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How did Greece manage to hold on to all of their islands throughout all of the wars?
Good answers from my fellow respondents. So:
- For a long time, there was no Greece, so there was noone to do the holding on.
- For a long time after that, Greece didn’t have most of the islands: it had to get hold of them:
- The Cyclades and Euboea, and the Saronic Gulf islands, were part of the Greek state since 1832
- The Ionian islands were ceded to Greece in 1864
- Most of the islands of the Aegean were ceded in 1913
- The Dodecanese were ceded in 1946
Greece did not get all the islands either: the strategic islands of Imbros and Tenedos are now officially named Gökçeada and Bozcaada, because they remained part of Turkey. Their Greek population of the islands was not subject to the 1923 Population exchange between Greece and Turkey, but it has substantially diminished since. In fact, a fair proportion of them are my parents’ neighbours in Melbourne.
How can I translate “talent” into Ancient Greek?
Well…
Talent as is in the ancient coin is τάλαντον, as Haggen Kennedy said. Talent as in being talented, not so much. The googles tell me that the modern sense is Mediaeval Latin, with an allusion to a parable in the Bible: Online Etymology Dictionary . As far as I know, that metaphorical extension did not happen in Mediaeval Greek—it’s certainly not given in Lampe’s Patristic lexicon; and the Modern Greek ταλέντο is a borrowing back from Italian.
So what of the modern sense of talent? English-Greek Dictionary is an online version of Woodhouse’s English-Greek dictionary: it gives:
- δύναμις: capacity
- δεινότης: cleverness
- φρόνησις: mental powers
- εὐφυής εἶναι εἰς..: aptitude for…
(But that is a secondary sense of εὐφυής, and in LSJ the corresponding noun εὐφυΐα still means “shapeliness; good disposition; fertility”.)
LSJ uses “talent” as a translation for:
- δῶρα: (natural) gift
- μεγαλοφυΐα: genius
Try some synonyms like “aptitude” on Woodhouse…
What alphabets are not used in mathematics and why?
Not a mathematician, but:
Mathematics as practiced in the West is a European invention, and it calls for its symbols on European patrimony. That means:
- Roman (italics, to differentiate from text)
- Including Fraktur if you want to spice things up
- And avoiding diacritics, not because they aren’t old (disagree with Martin Ekman’s answer to What alphabets are not used in mathematics and why?), but because diacritics are also used within mathematics, so they’d be misinterpreted.
- I wonder if thorn gets used…
- Greek (avoiding Greek letters that look identical to Roman letters, such as omicron, and half the capitals)
- Hebrew, because it’s the next closest prestigious alphabet to the European patrimony. Even that gets used very rarely: aleph and beth are infinity numbers, gimel is a function; is there anything else?
I’m not aware of any systematic or even ad hoc use of other scripts; Cyrillic would be the next candidate along.
Answers from actual mathematicians welcome. 🙂
Was Latin spoken in the Byzantine empire, even though the official language was Greek? And did Byzantines study Latin texts?
What Steve Theodore’s answer to Was Latin spoken in the Byzantine empire, even though the official language was Greek? And did Byzantines study Latin texts? said, and what Steve Theodore’s answer to Were the medieval Byzantines familiar with the famous figures of Roman antiquity, like Cato the Elder, Scipio Africanus, or Cincinnatus? said.
In particular, Steve mentions Maximus Planudes’ translations from Latin. Those weren’t a result of a periodic thaw, those were one-offs at the very end of Byzantium. It was only in the last century of Byzantium, with Byzantium reduced to a bystander, the Latins ruling much of the Greek-speaking world, and persistent pressure for Church Union, that Byzantine scholars noticed there was anything worthwhile done in the West at all. It was him, Demetrios Kydones, Prochoros Kydones, Gennadius Scholarius, Manuel Holobolos, George Pachymeres. All 13th century or later. And with the exception of Planudes, who did Ovid, they’re all translating Catholic theology and Boethius, not the Classics.
If the compound words, “insofar,” and “inasmuch” require that they be followed by “as”, why haven’t we made the leap to “insofaras,” and “inasmuchas”?
