’s a joy of art, not of heritage. Beowulf and the Wanderer are recognisably not English; it’s hard to feel they’re in your language. Chaucer… maybe the closest to what you’re describing in English: recognising the echoes of the early version of your language—unfamiliar, because I wasn’t taught Middle English, but familiar, because it is identifiably English.
I felt that connection more strongly with Early Modern Greek; but ideologies of language always play a role in Greeks’ connection to their language. From a Demoticist perspective, with Early Modern Greek you see glimpses of what could have been, if it were not for the pedants: a pristine ideal of the true vernacular language. That’s a myth, of course: there’s no such thing as a pristine language, and the pinnacle of pristineness, the Cretan Renaissance, was a purist Demotic that quite artfully hid its own artifice. But it’s a seductive myth none the less.
My idle speculation—and tell me if you take offence:
Albanian hasn’t had a millennium or two of written tradition. It has maybe a couple of centuries of intense literary production. In Buzuku’s missal, you see a canonical text, with all the weight of 1500 years of religious tradition behind it, in a language you recognise as yours, but which is also archaic and unfamiliar. And you’re no naive reader, Kelvin, from your other answers here: you know Albanian dialect pretty damn well.
So the text feels to you like what you were missing, and what your neighbours have taken for granted. A complex, monumental, literary forebear.
You’re lucky. Because I open the New Testament in Koine, and just think “meh”.
You remind me of the contrast between my visit to London and my visits to Crete.
London is my dominant culture’s home. I went to London, and was agape at seeing the Globe and St Paul’s and St Clement’s and Big Ben. It felt wondrously like coming home. It felt like coming home, because I’d never been there before, yet I recognised so much.
As opposed to how I feel when I actually go home to Crete. “Meh, not this shit again.” 🙂
Are there any dialects of Greek acknowledged to be unintelligible to mainstream Greek within Greece itself?
Now, this is Dimitris Almyrantis asking, so he deserves some politics in his answer!
“Acknowledged”? Well put, because mutual intelligibility is often more about identity politics than about communication. As in the cause célèbre of the PM of Macedonia bringing along an interpreter to his meeting with the PM of Bulgaria.
Greeks acknowledge idioms where anyone else would say “dialect”, and “dialects” where anyone else would say “that’s a different language”. For the same ideological reasons that people on Quora grouse that there’s no such thing as Northern Greek, and that I got harangued once for saying I work on Middle Greek. At least it never got as bad as Turkey, where linguists were discouraged from researching dialects at all.
That said.
Tsakonian is within Greece, and it’s so, so a different language, it’s not funny. Check out Tsakonian song online for an example. (And hang out there, I’ve written some neat stuff in my time.)
Of the other acknowledged “dialects” of Greek: Actual Cypriot, as opposed to Standard Greek with a nasal sing-song accent, is not mutually intelligible. Griko in Italy can be intelligible, though I think the moribund Calabrian variant is much more of a challenge. Pontic is not mutually intelligible, but it can be picked up (as Dimitra Triantafyllidou has); Mariupolitan ditto. [EDIT: Forgot Cappadocian. Way more different than Pontic.]
Cretan is deemed on the borderline of dialect and “idiom” in traditional Greek dialectology. It does less phonologically odd stuff than Cypriot, and Renaissance Cretan is approachable, but I agree with Bob Hannent: the genuine article is going to be a challenge for Standard Greek speakers
Within Greece, what you have left are “idioms”. The mutual intelligibility of those can be overstated.
Northern Greek, with its raising of unstressed /e, o/ to /i, u/, and its deletion of unstressed /i, u/, is not that interesting morphologically or lexically—but yes, phonetically it’s… something else. That’s what happens when you get rid of half your vowels. I presume that’s what you were exposed to in Northern Euboea, Dimitris.
(If you were in Kymi, you were exposed to a relic dialect related to Old Athenian, preserving /u/ for ancient upsilon. If you were anywhere else in Southern Euboea, what you heard was Arvanitika, and it’s no wonder you didn’t understand it.)
