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Did the written word slow the evolution of language?
Yes. Not by the magic of the fact that it is in writing, but by the fact that it has helped immensely in establishing and propagating conservative versions of the language, based on written records, as the most prestigious versions, which are learned in education and emulated in formal registers.
Given the time depth of the Mayflower, American English should really be a separate language from England English by now. And true enough, there are issues with mutual intelligibility in some registers. But the written norms of the two are close enough, and universally propagated enough, to have kept them in sync.
Universal literacy, and familiarity with the sagas, is widely held as the reason Icelandic has changed relatively little in the past 1000 years. It’s also one of the few places where prescriptive intervention has actually reversed a language change (flæmeli). Written Greek has had a similar effect on Greek dialect.
Ancient Greek: What pronunciation scheme do you use for 5th-4th century B.C.E. writings? Modern, reconstruction with pitch, Erasmian, etc. and why?
Ah, I see this is the question where all the cool people hang out! Νικόλαος Στεφάνῳ, Δημήτρᾳ, Μιχαήλ, Ἰωακείμ, Βενιαμείν, Ῥοβέρτῳ τε ἐρωτήσαντι, εὗ πράττειν.
Related question, with rationales: What are the pros and cons of the Erasmian pronunciation?
When I am on my own, I actually mutter Ancient Greek aloud to myself, to try and work out what the hell is going on. (I’ve never actually learned Ancient Greek formally.) And when I’m muttering, it is of course in Modern Greek pronunciation. Which is motivated by familiarity, since I speak Modern Greek.
When I speak aloud to others, it is in reconstructed, because that’s what the word was as far as I know, and reconstruction makes Greek spelling make sense. In fact, I’ve had Greek classicists tell me “could you please stop using Erasmian to me?”
I don’t use Erasmian, because I find Anglicised or Germanicised Greek distasteful—Dzoys for Zeus indeed! But since I never learned Ancient Greek in an English-speaking classroom, I don’t have the pressure of Erasmian familiarity that Anglo classicists do. If I did, it would make much more sense for me to do so.
I occasionally try to do pitch as well. But no, it does not come naturally, and there aren’t many good models for it. (Search the phrase “Yodelling Martians” on Quora for more on what I think of it.)
Why do some languages assign a gender to each noun (e.g., table is feminine in French)?
Originally Answered:
Why do Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian etc. have masculine and feminine gender for inanimate objects?
The history of Indo-European gender, like the history of any language feature, is messy. The mainstream theory is that the feminine, in fact, was originally not animate at all, but came from the abstract and collective suffix *-h₂. You may be more familiar with the Greek form of that suffix: -(i)a.
Why does gender not align nicely with animacy, let alone sex? Because of analogy, and cognitive patterning: making up classes of things, and then lumping everything in the world into one of them, by family resemblance. The mechanism for this lumping is Conceptual metaphor.
We see this more obviously in non-Indo-European languages, which have a lot more “genders”. (In fact, by the time you get to a dozen of them, there’s no point calling them genders, and we call them noun classes instead.)
The pioneering work on the kinds of cognitive categories underlying noun classes is George Lakoff’s. His acknowledged classic takes its title from the membership of one of the noun classes of Dyirbal language, an Australian Aboriginal language.
The noun classes of Dyirbal are:
Lakoff’s classic was thus titled: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.
Mind blown, Dimitra (who A2A’d)?
Greeks’ minds will be blown be the fact that πῦρ, γυνή, καὶ θάλασσα, “fire, woman, and the sea”, have been lumped together in an Ancient Greek maxim. (It has been attributed to Aesop: Πῦρ γυνὴ καὶ θάλασσα, δυνατὰ τρία, “Fire woman and the sea, these are the three strong things.” And Menander: Θάλασσα καὶ πῦρ καὶ γυνὴ τρίτον κακόν “Sea and fire, and woman is the third evil.”)
My mind is blown (though it shouldn’t be) by the fact that Lakoff had no idea about the Greek maxim when he wrote the book.
Are Middle Easterners considered to be White by Greeks?
Everyone here has spoken well on the topic.
Greeks have a keen sense of Other, and skin colour can factor into that. As Dimitra Triantafyllidou says, we have a history of dismissing Gypsies (like much of Europe); and there’s a lot of anti-Pakistani feeling in downtown Athens. But then again, there was a lot of anti-Albanian feeling in downtown Athens twenty years ago.
But here’s the thing. Swedes are almost as alien to Greeks as Nigerians are. And a good deal more alien than the Lebanese are.
And that’s where the peculiarly American dichotomy of White/Black falls down. As Yannis Gaitanas said, “Us” is not defined in Greek by skin colour—as it was in the US, whose ruling class was a melting-pot of light-skinned cultures. “Us” is defined by culture, whether as religion or ethnicity or education. So light skin on its own doesn’t mean that much. Just because we don’t identify with Nigerians doesn’t mean we identify with Swedes more.
