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Since the Greeks and the Romans seemed relatively cultured people (at least by the standards of their time), how were they deceived by Christianity?
Hm, question with assumptions much?
Note that:
- The Roman Empire was not a Gene Rodenberry Humanist utopia. It was fertile ground for all manner of (as the Roman sceptics would have put it) strange cults from the East, and it certainly had not turned away from religion in any meaningful sense.
- Lucian derided many of these cults in his Passing of Peregrinus and Alexander the False Prophet (including a very early and somewhat confused mention of Christians) ; that tells you that they prospered.
- Lucian was in the elite, and his scepticism was very much an exception. (He made Greek mythology sound absurd, too; and it’s very hard for us to recover the sense of awe that the myths originally had.) Christianity, like other new religions, took root among the disenfranchised Greek-speaking masses.
- As religions went, Christianity was not more absurd-looking than whatever else was on offer in the Empire. It was absurd-looking from the perspective of post-Temple Judaism; but it has been argued that what made it absurd to Jews is what made it plausible to Gentiles (divine birth, relaxation of Mosaic law).
What is the plural form of the word “vertex”? Why is it irregular?
Vertices.
Why? Because the word is straight of out Latin, and Latin has a lot of declensions that look weird from the perspective of English.
In particular, the plural vertices suggests that the singular should be vertix, just like the singular of matrices is matrix. There are a lot of –ices plurals corresponding to –ex singulars in Latin thoough, and historical linguists mumble something about analogy and/or vowel reduction. Sihler’s New Comparative Grammar p. 67 is my source for the mumblings.
Why use the Latin vertices rather than a regular vertexes? Because (a) vertex is a learnèd, rare word; (b) vertex is a word straight out of Latin, that never really was assimilated into English; (c) even common Latin words following the –ex -ices pattern don’t readily get regularised into English, precisely because –ex is so redolent of Latin.
We say indexes now, but we still say indices too; it’s the more common meaning of index, as what’s in the back of a book, that gets the English indexes plural.
What interesting differences would there be today if I went back in time to ensure that “-tion” words in English instead ended in “-tio”?
where the endings “-tion” and “-tio” both were in use.
Alack, not so.
The Latin ending is nominative –tio, genitive –tionis, dative –tioni, accusative –tionem, ablative –tione.
That’s a pain, sure, but the common pattern is that the underlying ending seems to be –tion– (and that’s what you’d reconstruct the proto-Latin nominative as). The nominative drops the final –n since there’s nothing after it, since Latin doesn’t normally have final –n‘s; that’s what makes a lot of Latin declensions look inconsistent (and even more Greek ones).
When the Latin case system melted down, speakers went with the regularity they could see, and reduced it all to –tione (Italian) or –tion (Old French). English got its Latin from Old French. And it did not have the option of getting them without the final -n, straight from Latin.
Much more recent loans straight from Latin will take them as –tio ; the only one I can think of though is fellatio. And the taboo nature of it probably explains why it wasn’t Francified to *fellation: it was not so much a borrowing, as a way of hiding the meaning, so it wasn’t a real English word.
So…
What would happen if you went back and switched –tion to –tio?
It’s an odd thing in English to have words ending in –o; that’s not an English thing, it’s an Italian and Spanish thing (see List words ending with io ). It’s an Italian and Spanish thing precisely because it’s not a French thing—French aggressively dropped final vowels (-tione > -tion; *bono > bon). You couldn’t switch tion to –tio in isolation back then; you’d have to make sure all those final vowels were kept in general, because if you didn’t, people would make –tio sound like something more familiar. Like say –ty (which comes from Latin –tia).
To make that work in turn, you’d basically have to have English borrow words from Italian or Spanish instead of French. Words like braggadocio and machismo would be closer to the norm than the exception. And as an added bonus, English would sound even less Germanic.
Opera singers would be grateful.
Is Greece more West or East?
Greece was an Eastern country in 1832, and has been telling itself ever since that it’s a Western country. (That’s what the Westerners were telling her too. At least, to her face.)
By the 1990s, Greece was a Western country. But the Eastern roots are still there.
When the switchover between East and West happened is hard to answer. I think it’s the 1980s, others might think it was the 1880’s.
There’s been a lot of talk here on Quora about Greeks calling themselves Roman (Ρωμιός). The Hellene/Roman dichotomy is the Western/Eastern dichotomy.
Does Monaco have its own language, or local dialect?
Yup. Close to the dialect of Genoa, which Monaco sits next to: Monégasque dialect.
There’s been some promotion of Monegasque recently, but Monaco isn’t in the right part of the world for promoting small languages. The Duchy of Savoy (in the same general area, and homeland of Franco-Provençal/Arpitan) made French its official language three years before France did, and 300 years before they became part of France.
