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What is the etymology of the ancient Greek word “Otis”?
Frisk’s etymological dictionary concurs with Frank Dauenhauer’s answer, that the bustard was called ōtis ‘one with ears’ (“from its cheek tufts or head? See Thompson, Birds”); thus also ōtos ‘scops owl’, from its ear tufts.
If you go to A glossary of Greek birds : Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 1860-1948 Sir, p. 200, you’ll find he says the etymology is doubtful, as well as whether the bird is the Great bustard (Otis tarda) or the Houbara bustard. But I don’t see what else it would be.
How did old linguists in a pre medical screening world manage to figure out phonologies so perfectly?
Articulatory phonetics was indeed done before Palatography. And not just by the Ottomans: the Korean script Hangul originated in articulatory phonetics, and for that matter both the Sanskrit grammarians and the later Graeco-Roman grammarians had pretty much had it figured out.
And they could just as my students in first year were able to learn phonetics from me, by watching my mouth and thinking about their tongue positioning. Yes, we used diagrams like that too, but people do know what the roof of their mouth is, or their hard palate, or that bumpy thing just behind their teeth; they know when they are rounding their lips, and when their tongue moves to the front or back of their mouth. For the phonemically distinct places and manners of articulation of any language—just half a dozen each—you don’t need any more detail in location than what you can introspect by being aware of what your mouth muscles are doing.
Phonetic detail needs more than that. And phonetic detail is the domain of the palatograph and the spectrogram.
Tear it down, Elias!
Contemplating the follies of Quora, as I am wont to do, is an often dispiriting exercise. An Existentialist Parable, as I have called it. An exercise that can made one go all nihilistic.
I’m already warning friends to intervene if they find me muttering “Tear it down, Elias!”
To help them do so, I need to recount what that phrase means.
I’ve just discovered it myself, thanks to Constantinos Kalampokis’ answer to Why do Greeks break plates when dancing? and, independently, Evangelos Lolos at https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Gre…
I could cite Constantinos’ answer, but I’d rather retell the story myself.
The phrase comes from a Greek movie triptych about loneliness, It’s a Long Road (1998). The first two parts of the movie are obscurantist and ruminative, in the way you’d expect of a European arthouse film: a game warden confronted by the shooting of the last midget goose in a national park; an archaeologist stumbling on an ancient tomb of Macedon.
The third part was not as popular with the critics, because its dabbling in Greek low culture makes it stylistically more uneven than the muted first two parts. The third part is nihilistically over the top, and was, quite plausibly, something of a hit with non-arthouse audiences; it even has a Facebook fan page. The YouTube commentariat, vulgar and sexist though they are, are quite unanimous that this film should be taught in school. And they draw parallels with the wasted finances of the 90s, that have brought Greece to where it is now.
But mostly, revelling in the macho nihilism.
The full 40 mins is online. It is a very good film:
This clip is abridged (10 mins); it doesn’t give enough of the protagonist’s despair, and it emphasises the over-the-topness over the lead up, but it works:
Times given from the 10 min abridgement.
Makis Tsetsenoglou runs a furniture factory in the small town of Kilkis. His wife leaves him and takes the kids. (“Two months ago, you came to my bed and stunk of Bulgarian women.”) The abridgement skips Makis’ shock and isolation, and picks up with Makis heading to the local bouzouki joint, Vietnam, to drown his sorrows. His sorrows won’t drown easy.
He orders rosepetals cast onto the chanteuse (2:30). His sorrows do not drown.
He orders all the plates in the establishment brought to the dancefloor for smashing (3:00). His sorrows do not drown.
He bids the reluctant establishment owner come out (“Why the hell didn’t you tell him I wasn’t in?”), and asks him to bring out whatever glassware can be smashed from the kitchen (4:50). His sorrows do not drown.
As bored Bulgarian hookers look on, the owner comes out to check whether Makis is having a good time (6:00). Why, no, my dear Mr Makis, there is nothing left to smash. All that’s left is the bathroom tiles. Makis turns to him with a smile. The toilet bowls are ceremonially dispatched on the dance floor; he is paying, after all. Yet his sorrows do not drown.
