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Is an accent sufficient in forming a dialect?
If the accent deviates only in intonation, probably not: intonations are difficult to capture schematically; and by the time you have a different intonation, typically there’ll be a whole lot of other differences anyway.
If (as your question posits) you have only phonetic differences, but not phonological (so the same spelling system does just fine for both), and not lexical: again, typically not. The distinction between [pɑːθ] or [pæθ] is a significant isogloss of Northern vs Southern England; but traditionally those differences are accompanied by differences in lexicon and morphology (and often enough phonology), and they are what has been prioritised in the differentiation: they are bigger ticket items, and make for a more obviously distinctive linguistic system.
With the prevalence of standard English, the dialectal differences in England have been attenuated, so the phonetics is more important as a differentiator. But that’s not been a normal state of affairs.
Why do we learn Ancient Greek and Latin using the modern alphabet and not the ancient ones used at the time?
It’s an interesting question, with a boring answer. Because there’s no point.
Let’s break that down though.
1. Right up until the 19th century, the main language being written in Greek script was Ancient Greek; and right up until the 17th, the main language being written in Roman script was Latin. The script hands and typefaces (i.e. “fonts”) evolved over centuries, as memes do, but there was no differentiation felt necessary between Ancient Language font and Modern Language font.
2. People didn’t read Ancient Greek or Latin for primarily antiquarian interest: those were the contemporary languages of the intelligentsia. So they got contemporary fonts; and they couldn’t justify for themselves the additional effort of using an antiquarian script.
3. The authentic scripts of Ancient Greece had not been standardised, and varied greatly from town to town. If you’re going to go with a standardised version of Greek script—you have it, and it’s what you print Modern Greek with. (That argument doesn’t apply to Roman with Trajan’s capitals of course.)
4. The notion of antiquarianism and authenticity is really a 19th, if not 20th century thing anyway. Like historically accurate musical instruments. Before then, it would not have even occurred to anyone that a 2500 year old text should be reproduced in a 2500 year old font.
5. People are familiar with contemporary fonts, and not with really old fonts—the odd period embellishment notwithstanding (such as lunate sigmas). It is *difficult* to read even 500 year old manuscripts; that’s why palaeography is a specialist skill. The shorthand abbreviations commonplace in Greek from the 1000s right up until the 1800s are impenetrable to anyone but specialists. Ditto Latin palaeography.
6. The writing conventions of antiquity are even more challenging for contemporary readers. No lowercase, no spaces, minimal punctuation that doesn’t work the same way as modern punctuation does. Is it worth it?
Papyrologists and epigraphers differ from other classicists who work off mediaeval manuscript copies. The texts that other classicists reconstruct from the mediaeval manuscripts follow modern conventions and punctuation; there’s nothing much in the mediaeval manuscripts’ convention they feel beholden to.
Papyrologists and epigraphers OTOH are working with texts written at the time, not copies; so they are interested in preserving more of the look and feel. Still, usually they put spaces and punctuation in, if not capitals; and only the most fastidious will print two versions of the text—one as it appears on the papyrus or stone, and one normalised. Making sense of the original, unspaced, run-in, unpunctuated text is the specialist’s job—not the reader’s.
7. There’s a related question you haven’t posed, but which is worth posing: why does noone (outside the Gothic Wikipedia) print Gothic in the Gothic alphabet, instead of the Roman? Why does noone print Old Church Slavonic in Glagolitic, instead of Cyrillic? Because the people primarily interested in the scripts feel it’s part of their patrimony, and don’t feel the need or the inclination to learn a more authentic, but completely different writing system, when it’s painful enough to read the originals to begin with.
7a. Although I’ll concede that Old Church Slavonic is printed in old fashioned Cyrillic, looking like what it did before Peter the Great made it look all serifed and Western. That’s an exception to the global trend, witnessed with Greek and Latin.
How was Athens chosen as capital for the Greece?
Ancestor worship.
The first capital of Greece was Nafplio (Nauplia), which was an important port in Ottoman times, while Athens was an insignificant village that attracted the odd Western tourist.
In 1834, King Otto (himself a Western tourist) decreed that the capital of Greece shall be the most important city of Ancient Greece. For after all, Otto was King of the Hellenes.
What is the Greek word for heaven?
Ouranos for “sky, heaven”, and pre-Christian and proto-Christian notions of heaven. It’s what “Our father who art in Heaven” uses. And yes, that is the same word as Uranus; Uranus was the sky god.
Once Christianity was entrenched, Heaven as in where the virtuous dead go is Paradeisos, Paradise, as it is in Catholic languages too; English is an anomaly in retaining Heaven for that sense.
Has anyone got any ideas for a simple grammar design?