Are memes a novel linguistic category of proverbs?
Hm. In this subculture, sure. Adage at least, if not proverb.
The fragmentation of culture in the Anglosphere, and the lack of common cultural reference points as a result, is a strange thing. It feels unprecedented. You can’t fall back on common literary references any more. The Anglosphere thinks traditional wisdom is old hat and values innovation; so proverbs are derided as cliches (a big difference from say Greekdom). You can fall back on pop songs and movies to some extent, but only to some extent, because of the fragmentation.
So in this culture, memes fill a function. They are visual, because the communication enables it. Maybe not completely unprecedented; there’s lots of coded memes in Renaissance painting, for example. But yeah, they’re a proverb of the future.
What non-Roman scripts keep foreign words in Roman?
In the last few decades, written Greek uses Roman script for foreign names by default, unless the name is extremely newsworthy. So you’ll see
Το συγκινητικό ντοκιμαντέρ για τη ζωή της Amy Winehouse (The moving documentary on Amy Winehouse’s life)
Rehab της Amy Winehouse, σε διασκευή των Vocal Adrenaline. (Rehab by Amy Winehouse, arranged by Vocal Adrenaline)
More rarely, you’ll get Roman + Greek:
Ο πατέρας της, Μίτσελ Γουάινχάους (Mitchell Winehouse) ήταν ταξιτζής και τζαζίστας, η μητέρα της Τζάνις (Janis Winehouse) ήταν φαρμακοποιός (Her father Mitchell Winehouse was a cab driver and jazzman, her mother Janis was a pharmacist)
And rarely (I find), you’ll get just Greek:
Η Έιμι Γουάινχαουζ «ζωντανεύει» δια χειρος Ασίφ Καπάντια (Amy Winehouse comes alive through the work of Asif Kapadia)
This doesn’t get done for world leaders who show up in newspaper headlines constantly. So Schäuble, the German finance minister and current bête noire of Greece, is always transliterated as Σόιμπλε. The headline in the following is more unusual than the lead;
Κρεμλίνο: Ο Putin δεν θα συναντηθεί με τον Εrdogan (Kremlin: Putin will not meet Erdoğan)
Ο Πρόεδρος της Ρωσίας Βλαντίμιρ Πούτιν δεν σχεδιάζει να συναντήσει τον τούρκο ομόλογό του Ρετζέπ Ταγίπ Ερντογάν … (The president of Russia Vladimir Putin does not plan to meet with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan)
The foreign script is always Roman; you won’t see Ο Путин δεν θα συναντηθεί (even though Cyrillic should be more familiar).
Of course, there is individual variation. In this Reddit thread (Τι κάνει ο Χόκινγκ; Επιστήμη ή μάρκετινγκ; (Το άρθρο που “καίει” αυτή τη στιγμή το twitter #protagon_science) • /r/greece), the first comment has Χόκιγκ, the second has Hawking.
The untransliterated Roman is a recent thing, maybe two decades old. Before then, transliteration into Greek was universal.
History: During Alexander’s invasions, would his soldiers have found Old Persian or Indic to be somewhat familiar sounding given their closeness to Greek?
Good insight, Sabeshan. Probably. And they probably wouldn’t have cared.
300 BC was a good time to be doing historical linguistics. The Indo-European languages were a lot closer to each other back then than they are now. In fact, the only reason Indo-European was discovered and reconstructed when it was, was that we had 2000 and 3000 year old records of Indo-European languages.
And the Greeks were well placed to do historical linguistics. They were already familiar with lots of different dialects of Greek, and the regular phonological correspondences between them.
But the Greeks did not make much of historical linguistics.
- For starters, they didn’t really have the wherewithal for linguistic analysis. Linguistics as we know it is a Roman-era invention. The sophists got language analysis started in Classical time, but it was quite rudimentary. Aristophanes in his Frogs makes fun of Euripides’ new-fangled, sophist-inspired notions. Those notions include word and verse.
- For seconds, they were profoundly indifferent to the barbarians’ languages. They were, after all, bar-bar-bar gibberish. Herodotus records some Persian and Scythian derivations of names, so Greeks did learn languages; but they didn’t at the time particularly reflect on them. I think some Greek somewhere did speculate on Latin being a Greek dialect, because of the similarities; but that was later.
- For thirds, reflecting on the relatedness of languages is a very recent thing. The identification of Indo-European and Uralic languages as families is a very late thing—18th century.
- For fourths, if all the languages you’ve been exposed to are Indo-European, then your conclusion is that all languages in the world have vaguely similar words for “mother” and “daughter”. Someone who particularly cared could have noticed that those similarities did not extend to Phoenecian, Egyptian and Aramaic (or even that Phoenecian, Egyptian and Aramaic were similar). The Greeks did not particularly care.