If people are going to run words together, they don’t so randomly. They run words together when the words form a syntactic grouping. And the stop running words together when they run into a syntactic break.
A clause like “in so far as I am able” is analysed syntactically as:
[in [so far]] [as [I am able]]
There is a break between so far and as I am able. in so far, OTOH, can be argued to hang together as a group. (Even if it doesn’t, it can be argued to be reanalysed into a group that hangs together. Handwaving there, because I don’t care deeply about syntax.)
So there is a natural intuition that prevents you making the leap to insofaras: the as belongs with the following clause, so you can’t run it in with the preceding clause.
As to why the run in to begin with: that’s syntactic reanalysis. in so far as does make sense, if you think about it, but it’s a fairly abstract kind of sense, using a metaphor with spatial extent standing in for validity. Once the metaphor becomes opaque, particularly in a legalese context, people won’t really make sense of in so far word-for-word; so they’ll be tempted to rattle it off as gobbledygook, and thus reanalyse it as a single word.
What they won’t do is extend the gobbledygook to the next word, because they do still understand that as is a conjunction introducing a clause, and not gobbledygook.
Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages?
What Tomasz Dec’s answer to Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages? said. Icelandic is likely the most successful, as the poster-child of conservative intervention in language change in general. Lots of European languages have had bouts of this. German fought the good fight for a fair while, and their vocabulary is more purist than many on the continent, but it wasn’t as thorough going as some. Greek quite successfully eradicated or marginalised Italian and Turkish from their vocabulary, and came up with lots of native coinings for terminology—before they gave up and let French in. Turkish had a major campaign of eradicating Arabic and Persian words for made up Turkic words—and French.
Noone’s said much about non-European languages. There are loans in Chinese alright, but in a (largely) monosyllabic language like Chinese, mass influx of Latin or English terminology is not as practical. There certainly has been mass influx of English into Japanese, though their phonology makes the loans look quite different.
Should countries do it? It’s a matter of their ideology and their feeling of insecurity in the world. I won’t say they have to.
I also won’t say they needn’t bother, or make fun of them for doing so. Two groups do:
- Linguists, but this is not a linguistic issue, it’s a sociolinguistics (and indeed primarily sociological) issue, so it’s none of their business. It’s not the communicative adequacy of a hybridised language that’s at issue, it’s whether the community want to have a hybridised language.
- English speakers: “Ooh, look at us! We don’t have an Academie, like those awful Frenchies! Our language is a mongrel, so that makes it superior to any language spoken in history, aren’t we special.” No, no, you’re not, pilgrim. Your societies just happened to have made a different choice in the 16th through 19th centuries. And had a choice imposed on them in the 11th through 15th century. That doesn’t make you special, just different.
How do I teach myself the Byzantine/Medieval Greek language, i.e., around the 9th century?
Hm. Noone teaches Byzantine Greek as something distinct from Ancient Greek. That’s because for most purposes, it isn’t distinct.
I’m going to go through a potted history of Byzantine Greek for others who might stumble on this question.
There are three registers of Mediaeval Greek to consider; I’ll use Mediaeval to include Greek under Latin rule.
- The vernacular doesn’t show up much at all; nothing systematic before the 14th century. There is exceptionally a vernacular corpus from the 9th century, the Category:Bulgarian Greek inscriptions. You don’t need Modern Greek to read them.
- Low literary Greek was an officialese Koine, with occasional hints of vernacular developments, and lots of Latinisms.
- High literary Greek was Atticist: it was an attempt to write in the Attic of the ancients, with varying degrees of over-enthusiasm.
If you’re going to work with Mediaeval or Byzantine Greek, you do the following:
- Learn Ancient Greek. There will be atticisms of various flavours, a bit more than in the Gospels (though some church fathers had reasonable Attic learning).
- Be across Koine.
- You won’t need to learn Modern Greek unless you are actually working on vernacular texts.
