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Is it true that most of the Greeks in Anatolia and Thrace converted to Islam and became Turks during the Seljuk and Ottoman years?
The received wisdom in academia is yes, although several users here (Dimitris Almyrantis and Dimitra Triantafyllidou) have questioned how feasible this is. The argument made by Speros Vryonis Jr, and summarised in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?, is that any deurbanisation and mass migration happened in the first century after the Seljuk arrival, at the end of which Anatolia was still substantially Christian. The reduction of the Christian population accelerated in the 14th and 15th centuries, and was accompanied by extensive Islamic missionary activity. By the start of the 16th century, Western Anatolia (Anatolia Eyalet) was only 1.5% Christian.
Northern Anatolia (the Pontus) and Central Anatolia (Cappadocia) seem to have been exempt from this trend; Vryonis does not discuss these, but presumably the former is to be explained by the late conquest of the Empire of Trebizond, by which time the Millet system was established and gave Christians some degree of autonomy. The Christian population in Cappadocia was small, and substantially assimilated linguistically, and this may have been more an issue of inaccessibility.
Thrace is not covered in Vryonis’ work, and my impression is that a substantial Christian population remained in place.
Does the village of Lapi, presumably in the Messinia province of Greece, still exist?
Ριζοχώρι – Μεσσηνία | Terrabook
The village name was Lapi, which was believed to refer to the Lab tribe of Albanians (normally rendered in Greek as Liapis, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a folk etymology).
As inevitably happened with most foreign-looking village names, the village was renamed to Rizochori in 1940. The link reports that its current population is 60.
Why are so many people today using the word “fuck,” like it’s a common everyday word, and not sparingly, like the vulgar, profane word that it is?
Quite apart from the changing nature what is considered taboo in the English-speaking world, fuck has undergone weakening though overuse, and has lost its potency. It is simply not as profane as it used to be.
This inflation of profanity is a linguistic commonplace: 150 years ago, the profanity to avoid in polite company was damned. In fact, it is a characteristic of vivid language in general; that’s why slang has such a short shelf life.
Which books on Greek and Roman mythology list the most number of mythological characters?
As I am nowadays saying openly, I worked at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for 17 years, 13 which I spent working on word recognition. As a result, I got to know pretty well where all the obscure names were in Greek literature.
In the classical Canon, hands down, the Bibliotheca (Pseudo-Apollodorus).
Among online resources, THEOI GREEK MYTHOLOGY saved my bacon quite often.
Answered 2017-07-15 · Upvoted by
, Classics PhD, specializing in Greek tragedy and Greek/Roman mythology
What do sophisticated, neutral, and unsophisticated typefaces from different writing systems look like?
This is not the most sophisticated of answers; but one bugbear of all type designers outside of the Latin script (and Cyrillic, thanks to Peter the Great) is recent font kiddies slavishly copying the design of Latin fonts. Particularly serifs. Type designers in other scripts hate serifs. Serifs are a Latin thing; Peter the Great got them into Cyrillic, but they don’t belong anywhere else, and they look horrible when they do show up. As typographers often decry. Font kiddies.
I bought a coffee table book on the history of Arabic typography, and was rather puzzled to find the author thinking Arabic serifs were actually a good thing. Until I realised the author was in fact such a font kiddie.
Type designers also loathe Old English (i.e. Heavy Metal) fonts in other scripts. I’m not as sophisticated; I recently saw Chinese written in Old English style, and I rather liked it. But then, I can’t read Chinese.
But then again, it was quite elegant in its rendering of strokes. It wasn’t this version of Katakana (It’s a katakana font (named “ゴウラ”) designed to…):
… Yeah. I think the scholarly term is “font kiddies”.
Is the word “pray(er)” different between Christians and Muslims in your language(s)?
I’m guessing rather than certain here, but Muslim Greek and Jewish Greek, as spoken by longstanding religious communities, did have distinct vocabulary about religious practices, and I’d have no reason to think prayer is an exception.
The two Turkish terms given in Murat Öz’s answer are namaz and ibadet. As noted in Τι είναι το Ναμάζι;, ναμάζι is frequent in Greek literature with reference to Muslim prayer, and has been used in the Greek press.
The one instance of ibadet in Greek I find on line is in a letter from a Greek bishop in the region around Drama, written in 1911 and available at Μικρόπολη Ιστορία Οθωμανική Περίοδος και Τουρκοκρατία Μικρόπολης Καρλίκοβα Δράμα Mikropoli Mikropolis Karlikowa Καρλίκοβα Μικρόπολη Μικρόπολης. It disapprovingly cites a local Bulgarian Orthodox (“schismatic”) cleric referring to Orthodox prayer as ιμπαντέτι; the Bulgarian is cited (in vernacular Greek with Turkish codeswitching) as saying “I am liberal: I would be happy to celebrate mass with the bishop. I ask no-one for permission about ibadet, neither the Exarch [Bulgarian church leader] nor anyone else, I’ll even yaparım ibadet [do prayer] with a hoca [imam].”
The call to prayer, adham, is referred to through its Turkish form ezam > εζάμι in the Greek press still, with reference to calls to prayer not only in Turkey, but also in Jerusalem.