The 2004 international conference on Greek Dialectology happened in Lesbos. Someplace in Mytilini town, a local has scrawled some bon mots in the local dialect on the arch outside his café. Lesbos also has a Northern Greek dialect. So you can picture three internationally renowned Greek dialectologists (OK, two plus me), standing outside the café to the merriment of the locals, staring at the bon mots and trying to fill in the vowels.
The maximum meltdown happens in Samothrace, which has stuck with me because I honestly had no idea what the hell was going on when I first encountered it (in a phonetic transcription of WWI POW’s, published by Werner Heisenberg’s dad, August). The grammar of Samothracian I have, annoyingly has no sample texts.
So you’ve got Greek with half the vowels missing, right? OK.
Now take away all the r’s as well.
mavros “black” > mavwus. riɣani “oregano” > jiɣaɲ. anθropos “person” > aθjipus.
There’s a thesis on Samothracian grammar here: ονοματικό και ρηματικό κλιτικό σύστημα. Read the example sentences out loud to yourselves, and tell me you’d understand them…
How do you say welcome in Greek?
I normally pass on answering these readily Googleable questions, unless I can say something linguistically interesting about them. It’s your lucky day, Anon.
Two main ways of rendering “welcome” in Modern Greek.
1. Καλώς ήρθες (singular), καλώς ήρθατε (plural): kalos irθes, kalos irθate. Literally, “well you came”; so it corresponds exactly to English welcome.
More importantly, it corresponds exactly to Turkish hoş geldin (sg), hoş geldiniz (pl).
There are many such correspondences between Turkish and Greek, and it’s often quite hard to work out which came first.
The well word, καλώς, is in the archaic form, though that may well be genuine archaism and not Puristic—I’ve seen nothing in the earlier vernacular to suggest that καλά ήρθες was ever used. You will often see the more puristic verb forms, καλώς ήλθες and καλώς ήλθατε, kalos ilθes, kalos ilθate, particularly in more formal/written contexts.
2. Καλώς όρισες (sg), καλώς ορίσατε (pl), kalos orises, kalos orisate, “well you commanded”. This one is more interesting.
Commanding is what a master does to a servant; so you can say “command (me)” to indicate that you are prepared to act like someone’s servant; it’s the same as “at your service” in English.
(At this point you may be reminded of that fine Age of Mythology command, prostagma: What does “Prostagma” mean in Greek? But prostagma is what you give a soldier, not a servant.)
So when the guest comes to you as a host, you as a host get to tell them you’re quite happy to be at their service: “well may you be commanding me”.
The “at your service” equivalent itself in Greek is “command!” This should have been ορίσετε orisete in the politeness plural, but it’s always rendered as the reduced form ορίστε oriste. It originally meant “at your service”; you use ορίστε in Modern Greek to mean “go ahead, I’m listening.” Which is a short distance from “at your service”:
—Nick!
—Oriste. [At your service]
—Take out the trash and stop spending time on Quora!
—Grumble grumble.
It can also be used to mean “here you go”; the shift is from “I am at your service” to “I am complying with your request through this”:
—Nick, will you get me a cracker?
—(handing over a cracker) Oriste. (Here you go.) [I am complying with your request, which is part of me being at your service.]
You can also used ορίστε as a question: “… at your service?” It corresponds to “pardon me?”, when you haven’t heard what the other person has asked for, or you’re having trouble believing what the other person has asked for. The implication is that you’re quite happy to be at their service, but you’re putting a question mark on it because you haven’t quite understood how you’re supposed to be at their service.
—Mumble mumble mumble please?
—Oriste? (Pardon?) [I’d… like to be at your service; what’s the service again?]
—I said: Take out the trash and stop spending time on Quora!
—Grumble grumble.
—Vicky Gunvalson is a fine human being, and an exemplar to our nation.