“Tell me. (7:15) How much do you reckon this joint is worth?” “Maybe 20–25 mill?” “Fine, I’ll give you 30 mill, to sell it to me this instant.” “What do you want to do, Makis? Run it?” “Run it? Don’t be stupid. I want to smash it.” His sorrows do not drown, but he does finally start dancing.
The musicians adjourn outside. He signs the check (8:00), and when the owner sycophantically says και το καινούργιο δικό σου, μεγάλε “You can own the rebuilt joint too, chief”, Makis issues one of those ceremonial phrases that Greeks and Turks are renowned for—though this particular ceremonial phrase is original with him: να ’χουμε να γκρεμίζουμε. “May we always have enough money to keep demolishing with.”
He then takes a bottle of whisky, and uses it to set his tie alight to the sound of the bouzouki. He sets his favourite trenchcoat alight, and dances with it.
And at last (9:20) he calls out to his mate: Ρίχ’ το Ηλία! Ηλία ρίχ’ το!
Tear it down, Elias!
A bulldozer comes into view. The bulldozer keeps going, and takes Vietnam nightclub with it. And Makis stumbles, dancing into the dawn.
Why is computer called υπολογιστής instead of κομπιούτερ in modern Greek?
Everyone else has said the ‘what’. As to the ‘why’:
Formal Greek is resistant to Latin-based loans, and routinely translates them into Greek morphemes whenever it can. The resistance was always lesser in informal Greek, and in the last decade or so, the floodgates have opened up for technical terminology in English: Hellenic coinages often exist, but practitioners of IT rarely know them or use them.
That’s the overall trend. In the case of ‘computer’, the native calque hypologistēs has indeed prevailed over the loan kompiuter, and indeed so has logismiko over softgouer. As other answers have noted, the loanword is antiquated. But as Yiannis Tsiolis’ answer says, Greeks all know the word kompiuter (since they all know English by now anyway); and slang or jocular words are formed based on it.
What is the difference between Rum, Urum and Yunan, and Yunanistan?
- Rum < Roman is the traditional Ottoman designation for Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, inherited from the self-description of the Byzantine Empire, and it continues to be the Turkish designation for ethnic Greeks, living in Turkey and Cyprus.
- Urum is a variant of Rum, and is used as the self-designation of several Turkic speakers who are traditionally Greek Orthodox, and who are believed to have been linguistically assimilated. Notable among them are the Urum who live in Mariupol’, in the Ukraine, and who moved there along with Greek-speaking Christians from the Crimea in 1778.
- Yunan is the Turkish term derived from the Persian word for Greeks, which in turn derives from Ionian. In Ottoman times, it was used to refer to Ancient Greeks, just as Hellene was in Greek. After the independence of the Greek state, Yunan also came to be used for Greeks in the new state (just as Hellene was in Greece), while Rum continued to be used for Greeks in the Ottoman Empire (unlike Greece, which had an irredentist vision). The country of the Yunan in Turkey, Greece, is Yunanistan.
How would modern Greek language sound to an Ancient Greek?
— … By the twin gods, Autolycus!
—What then, O Charaxus?
—Hear you what a curious speech it is, that this strangely dressed individual utters?
—It is indeed passing curious.
—Some words sound like words of our common Hellenic tongue.
—Indeed so, O Charaxus.
—Yet there is a harsh deficit of diphthongs in his speech.
—Much like a Boeotian. Someone should indeed tell them, that there are more than seven vowels in the language.
—And some awkward sibilants, where a Grecian would use stops.
—You have learned quickly the terms of the sophists, O Charaxus! Like unto a Laconian, methinks. Nē tō θiō.
—Yes, yes, instead of Nē tō tʰeō. “By the twin gods.” But forsooth, with many more horrid sounds.
—And such monotony of speech, O Charaxus!
—Indeed. Much like unto the rattle of some dull bird. No poise of long and short vowels, no tunefulness of speech. A mere monotonous alternation of loud and soft noises.
—What make you of this then?
