Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 325 other subscribersJune 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
What is Yahweh’s name (Hebrew) translated into Ancient Greek?
There was a taboo on saying YHWH out loud in Hebrew, and that extended to other languages; so yes, the Septuagint rendered YHWH as Kyrios, the Lord, just as Jehovah (when Christians rediscovered YHWH) comes from YHWH with the vowels of Adonai.
Now, Jehovah has come into Modern Greek as Ιεχωβάς, /iexovas/. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, are Μάρτυρες του Ιεχωβά. But Jehovah is a Renaissance coinage in western languages.
Did any Greek writings render YHWH?
Well, some Greek theologians discussed YHWH as YHWH. The Hebrew יהוה looks like the Greek ΠΙΠΙ. Hence the work spuriously attributed to Evagrius Ponticus “About PIPI”—although if you read it, pseudo-Evagrius knows perfectly well what a yod and a he is.
We also know that Theodoret (Quaestiones in Octateuchum p. 112) said that the Samaritans pronounced YHWH as Ἰαβέ, /iaβe/. He says that Jews instead pronounce “I am that I am” as Ἰά /ia/, which is of course just Yah. Epiphanius of Salamis‘ Panarion also mentions Ἰαβέ “He who was and who will forever be” as one of the many Jewish names for God
The Greek Magical Papyri are full of referenced to all manner of deities, including Yahweh, but only once or twice as Ἰαβέ. Their usual way of alluding to YHWH was Ἰαώ /iaɔː/(Iao – The Encyclopedia of Ancient History – Pleŝe – Wiley Online Library ).
For what reason is the Czech ř hard to pronounce for most foreigners?
It’s a genuinely difficult phoneme to articulate. Back in the 80s, when the Guinness Book of Records was more than a picture book, it was listed as the most difficult to acquire—kids are supposed not to pick it up until they’re 7, and our own Zeibura S. Kathau says they have cram schools for it.
So what’s the deal with [r̝]? (See: Dental, alveolar and postalveolar trills)
- Trills are hard to articulate to begin with. As witnessed by questions here on Quora.
- There’s two articulations going on at the same time: both fricative and trill. That’s a much harder task. Much harder.
- And bugger me if I can hear anything but [rʒ] in the Wikipedia recording. Like any learner of Czech. Though I’m notorious for having a tin ear.
- It’s a complicated articulation, and (cause–and–effect) it’s very infrequent in human language, so it’s not like lots of people get exposed to it outside of Czechia. Kobon language has it as well, but it’s only one of like eight allophones of /r/; so if ever you have to learn Kobon (10000 speakers, which is huge for Papua New Guinea), you could get away with mangling it. Whereas in Czech, ržát [rʒaːt] (‘to neigh’) and řád [r̝aːt] (‘order’) are a minimal pair. Nice one, people of Czechia.
Why do many European languages use the same word for “morning” and “tomorrow”?
Brian Collins says “Probably because the protolanguage did not distinguish between those forms.”
Actually, Brian has sketched the answer in his response, but the foregoing isn’t quite it.
Indo-European languages often use notions of “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early” interchangably. The Ancient Greek for “tomorrow”, aurion, is cognate to the Lithuanian aušrà “dawn”; and the Ancient Greek for “morning”, prōi, is transparently related to the word for “before”, pro. So it’s tempting to say “‘coz Proto–Indo-European”.
But (a) that doesn’t tell you why Proto–Indo-European conflated the two notions. And (b) it doesn’t tell you why Polish turned the word for “early” into the word for “morning”, as Brian reports. The Poles didn’t speak Proto–Indo-European.
Neither did Mediaeval Greeks, when they ditched both aurion and prōi, and instead started suing forms of taxia to mean both “tomorrow” and “morning”. Unsurprisingly, taxia comes from the ancient Greek word for “fast”, takhy… which in this context means “soon”, as in “early”: Remember: “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early”.
If the same meaning shifts keep happening again and again, it’s not because Proto–Indo-European: it’s because those shifts make sense.