—… Oriste?! (WTF?!) [I’d… like to be at your service, if only I can be certain that I heard you right and you are not in fact a lunatic]
And moving further, ορίστε μας “oriste to us”, is an expression of disgruntlement: “how rude! how shameful! what a mess”. Holton et al.’s reference grammar explains it as an ethical dative: “Here you go [referring to a situation that’s crap] for us”.
The singular form, όρισε orise, is what you’d have expected before the 19th century. I’ve only found it in the reduced form όρσε, orse. In 17th century Cretan, it already means “go ahead”: (Stathis IV 174: Όρσε, Πετρούτσο “Go ahead, Petruccio”—spoken by the pedant to a servant, so it’s no longer the literal “at your service”.) But it also has already shifted to mean “here you go”: Anthimos Diakrousis, War of Crete, 6.621: Ὅρσε τὰ κλειδιά, τὸ κάστρον εἶν’ δικό σου, “Here’s the keys, the fortress is yours”—spoken by the Venetians surrendering Canea/Hania to the Ottomans.
In Modern Greek, it’s moved further still: it’s stereotypically Ionian islander, and it’s the exclamation associated with the mountza (the equivalent of flipping the bird)—which elsewhere goes with νά “behold!”. So “here you go” > “take that”, Vicki Gunvalson! [splat].
Which is a very, very far way to go from “at your service”.
3. Both the “welcome” and the “here you go” senses of oriste are also present in the Turkish equivalent verb, buyurun:
does anyone know what does the turkish phrase “buyurum efendim” means?
Buyurun efendim, literally “Say your wish, sir/madam”, used either when giving someone something (“Here you are”), or an invitation to come in or sit down (“Please do come in” or “Welcome”)
Again, it’s chicken and the egg about which language came up with it first, though the Cretan examples predate Ottoman rule of Crete, so they suggest Greek before Turkish.
4. Btw, there is an English cognate to oriste and those other forms of “command”, though it is reasonably obscure. orizō is originally “to define, to delimited”. The past tense of Greek that is not delimited is the one whose aspect is open-ended—it could be either completed (perfective) or ongoing (imperfective). That’s the Simple Past of Greek, and its name is “undelimited”, a-orist.
I was hoping orison was related as well; but etymologists who actually know what they’re doing it know that it’s from French oreison < Latin oratio.
5. Both καλώς ήρθες and καλώς όρισες are spoken by the host to the visitor. The visitor formulaically responds καλώς σε/σας βρήκα/βρήκαμε, “well I/we have found you (sg/pl).” This is spoken on initial greeting; it is also spoken when you sit down to eat together.
Or, apparently, when you’re performing to an audience to thousands.
And, what do you know:
Hoş bulduk = καλώς σας βρήκαμε. As in:
“Well have we found you, Vienna and Prague”. “Well found”, not “well commanded”. Because Vienna and Prague are the hosts, and we’re the guests.
First attempt at a Quora-idiomatic pic-heavy post… about Greek grammar. Nah, I don’t think it works…
Do Greek villages near Albania use Albanian words, just like those in Albania use Greek loanwords?
In brief, yes.
First, we need to define “near Albania”. Let’s start with this map from Languages of Greece
I’m going to ignore Arvanitika in Central Greece, because that’s nowhere near Albania. I’m going to ignore the Albanian enclaves near Florina, because they were traditionally surrounded by Macedonian Slavonic, rather than Greek. I’m going to focus on the region around Ioannina.
The map has a patch of Aromanian to the west of Ioannina. That’s likely wrong: that region is Thesprotia, Albanian Çamëria, and it was inhabited by a substantially Albanian Muslim population until WWII.
[Edit: actually, if the map represents contemporary populations, it’s probably right; all that’s left of Çamëria is that small green dot. I think the Çam population is down to a dozen.]
Just north of the Greek–Albanian border, is the region Greeks call Northern Epirus, where there is still a Greek-speaking minority.