—Were it not for the lack of long vowels, my good Autolycus, I would think this some peculiar Aeolism, some corrupt dialect of our storied tongue. Like unto Nick Nicholas’ answer to During antiquity, did anyone in Greece or Rome recognize similarities between Greek and Latin languages and hypothesized relationships between them?
—A capital scholar, this Nicholas, grandson of Nicholas.
—I vouchsafe you, sir. Yet even those blockheads of Latium speak more tunefully than this.
—What then, O Charaxus?
—Mark you not, my good Autolycus, the lip hair on many of his number? That which we call mystax?
—Indeed I do, O Charaxus.
—And his breeches, worn in the stead of a decent chlamys?
—Very much so.
—This, and the corrupt Aeolisms that pass from his lips, the which remind one of Grecian words, yet are not truly Grecian. It is decided, Autolycus.
—Very much so, O Charaxus.
—This man is a Celt. A Gaul, I believe.
—May he to the crows! Es kórakas!
EDIT: https://www.quora.com/How-would-…
On the one hand, brilliantly thou speakest; on the other meseems thine Hellenes abstain from balancing clauses. οἴμοι!
—Good morrow, O Charaxus; what news bear you then from the fora?
—Hooray, mén, my good Autolycus; alas, dé!
—Wherefore then this contradiction, O Charaxus? I would fain learn that.
—Our discourse on the peculiar Gaul , which we conducted the other day, was acclaimed for its brilliance, mén. It was castigated for its inelegance, dé.
—In what wise though was it found to be inelegant?
—Our discourse used many of the elegant particles of our storied Grecian tongue, mén. It neglected, so it would seem, to use mén and dé, dé.
—And know our readers at the fora, O Charaxus, that mén in Greek means ‘on the one hand’, and dé ‘on the other hand’?
—They way well not have before now, mén. I will vouchsafe you they know it now, dé.
Why is aponeurosis named as such? I know the “apo” part. What’s the word root: “neurosis”?
To expand on Raul Hernandez’s answer:
aponeurōsis = apo ‘away, from, of’ + neurōsis
neurōsis = neuroō ‘to equip with sinews, to put strings on (a bow, a lyre)’ + –sis ‘nominalisation suffix, -ing’
neuroō = neuron ‘nerve, sinew’ + –oō ‘verb suffix, often factive: to make something be or have X’.
So aponeurosis literally means ‘a sinewing out(wards)’.
Aponeurosis: Aponeuroses (plural of aponeurosis: απο, “away” or “of”, and νευρον, “sinew”, and pronounced ap·o·neu·ro·sis) are layers of flat broad tendons. They have a shiny, whitish-silvery color, are histologicallysimilar to tendons, and are very sparingly supplied with blood vessels and nerves. When dissected, aponeuroses are papery and peel off by sections. The primary regions with thick aponeurosis are in the ventral abdominal region, the dorsal lumbar region, the ventriculus in birds, and the palmar and plantar regions.
It’s a Neo-Latin coinage, and an awkward one: the -(ō)sis ending refers to an action, not to the result of an action, which would be -(ō)ma (e.g. sarcoma ‘a fleshening’: not the action of fleshing something out, but the result of it). And because Greeks actually know how Greek suffixes work, aponevrosi in Modern Greek means ‘root canal’: you are removing the nerve ending from the infected tooth. So not ‘a sinewing outwards’, but ‘de-nerving’.
Of course, this is Neo-Latin’s world, we Greeks just live in it. From what I see in this article on Plantar Fasciitis Πελματιαία Απονευρωσίτιδα, Greeks also call aponeuroses aponevrosis. In fact, it looks like Greek is ahead of English, in insisting that Plantar fasciitis is actually an aponeurositis, because the Plantar fascia is actually an aponeurosis.
And if I knew the difference between an aponeurosis and a Fascia, I’d be speaking with a bit more conviction…
What’s the one-word translation of the word ‘cuckold’ in Greek, when the husband knows (and does not care) about his wife’s infidelity?
Huh.