Look at Interglossa. Minimal number of verbs (a dozen?), which basically only encode thematic structures (feel, act, react, become…); and lots of verb modifiers, which capture the actual verb semantics. A thing of beauty, which has not really been followed up.
Is the modern pronunciation of Greek accurate for koine?
It’s close. This is from memory, so I could be wrong in a couple of details. 1st century AD Koine was the same as Modern Greek in the following:
- Stress accent, not pitch accent
- Diphthongs pronounced as single vowels
- Most vowels with modern values
- Most consonants with modern values
- No aspiration
It differs as follows:
- Upsilon and Omicron iota pronounced as /y/.
- Eta still /ɛ/,
- Phi in transition from /pʰ/ to /f/ via /ɸ/.
- Beta is /β/, on the way to /v/
- According to Wikipedia, delta and gamma were already /ð, ɣ/. I remember /ð/ being as late as 4th century AD, but what the hey.
In summary, if we go by the Wikipedia article for popular Greek pronunciation, the only letters whose pronunciation was substantially different from Modern were eta, upsilon, and omicron iota.
Would the Byzantines have spoken Ancient Greek or something closer to modern Greek?
Modern Greek.
Being literate in Greek has always meant being literate in Ancient Greek; so all our evidence of the vernacular is tainted, right up until the Cretan Renaissance (and there it’s tainted in a different direction, of conventionalised dialect). In the period between the Arab conquest of Egypt (when the papyri run out) and the first experiments with vernacular poetry in the 12th century, we have almost no direct evidence at all, outside of Bulgar inscriptions presumably written on their behalf by Greek prisoners of war.
But what we do know and can reconstruct tells us that the spoken language looked close to Modern Greek by the 7th century, and the texts we have in the 12th century, though macaronic, are identifiably macaronic with Modern Greek.
There would have been registers of spoken language as with every language. We have a hint from Filelfo, writing in the 15th century, that the language of the court in Mistras and Constantinople was “purer” than everywhere else. That suggests a proto-Puristic Greek, with more influence from written, atticist Greek than in the countryside.
Can you create your own rules in conlangs?
What others said. Yes, but make sure there is an internal logic to your rule, and that you’re applying it consistently and meaningfully.
Klingon has an internally consistent story with its zero copula constructions: the pronouns in copula constructions (“he — teacher”, ghojwI’ ghaH) have been reanalysed as verbs, and take verb aspect endings (“he is being a teacher”, ghojwI’ ghaH-taH) and subjects (“Worf is a teacher” ghojwI’ ghaHtaH wo’rIv’e’, literally “teacher he-ing, Worf”.)
Suzette Haden Elgin once accused Marc Okrand of linguistic malpractice, because he’d said that Klingon pronouns have subjects. Think of all the kids whose understanding of grammar will be destroyed, she exclaimed.
Fool. Cairene Arabic does pretty much the same with its pronouns.
But the key is that the rule has to be internally consistent. As Jim Grossman says, the rule likely makes more sense if the noun denotes a nominalisation to begin with. And as Zeibura Kathau says, the rule as stated is probably not what a linguist would end up describing it as—they would talk of complements of nouns instead.
And be aware of what ambiguities and dysfunctions the rule could introduce. You can have the same particle for objects of verbs and complements of nouns, as Olivier Simon does. But what happens when you have both a verb and a noun taking objects in the sentence: it is clear which of the two the complement belongs to?
Why do people say, “Call it pedophilia, not childlove” when the word “pedophilia” is Greek for “childlove”?
Just because two words have identical semantics, does not mean they have identical connotations.
Pedophilia in modern society has extremely negative connotations. It didn’t have negative connotations when it was coined in Ancient Greece, because it was coined under different cultural norms. Words carry with them the connotations that a culture puts on them.
Advocates seeking to avoid those negative connotations may try to do so by coining a new word, which doesn’t have those connotations. Calquing the word into English “childlove” is such a strategy; “childlove”, being a new coining, doesn’t particulary have any connotations, and “child” and “love” on their own sound nice. “Call it pedophilia, not childlove” expresses objection to the strategy, and wants to keep the negative connotations in place.
Literal meaning is only one part of the meaning of words.
What is the difference between Orthodox Christianity and other forms of Christianity?
Oriental Orthodoxy and Church of the East have Christological differences from other Christian churches. The Church of the East (Assyrian) rejects the Council of Ephesus (Christ–God is the same being as Christ–Man), and Oriental Orthodoxy rejects the Council of Chalcedon (Christ–God is a distinct nature from Christ–Man).
This diagram in Non-Chalcedonianism helps: Non-Chalcedonianism .
The doctrinal distinction between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism is the Filioque : whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from (obeys, if you like) the Son as well as the Father.
The substantial distinction between all the branches, of course, is not theological but identity-based: ritual and political.