So you have, moving in a crooked northwest from Ioannina:
- Ioannina: Greek
- Thesprotia/Çamëria: Albanian
- Northern Epirus (e.g. Agii Saranda/Sarandë, Himara/Himarë): Greek
- Albania
And the map is patchwork, and there is presumably a continuum in Ioanninia prefecture up through Pogoniani, but yeah.
I’ll ignore Northern Epirus: they’ve a Greek enclave, so of course they’ll have a lot of Albanian. What’s more interesting is, how much Albanian got into Ioannina dialect, being at the northern edge of contiguous Greek-speaking territory. (And yes, that’s Aromanian immediately to its right: Metsovo is the Aromanian heartland.)
There are some dictionaries of Epirot dialect. The one I happened to have on my shelf was not at all promising:
- Κοσμάς, Ν.Ι. 1997. Το Γλωσσικό Ιδίωμα των Ιωαννίνων. Αθήνα: Δωδώνη. (The Dialect of Ioannina)
It had oodles of Turkish words, some Venetian words, and only one or two Albanian words.
I was going to go further afield, and check out Bongas’ 1964 dictionary (which is rather large, but etymologically patchy), or Aravatinos’ 1909 dictionary. But I didn’t have to.
Nikos Sarantakos maintains the premier Greek language blog, Οι λέξεις έχουν τη δική τους ιστορία. The post Πενήντα ελληνικές λέξεις αλβανικής προέλευσης is his article on 50 words in Greek of Albanian origin. He’s eliminated obscure words from earlier lists (he’d redacted down a list of 89 words); but I’ve got to say, I’ve only heard of 23 of them, and I doubt I’d use more than 5 [Counted: ok, 10]. Note the Greek question marks (;) against several, btw: Balkan etymology is a difficult business.
The Greek nationalists unfortunately discovered the post, and the comments thread gets nasty quickly. But before it did, commenter Grigoris Kotortsinos (comment: Πενήντα ελληνικές λέξεις αλβανικής προέλευσης) mentions that the book
- Κ. Οικονόμου, Η αλβανική γλωσσική επίδραση στα ηπειρωτικά ιδιώματα, Ιωάννινα 1997 (Albanian linguistic influence on Epirus dialects)
mentions 183 Albanian words in the local dialect, and then cites the 55 he has heard in use.
55 is a lot more than 23, let alone 5; and 183 is a lot more than 89. So yes, there is a larger than usual concentration of Albanian words, in the Greek dialects spoken south of Albania.
Obvious, but good to see it documented.
How’s your Greek, btw, Aziz?
Edit: the source 89-word list, which also tries to find modern Albanian equivalents, is Αρβανίτικες λέξεις στα Ρωμαίικα ή αλβανικά δάνεια στη δημοτική γλώσσα [2011]
What is the most beautiful Greek typeface?
Originally Answered:
What is your favourite Greek font, and why?
GFS Complutum: Εταιρεία Ελληνικών Τυπογραφικών Στοιχείων
There is a Romantic history to Greek typography. The first fifty years of printing started inauspiciously, with poor, crude carved out Greek letters. But they got steadily better, until their apogee in the Complutensian Polyglot Bible of the 1520s, where they are used in the New Testament.
(I’ve posted about the history and awesomeness of the Complutensian already on my blog: The Complutensian Polyglot, ahead of the times.)
The Old Testament of the Computensian is written in the version of Greek typography that then prevailed for the next two centuries: the italic squiggle, popularised by Aldus Manutius, and taken up because it was more reminiscent of what scribes were doing.
Greek typography only got out of squiggle in the late 18th century, and in the early 20th century typographers were coming to fetishise what could have been, if the early tradition had continued on. Classicists may be familiar with the more modern iteration of fonts inspired by the old style: GreekKeys Athenian/New Athena Unicode.
The Greek Font Society has revived a font based on the Complutensian, although it’s now polytonic rather than monotonic. It’s not a font you’ll get away with for everyday use—people won’t get past the archaisms, like the nu that looks like a mu, or the random lowercase letters that look like capitals.