So: why conflate morning and early? Because morning is the early part of the day, duh.
So, more interestingly: why conflate morning and tomorrow?
If you don’t do something by COB today, what do you tell your boss?
“I’ll do it in the morning.”
What does that mean?
That you’ll do it tomorrow.
It’s even more true if you’re a peasant, like most speakers of most languages have been. When do you think of tomorrow? Not first thing in the morning; but in the evening, when you’re planning what you’re going to do the next day. What do you think of tomorrow as, in the evening when you’re planning your work? Not as tomorrow evening—that’s when you’re meant to have finished the stuff you’re going to do the next day. But as tomorrow morning, when the next day’s work starts.
So a lot of people would say a lot of times “I’ll do it in the morning.” In that common context, morning is ambiguous with tomorrow. So morning ends up standing in for tomorrow, as a more vivid or concrete way of referring to it.
And not because people have forgotten how to say “tomorrow”. Words rarely change to fill a gap: they change to make communication more vivid.
What are the differences between cypriot accent and greece accent?
I’m not going to do this question justice.
Phonological differences in the dialect that carry across to the accent:
- Lots of /n/s that have dropped off in standard Greek, and longer [n]s than in standard Greek. So it sounds nasal: not French, nasal vowel nasal, but lots of nnnns nasal.
- The Greek counterpart of the Onion has an article on a tech upgrade to RIK (Cypriot TV) eliminating their Cypriot accents. The title of the piece is Χωρίς κυπριακή προφορά τα ελληνικά στο ανανεωμένο ΡΙΚ HD • Το Κουλούρι (“No Cypriot accent in the Greek of the rejuvenated RIK HD”). The web page file name is more direct: rik_without_ni, “RIK with no n’s”.
- Different stop contrasts. Standard Greek contrasts voiceless [t] and prenasalised [ⁿd], which increasingly ends up as [d]. Cypriot contrasts [tʰ] (initial geminate t), geminate [tː], and prenasalised [ⁿd]. That means that in the dialect, there are unfamiliar geminates and aspirates; and when speaking standard Greek, the stops sound wrong.
More singsong than Standard Greek (which isn’t hard, Standard Greek is pretty rat-tat-tat). Because of the geminates and the long [n]s, somewhat slower and more deliberate sounding (again, in contrast to Standard Greek rat-tat-tat).
Should the Greek people give Alexis Tsipras another chance as their prime minister?
I no longer follow Greek politics for the same reason I stopped following US politics: too depressing.
I refer you however to the Greek version of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”, as I have illustrated here:
Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean?
I also look forward to hearing about Tsipras what I heard about Andreas Papandreou during recent visits: “A demagogue! A deceiver!” And that it doesn’t take twenty years and an economic collapse for people to see through this instance of populism.
EDIT: the question photo, btw, is why the Greek people shouldn’t give Tsipras a second chance. It’s from the Thessalonica International Fair, and it was where Tsipras the candidate, in September 2014, announced all the things he was going to do—the notorious “Thessaloniki Programme“.
We campaign in poetry, we govern in prose. But it’s handy as a politician not to get too surrealist in your poetry.
How does Turkish sound to non-Turkish speakers?
Originally Answered:
What does Turkish sound like to foreigners?
Like French with a /ɯ/ in it.
I was about to say “and without the annoying mumbling”; but, having been to Istanbul:
Like French with a /ɯ/ in it.
I do actually like the sound of it. (Although as a Greek I’m not allowed to say that.) And vowel harmony is cute.
Why is there a ‘d’ in the word fridge but not in the word refrigerator?
Allow me to write a more general answer.
The phonotactics of a language, and the conventions of its spelling, can lead speakers to expect letters to be pronounced differently in different contexts—for example, at the start or at the end of a word.
Truncation, in words like (re)frig(erator), takes a sound from the start or middle or end of a word, and makes it a new word. So [ɹɛfrɪdʒəɹeɪda] becomes [frɪdʒ].