- Read a couple of histories of Greek, so you know in broad terms what’s likely to come up. Medieval and Modern Greek (9780521299787): Robert Browning, A History of the Language and its Speakers (9781118785157): Geoffrey Horrocks
- There isn’t much in terms of a grammar of Byzantine Greek; An historical Greek grammar chiefly of the Attic dialect [By] Antonius N. Jannaris is still the best out there. There are specialist articles, but you likely won’t need them.
- Bring a dictionary. Bring three, actually: A Patristic Greek Lexicon: G. W. H. Lampe; Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität; Greek lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine periods (from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1100) : Sophocles, E. A.
- Be prepared for oddities. The oddities will depend on who’s writing and when. Atticists get enthusiastic to the point of fictional grammar. (When Harry Turtledove was a Byzantinist, he wrote “Most Byzantine historians felt they knew enough to use the optatives correctly; some of them were right”.) Byzantine authors systematically misaccented words, because they could. Some authors slip up and let vernacularisms in, though that’s more a late Byzantine thing.
Modern inventions have made it possible to hear how our great grand parents spoke. Will this influence how the language and dialects change?
*Probably* not.
Language change is influenced by several things, in both a conservative and a innovative direction. Input from older versions of the languages demonstrably has an effect in holding back language change — or at least, in promoting use of the older version’s features in parallel.
- Outright reversing language change doesn’t happen that often, and needs special circumstances—like with Icelandic and flæmeli (small population, universal literacy). Conservative influence however has a lower threshold for success.
But the success of conservative influence is incidental to it being older. The real reason why any conservative input would be successful is that it is being held up as prestigious. This is what happens with standard literary versions of languages: they happen to be more conservative than spoken variants of languages, but they influence language change because they are held up as prestigious, particularly in education.
So for old recordings to influence language change, it is not enough that they become available. They would need to be actively promoted in mass education as models to be emulated. In western culture at least that seems unlikely.
One area where recordings have much more of an impact is language revival efforts. In that context, knowing what your ancestors’ native accent was like is very important, though it may not be enough for you to shake off your modern accent…
Is it possible to make a language out of only one type of word (noun, verb, adjective etc)?
Logan R. Kearsley has written a comprehensive answer on one angle. I will throw a hint on another angle: if you have enough Noun Incorporation (linguistics) and polysynthesis at a language, you’re going to end up with languages where what European languages treat as nouns or adjectives usually end up as affixes—so what look like words are mostly verbs. In fact, from time to time you do hear people claiming that some such languages (almost always Amerindian languages) don’t have nouns, though my recollection is that the claim is marginal.
So you can in principle have languages with just verbs. However in practice you do have affixes that will tend to signify arguments rather than predicates—so you’ve really just pushed the noun/verb distinction down into morphemes rather than words.
Oh, I see Logan has also written on the converse, whether a language can have just nouns: Is it possible to make a language with just nouns and adjectives?
Did the ancient Greeks use a different language for a special purpose like it was the case with Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in India?
Did the Ancient Greeks have a different *language* for sacred purposes? No, Ancient Greek was their language.
But the Ancient Greeks did use different dialects for different genres of literature, to an extent that has not been paralleled since. Epic dialect (a mix based on archaic Ionic) for epic poetry, and allusions to it, is the closest they had to a Latin or Sanskrit, given the immense prestige of Homer. Doric for choral poetry, Aeolic for lyric poetry, Ionic for history and medicine (following Herodotus and Hippocrates), Attic for default prose.
The Mediaeval and Modern Greeks are a better comparison. There was a little Epic, Ionic and Doric written now and then, but the main distinction was between learnèd registers and the vernacular, with the vernacular avoided thoroughly until the 12th century, and by most writers right until the 20th century. The learnèd registers were varying mixes of Attic, Koine, and calqued French. (Those who’ve read Psichari know what I mean by the last bit.)
And to this day, the Greek Orthodox (and those of that heritage) are very uncomfortable with the vernacular being used in a Christian religious context. I did a spit-take walking past a Greek Catholic church, and hearing the mass in Modern Greek. Catholics in Greece are post-Vatican II, after all. Unthinkable in Orthodox services. The most vernacular language used in the services is probably the Gospels…