But there is a fearsome symmetry to the font, a stern blockiness, that I adore. Enough to have featured it in my wedding order of service:
Some would say I got married just so I could show off my favourite fonts. But that would be a bit much even for me…
Are Greek and Latin roots the only atomic words we know so far from which we can build all the compounded words?
I think what you mean, OP, is: are Graeco-Latin stems the only stems from which compound words can be formed in English.
The answer is of course no: there are plenty of compounds in English based on indigenous Germanic words, and there were all the way back to Old English. Statecraft. Breastfeed. Windmill.
There was a preponderance of Graeco-Latin stems for scholarly and learnèd compounds through the Renaissance, and up until the last couple of generations. Not any more: Bubblesort. Backbeat. Widescreen.
And you really don’t want to see how Greek renders object-oriented as a single compound.
Ok, you do: αντικειμενοστραφής. “object-turning”, where object itself is “opposite-lying”. Daft, just daft, and not idiomatic. HY-252 “Αντικειμενοστραφής Προγραμματισμός” (Crete Uni, CS-252) shows what could have been: the OOP course is subtitled οντοκεντρικός “entity-centered”, which is, well, at least less daft.
Why is Greece the 6th most important contributor in Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF)?
I wish I knew. This is what I get from the Googles.
Francophone Balkans? ‘Outsider’ Membership in La Francophonie and Other Language-Based International Organisations speculates that it’s because French is such a prominent foreign language in Greek education. Which explains why Romania is in the Francophonie. And French was indeed the default foreign language in Greece—until WWII. Since then, it’s been so uniformly English, it’s not funny.
Hold that thought.
Can we get any hints from the blog of Η Γαλλοφωνία στην Ελλάδα – La Francophonie en Grèce [The Francophonie in Greece]?
The blog reproduces the announcement from the Greek Foreign Ministry at the time:
Η απόφαση της Ελλάδος για την ένταξή της στη Γαλλοφωνία υπαγορεύθηκε από την εκτίμηση της δυνατότητας πρόσβασης σε ένα σημαντικό forum με κοινή γλώσσα – τα γαλλικά – και έναν χώρο κοινών αξιών και αλληλεγγύης, του οποίου βασικά στοιχεία και στόχοι είναι η προώθηση της δημοκρατίας, του κράτους δικαίου και του σεβασμού των ανθρωπίνων δικαιωμάτων, η προώθηση της ειρήνης και ασφάλειας, καθώς και η προστασία της πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς και η υποστήριξη της πολιτιστικής και γλωσσικής διαφορετικότητας. Ακόμα και η επιβίωση των εθνικών πολιτισμών στηρίζεται εν πολλοίς στη διαφύλαξη αυτών των αρχών.
The decision of Greece to join the Francophonie was dictated by her appreciating the opportunity to access an important forum with French as a common language, and a space with common values and solidarity, whose basic elements and aims are the promotion of democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights, promotion of peace and security, as well as the protection of cultural heritage and support for cultural and linguistic diversity. The very survival of national cultures is supported in many ways by preserving these values.
Wade past the diplo mumbo jumbo, and focus on the italicised bit.
Diversity, eh? An odd thing for Greece to say, when its attitude to linguistic diversity within its borders has been… well, it’s been a lot like France’s. But the linguistic diversity of Arvanitika and Aromanian is not what that last sentence is talking about, is it? So what linguistic diversity are they talking about?
The colophon of the blog says:
20 Μαρτίου: Διεθνής Ημέρα Γαλλοφωνίας
Η Ελλάδα μέλος της Γαλλοφωνίας από το 2004
Με τη συμμετοχή μας στη Γαλλοφωνία στηρίζουμε την πολυγλωσσία και μέσω αυτής την ελληνική γλώσσα20th of March: International Francophonie Day
Greece has been a member of Francophonie since 2004.
By participating in Francophonie we support multilingualism, and through that, the Greek language.
Hm. Getting a lot warmer.