As it turns out, reading Cuckold – Wikipedia, there was an Elizabethan term for someone who was aware of being cuckolded, but cuckold wasn’t it:
One often-overlooked subtlety of the word is that it implies that the husband is deceived, that he is unaware of his wife’s unfaithfulness and may not know until the arrival or growth of a child plainly not his (as with cuckoo birds).
A related word, first appearing in 1520, is wittol, which substitutes wit (in the sense of knowing) for the first part of the word, referring to a man aware of and reconciled to his wife’s infidelity.
Wittol is of course antiquated, and the kink associated with cuckolding (which is all about the partner being aware of the fact) is a pretty recent phenomenon. Wikipedia in fact makes a point of saying that this usage as a fetish is distinct from the traditional use of cuckold.
The Greek for cuckold is κερατάς ‘horned’, and has been since at least Michael Psellos in the 11th century, who documented the term. As OP notes, the Greek expression, like cuckold originally, is unaware of being cheated on; per Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής its secondary meaning is ‘a sucker, someone clueless’. (How the tertiary meaning ‘someone cunning, scoundrel’ comes about is one of those routine oddities of language.)
SLANG.gr (Hi, Melinda!) would be the obvious place to find an expression for something like this in Greek—even if they are expressions made up by site contributors. But I didn’t. The closest I got there was calling someone a Reindeer or Rudolph (τον/την έκανε τάρανδο, ρούντολφ – SLANG.gr) for being repeatedly cuckolded. As in, having really big horns.
How is it possible that we perceive irony?
Grice. Grice Grice Grice Grice Grice.
Paul Grice did seminal work in the philosophy of language, on how we recover meaning from an interlocutor’s words. It is clear that we routinely understand more—or less—than what our interlocutor says. To make sense of this, Grice developed a notion of conversational implicature. This is what we consider to be implicit in what the other is saying; but unlike logical entailment, it is fallible, and defeasible (more information or clarification can establish that our guess was wrong: it works as a default assumption, rather than a universal truth).
We arrive at conversational implicatures, in turn, through assumptions about how conversation works. Grice’s maxims are the ones that get taught in Undergrad Pragmatics, but the underlying Cooperative Principle is what matters here. It is the assumption that the person you are talking with is not a psycho, and that what they are saying somehow makes sense, is relevant to what we’re talking about, and is situated on the same planet as you are. Or, to put it in his terms,
Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
That assumption is what makes irony work, and for that matter what makes humour work. If someone gives you a response that is manifestly untrue and irrelevant, they could be being a psycho. But your assumption under the Cooperative Principle is that they are not being a psycho, that what they have just said is relevant, and that you have to dig a bit deeper to work out what the relevance is. People in fact expect that you will do that digging, which is why a lot of those seemingly psycho irrelevant responses become conventionalised—and the implicature of what they mean becomes a conventional implicature: an implicature that is still not the literal meaning of what is said, but which we by default associate with the expression anyway. (E.g. “sounds legit”.)
What follows from that is that we have strong expectations of what someone should be saying at any point, and of how the world works. And if they say the opposite to what we expect, or of how we know the world works, we assume that they are somehow joking. In fact, humour relies on us assuming that they are somehow joking.
How come the Hebrew words for 6 and 7 are so similar to their Latin counterparts, while the other digits aren’t even close?
There has been speculation that Indo-European borrowed its words for ‘six’ and ‘seven’ from Semitic, or that they reflect a common ancestral (Nostratic) element. Nostratic is not a mainstream theory, and there has also been significant scepticism about borrowing, especially if the Proto–Indo-European for ‘six’ is closer to *weḱs than *sweḱs.
I’ll note that PIE borrowing numbers from Semitic is not as implausible as it might seem. There is widespread suspicion that PIE borrowed some words from the contemporary prestige languages of the time, Sumerian (isolate: https://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~as…) and Akkadian (https://books.google.com.au/book… ); the words for ‘silver’ and ‘bull’ are the most commonly invoked of the latter. And in a time of early numeracy, borrowing the words for ‘six’ and ‘seven’ is plausible.
See also