Oh, and the traditional Modern Greek term for blacks—which is now derogatory, but was originally just neutral: arapis. From Arab. Early Modern Greeks knew that there was this place called Araby, and that black-skinned people came from there. They didn’t put Middle Easterners in that category (such as, you know, actual Arabs). As far as Greeks were concerned, those were Turks.
What are the names of different countries in your language?
Sofia Mouratidis gave names in current Greek. For jollies, I’m going to give names in Byzantine Greek, which are often quite different: the modern names are mostly from Latin, while the older names were usually from Italian.
- France: Frandza (now Gallia)
- Germany: Alamania (now Germania)
- Austria: Aoustria or Osterigon (now Afstria—which is a spelling pronunciation of Αὐστρία)
- England: Engletera or Inglitera (now Anglia)
- Flanders: Filandra (now Flamandia)
- Sweden: Suedzia (now Suidia)
- Poland: Lekhia or Polonia
- Croatia: Khrovatia (now Kroatia)
Why do the spellings of ancient Roman and Greek names differ in English than in other languages?
Partly, source morphology. Partly, mediation via Latin. Partly, particularity of English.
Remember first that Classical names in English came in via Latin most of the time. Hence Plato rather than Platon, and Hercules for Heracles.
Second, not all final -ns are the same. So there’s no contradiction about Latin keeping the final -n in Xenophon and not in Plato.
Third, English chops off more final inflections in Latin names, though less than French and (sometimes) German. That I don’t know as much about, but it’s partly to do with how the languages developed (French), and partly just random change.
So English avoids final –anus, and so does French (where English got the names from). So the names have the same ending as the corresponding adjectives, which have the same original suffix in Latin: Octavian, Vespasian, just like Christian < Christianus, quotidian < quotidianus. English and French have done the same with Latin names ending in –alis: we say Martial and martial, both of which are Martialis ~ martialis in Latin.
German does the same with –tus names, changing them to –t: German Herodot, French Herodote, English Herodotus. English does this with Theodoret, but not generally.
What is the weirdest song in your language?
Zavara Katra Nemia, Greek, 1968.
The songwriter Yannis Markopoulos was routinely subject to censorship during the Greek Junta, as a left winger. So he wrote a song with nonsense lyrics and lots of 5/8 and 11/8 metre, which got past the censors. And everyone assumed it was against the dictatorship anyway.
Zavara katra nemia Zavara katra nemia
Hallelujah HallelujahZavarakatranemia Mercy Mercy
lama lama nama nama nemia
Hallelujah Hallelujah
To my disappointment, I find on the Googles that the songwriter himself has provided an explanation of the seeming nonsense lyrics, which turns out to be a call for revolt against the dictatorship. Whether or not it’s past facto, it’s plausible-looking: (Zavara = lavara, katra = katrami, nemia = anemisan, lama “blade”, nama = mana)
Pitch-black banners waving, pitch-black banners waving
Consequence ConsequencePitch-black banners wave Mercy Mercy
Blade blade Mother Mother Waving
Consequence Consequence
And I have to say, it’s still disjoint enough to be not that much closer to lucidity. Everyone who quotes his explanation says sagely how obvious it is that he’s calling for a popular uprising. Maybe in Greek it is…
Doesn’t matter. The combination of the oracular music and Nikos Xilouris’ even more oracular vocals are meaning enough.
What is the meaning of the Greek word ‘atomos’?
Indivisible; literally, uncut. From the verb temnō, to cut; cf. tomē, a cut.
What is the importance of the Hellenistic culture?
Thx4A2A, Anon. As my fellows have asked, we’ll need more detail on what you’re asking.
I’m going to stab at a related question, which is the legacy of Hellenistic culture. In fact, that might be a good approach to vague questions like this, my fellow respondents: we grab a bit each of the possible answers that we can relate to.
We owe the Hellenistic—under which I’ll conflate Greek culture under the Romans:
- Linguistics, which started in Alexandria (Callimachus and co.) as a way of teaching the now obsolescent language of the Classics.
- Philology and textual criticism, which started in Alexandria (Callimachus and co.) as a way of stabilising the texts of the Classics.
- Library science, ditto, Alexandria.
- The novel, through a circuitous path (including Dictys Cretensis and the Roman de Troie).
- The comedy as we know it, from Menander via the renaissance revival of the Latin comic poets.
- Several influential schools of philosophy, including Stoicism and Neo-Platonism.
- The intellectual wherewithal of Christianity.
- Statues in Buddhism, through Greco-Buddhist art.
If you want to include a word or phrase in Greek in a novel, should you write it in Greek letters or should you transcribe it by pronunciation?
A novel with mass readership, not in Greek, where you don’t want to alienate readers unnecessarily, and you care to give readers some notion of what it sounds like? Use transliteration rather than original script. Same as if you were putting Hindi (or whatever your language happens to be) into a non-Hindi (or whatever) novel.
Yes, I write Greek in Greek characters here, and when I don’t, I use IPA. But I’m not writing a novel.