Euractiv, a EU affairs blog post from the time Greece joined, said at the time:
Greece has become an associate member of the OIF, a club for French-speaking countries. The move is seen as part of efforts to stave off the growing domination of English in the EU.
[…]
An official from the Greek Perm Rep in Brussels told EurActiv that the idea was to “reinforce the plurality of languages within the EU. We safeguard our own language by making room for more languages to be spoken”.
The move is widely seen as part of efforts to prevent a single language, namely English, from overly dominating the EU.
I think you have your answer. It’s political.
Greece joined in November 2004; George “Jeffrey” Papandreou Jr’s Socialists were voted out, and Kostas “the Calf” Karamanlis Jr’s Conservatives were voted in in March of that year; the Olympics were in August.
Greeks more knowledgeable than I about Greek politics will have to tell me what kind of chess the Greek Foreign Ministry was playing, and is playing now. But Greece certainly isn’t the only observer in the Francophonie with no immediately obvious reason for being there.
Why have you learned Latin, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit? What aspects of those languages are you fascinated by?
Latin: Opportunity. My uncle’s and aunt’s old Latin textbooks were in my grandfather’s storehouse, and I discovered them when I was 10 (1981). Thinking back, that’s where my love of language started. I read through the grammar, and then went to work translating Cornelius Nepos.
I loved the intricacies of the grammar, I guess, but I loved the monumental style even more. There is a solemnity there.
Ancient Greek, on the other hand, I was allergic to, because I’d soaked up the language controversy around me. Demotic had just won the dispute a few years before, and Puristic Greek was still the target of derision and partisan suspicion; the new socialist government was elevating folksiness to the political mainstream; and it was a decade before the backlash that let all the genitive direct objects and reduplicated participles back in.
I’ve only made any kind of peace with Ancient Greek in the past decade or so. The grammar is cool, but it’s tracking the changes that led up to Modern Greek that keeps me interested.
Is there a difference in using the subjunctive “να” vs using “πρέπει να”?
Slight. As with Are να and ας translated identically when used with a first person plural verb in Modern Greek?, it’s mostly a nuance thing:
- ας φύγουμε: “let’s leave, how about we leave”: pretty weak sauce, gentle prodding
- πρέπει να φύγουμε: “we must leave”, strong implication that this is an external imposition
- να φύγουμε: “we should leave”: it’s by default a command, and the implication is that there is no external imposition to do so, it’s because you want it. It can be a suggestion, but it’s not as weak sauce a suggestion as ας.
Are υπάρχει and είναι used the same way in Modern Greek?
Not quite.
In the existential sense that you’re using, είναι ένας άνθρωπος means “it is a man”, and υπάρχει ένας άνθρωπος means “there exists a man”. The latter sounds as formal and logical in Greek as it does in English, though I think it is more widely used than English as an interrogative or negative. The former is pretty much an answer to a question, and presupposes that the context is known; for example, it would make sense as the answer to “who’s there?”
(Oh, and using the indefinite article is always a red alert for translationese: it really doesn’t get used that much in Greek.)
The idiomatic rendering of “there’s a man”, introducing their existence out of the blue, is neither: it’s έχει [έναν] άνθρωπο, “it has a man” (cf. French il y a, and Portuguese tem). So when a diver first saw the shipwreck with the Antikythera mechanism, he exclaimed: κάτω έχει ανθρώπους και ζώα σπαρμένους, “there are men and animals sown [= scattered] down there”: «Κάτω έχει ανθρώπους… σπαρμένους».
In formal Greek, you can use υπάρχω with a predicate, to indicate a person’s previous appointment: Ο κ. Πετσάλνικος που υπήρξε αρμόδιος υπουργός όταν ξεκίνησε η προδικασία της υπόθεσης “Mr Petsalnikos, who “existed” [served as] the responsible minister at the beginning of the litigation” (Ο Καλατράβα του Κορυδαλλού). But that’s journalese, not natural Greek: υπάρχω does not normally take predicates.