Since we say Slovenia, Serbia, and Croatia, then why do we say Czech Republic instead of Czechia?
I am going to regret wading into this.
I am quite OK to say Czechia; then again, I have been exposed to languages that are quite OK to say Czechia (Tschechei, Tchéquie, Τσεχία, Ĉeĥio). So why the anomaly in English?
It could be an endogenous reason—because Czechia doesn’t work for English speakers; or it could be an exogenous reason—because someone told English speakers to use Czech Republic instead.
Is there something awkward in English about Czechia? Can’t be that the root is monosyllabic: we’re fine with Serbia and Bosnia and India. Can’t be the final -/k/ before –ia: Slovakia is OK.
Is it that Czech and Czech-oslovakia is familiar, and Czechia is unfamiliar? A minor factor, possibly, but I find it hard to believe that it was decisive. We didn’t freak out with Abkhaz ~ Abkhazia, after all.
So I’ll assume it was exogenous reasons. Someone, at the critical time of the Velvet Divorce, told English speakers that they should use Czech Republic; and Czechia wasn’t put forward as an alternative. Without exposure to the alternative Czechia, people went with Czech Republic.
Actually, no they didn’t, because that’s a damn fool thing to call a country. Noone says they went on holidays to the Commonwealth of Australia, or that they like listening to Republic of Korea-Pop. Without being given the option of Czechia, they started calling the country Czech.
Now, why were English-speakers not given the option? Presumably because some shmuck started getting all hot under the collar about how Čechy is not Česko, and we can’t have the world language conflating Čechy with Česko, and Moravo-Silesians are people too.
That hypothesis leads to the following questions:
1. Why did only English get subjected to that kind of edict?
2. Why did anyone in Czechia assume that anyone outside Czechia cares about the difference between Čechy and Česko?
3. Why did anyone in Czechia not realise that the small number of people who are both native speakers of English and care about the difference between Čechy and Česko, already have a word for Čechy—Bohemian.
4. Why did anyone in Czechia think they could get non-Czechs to understand that Czechia only refers to Bohemia, but Czech refers to Bohemia + Moravia + Silesia?
English does not have a committee running it, as Zeibura S. Kathau says in his answer. It does however have linguistic conventions and regularities. By making people say Czech Republic, the aforementioned shmuck was flouting the linguistic conventions and regularities of English. For that, they deserve to been bastinado’d.
Except that Fate has held an even better vengeance for that shmuck—and as collateral damage, all of said shmuck’s compatriots.
Fate has rewarded said shmuck with a generation of English speakers, saying that they went on holidays to Czech.
Is degrammaticalization real?
Well.
Grammaticalisation theory posits that there is a regular process in language of content words becoming function words and then bound morphemes.
Opponents of grammaticalisation theory (e.g. Lyle Campbell, Brian Joseph) posit that grammaticalisation theory is not particularly meaningful if there are counterexamples (degrammaticalisation), whereby function words or bound morphemes become content words. Their ultimate point is that grammaticalisation is not a discrete phenomenon, and doesn’t have explanatory power.
Proponents of grammaticalisation theory counter that the preponderance of change is in the direction of grammaticalisation, so it is still a meaningful claim. That’s the point of Kasper Geeroms’ answer. FWIW, I agree that grammaticalisation is a preponderance, although I think “rare” is an overstatement; and it is certainly a distinct process from degrammaticalisation, which needs to be made sense of.
Olli Mann’s comment would be an extreme approach, to deny it is happening. But it does happen; to up the ante and the pros and cons are the more obvious example from English, and Campbell has brought up lots of Finnish examples. My recollection is that grammaticalisation theorists tried to deny degrammaticalisation at the beginning, then just harrumphed it was an exception.
EDIT:
Oli Mann asks:
Do you know any striking examples of degrammaticalization?
Yes. (And my PhD thesis was done in the grammaticalisation framework, so not speaking as a hater.)
I’ll give an example in Greek, since I can speak to it; someone has written up a paper on it, but I don’t remember who.
Homeric Greek: ex and ana : two distinct prepositions/adverbs/verb prefixes (like in German).
Classical Greek: ex-ana– : verb prefix; ex and ana: prepositions. No more treatment of verb prefixes as separable morphemes (adverbs).
Early Modern Greek: xana-: verb prefix. ex and ana do not exist as separate morphemes. (Well, okh is a reflex of ex as a preposition, though it is regionally restricted.)
Modern Greek: xana– : verb prefix. AND adverb.
You could argue that xana– became an adverb by analogy with other productive prefixes, which also remained prepositions (apo, para). But they’re prepositions, not adverbs.
You could argue that this is just reanalysis. And so it is; but it’s reanalysis going the wrong way.