But when you come to spelling that truncation, you find that keeping the old spelling can be misleading in its new context (which is after all, a brand new and unfamiliar word). So as both other respondents have written, you can’t spell [frɪdʒ] as (re)frig(erator) > frig: <g> at the end of a word in English is always [ɡ], so you have to add a final <e>.
Moreover, English typically spells final [dʒ] as <dge>. Plain <ge> does exist, particularly in old –age loans from French; but an unfamiliar word ending in <ige> could be taken for a recent loan from French, and pronounced in the recent French fashion: [ʒ]. Even if that risk didn’t exist, spelling will prefer the usual <dge> pattern anyway, because familiarity in spelling is important (and when deciphering unfamiliar new words, we need all the help we can get).
Australian English truncates words a lot, and has to deal with this issue. The truncation of breakfast can’t be breakie: the shortening of the <ea> is irregular, and wouldn’t be extended to the new word. So it’s usually spelled brekkie. The truncation of poverty can’t be povo, because English shortens long vowels on the third syllable back, not the second; so it is spelled povvo instead, with the double consonant indicating that the first <o> is short. Ditto Seppo as the truncation of Septic Tank = Yank = American.
Why are there languages which are spoken the same but written in different script or alphabets?
Traditionally in Europe: religion. As a more general answer than religion, which covers the other answers here: culture. Scripts comes from a particular culture, and adherents of that culture adopt that script. If speakers of the same language belong to different cultures, they use different scripts. If there is a massive cultural shift in the language community, then everyone shifts script.
The critical thing to note here: writing is a cultural artefact, much more thoroughly than language is. So it does not pattern with language, and can change even more quickly. It can change by fiat, or by proselytism, more quickly than language does.
So three hundred years ago, Greek Orthodox Christians wrote Greek in the Greek script; Greek Jews wrote Greek in Hebrew script; Greek Muslims wrote Greek in Arabic script; and Greek Catholics wrote Greek in Roman script. Four hundred years ago, Orthodox Cretan authors wrote Greek in Roman script too—because they were writing Renaissance plays influenced by Italian culture, and all their Ancient Greek references were via Italian. The Orthodox churchmen in Crete at the same time were writing in Greek script.
Ditto Albania, with the added mess that some Albanians made up their own scripts. Coming up with a single Albanian alphabet was a necessary step to having Albanian nationalism override the credal identities of Albanian subcommunities.
Hence what used to happen with Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. It flabbergasts me that Serbs also use the Roman alphabet, but that’s about a new culture (or religion): Westernism. Which is also why Turkey switched to Roman.
Hence also the merry-go-round of scripts in the former Soviet Union. Arabic (Islam); then Latin (Westernism); then Cyrillic (Sovietism); then Latin again (Pan-Turkism).
Chinese Traditional vs Simplified is partly about culture (rejection of the past), though of course many of the simplified characters are older cursive forms, so they’re hardly made up out of thin cloth. There was some Westernising enthusiasm around Pinyin, but certainly not enough to displace the ideographic script.
What is the Greek word for actor?
Modern Greek: like everyone else said, ηθοποιός. In Ancient Greek this meant “character-building”. The modern meaning came about because plays can be character building, I suppose, but I can’t find out when the meaning shift happened. Pretty sure it’s very recent.
The word is from katharevousa. The old vernacular word is θεατρίνος, which is still around in its pejorative meaning of “drama queen; impostor”.
Like the Ancient word for actor.
Oh, what’s the Ancient word for actor, you ask?
hypokritɛ́ːs.
You recognise that word, don’t you?
With knowledge of modern Greek what historical literature could I read?
Hm.
I keep disagreeing that you’d understand all of the New Testament. Mark and John, sure; Paul, not so much.
Byzantine learned literature: forget it. It’s not identical to Attic Greek, but you’ll need Attic Greek (and a decoder ring) to make sense of it.
Byzantine Vernacular literature (1100 onward): sure, but knowing some dialect, e.g. Cypriot or Cretan will help a lot.
Attic. No. Worse, you’ll think that you understand it, and you’ll be wrong.
Homeric. As I love to say, it might as well be Albanian.
Faleminderit!