How could Byzantine writers re-introduce the subscript iota and the breathings, which were long gone at the time?
From An introduction to Greek and Latin palaeography : Thompson, Edward Maunde, Sir, (1912), pp. 61–62, My summary:
The breathings and accents were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, ca 200 BC—when the breathings and accents were still being pronounced. It is believed that they were promoted for the teaching of literary Greek, precisely because they were starting not to be pronounced.
Accentuation is not used at all in non-literary papyri, and only occasionally in literary papyri. By the 3rd century AD, their use had become systematic in literary papyri. When the transition was made to codices, they were dropped again (although they are added in to the early codices of the Bible); and they were not systematically resumed before the 7th century AD.
So, if the question is about why they were dropped in the 3rd century and resumed in the 7th century, well, not sure. The how though is not difficult: manuals of accentuation were written in Roman times, by grammarians such as Aelius Herodian, and had been preserved. Scribes just started paying attention to them again.
Iota subscript – Wikipedia, as Joe Venetos indicates, gives an account of its history. The iota subscript was invented in the 12th century AD; it had not been pronounced for the previous 12 centuries, and was only intermittently written as a silent letter. Again, the grammars and dictionaries had recorded where the silent iotas were supposed to be, and the scribes then decided to write it down as a diacritic instead.
Why do people think I’m a snob because I always speak in standard English?
This is Tony Mulqueen’s answer. I’m just being a little more abstract.
There is a popular misconception that the primary purpose of language is to communicate.
Language is a social phenomenon, practiced by social beings. And one of its primary functions is to demonstrate allegiance to the groups the speaker belongs to.
If you speak Greek, you are demonstrating allegiance to Greekdom. If you speak in a camp voice, you are demonstrating allegiance to gaydom. If you say “cuck” a lot, you are demonstrating allegiance to the alt right.
It is the same with standard forms of a language. Standard languages did not drop from the Heavens, as instruments of pure dispassionate logic. They were formed in a social context, and they demonstrate social allegiances.
Standard languages are also not native to all social groups within the speech community: they have to be learned. If they didn’t have to be learned, there wouldn’t be any need to standardise to begin with. And if you use the standard language in a social context where a different native form of the language is expected, then you are demonstrating greater allegiance to the standard language’s values, than to those of the group you are amongst.
In other words, you are behaving as a snob. And possibly a class traitor.
The main context where using the standard form of the language is appropriate (if it is not already your native language variant) is in the workplace. Hence, African Americans saying “I can speak Job Interview.” Hence also the Greek Cypriot derogatory term for Greeks from Greece being “pen pushers” (καλαμαράδες). As far as they are concerned, only a pen pusher should be speaking standard Greek.
My friend Marija’s father Ambroz arrived in Australia from Croatia in the 50s, and went straight to the nearest factory to apply for work. He’d learned standard English back home, of course. And the first thing he said in English when he got there was, “To whom should I speak to apply for work?”
Yes, standard English. Spectacularly inappropriate on an Australian factory floor.
In response to these social realities, you can rail against everyone else being peasants, and not appreciating the virtues of the linguistic standard. Or you can admit that there is no such thing as linguistic superiority, only linguistic fit-for-purpose. Ambroz was not demonstrating linguistic fit-for-purpose by using standard English where he did.
There is no such thing as linguistics superiority, but there is such a thing as social subordination. Make sure you don’t mistake one for the other.
Why do Greeks break plates when dancing?
See: Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer to Why do Greeks break plates?
As pointed out in Valya Doncheva’s answer to Why do Greeks break plates when dancing?, there are old folk antecedents to the practice—and indeed, similar practices are not uncommon among people who get drunk in general, as witnessed with any rock group that ever trashed a hotel room.
Per this article from the City of Athens Museum: Το σπάσιμο των πιάτων και η καθιέρωσή του
It seems that because of the financial crisis the custom of breaking plates at nightclubs is dying out, so we are taking care to recount it. Since time immemorial whoever came into a good mood (μεράκλωναν), especially at bouzouki clubs, would smash whatever they found at their table: chairs, painting frames, even pianos. Afterwards they would pay for the cost. So the number of those who’d pay for the breakage was limited.
[“Pay for the breakage”, πληρώνουν τα σπασμένα, is a proverbial expression. And it predates the Pottery Barn rule]
A clever businessman in the nightclub trade, Babaveas, opened the Folies d’été cabaret at the end of Herodes Atticus Road in 1931. With intoxicating Argentinian music, Parisian butterflies passing through, and a Russian ballet, he got his club into the centre of Athens nightlife.
The businessman would not charge his good customers for the breakage. But when the partiers (θεριακλήδες) increased in number, the old regime was restored. If you broke it, you paid for it, and you paid for it dearly. Three decades on, the custom was known, but it was not as well established or excessive. The spread of the phenomenon was aided by the movie Never on Sunday and the song The Lads of Peiraeus, in the early 60s. Plate smashing turned into a national pastime. That’s when the use of lower quality plates was established, whereupon the custom became daily practice.
Jules Dassin needed to reshoot the plate-smashing scene for Never on Sunday several times. He used defective plates that were factory rejects. In the 60s, there were up to 100,000 plates smashed per month, and some 50 workshops were established employing around 1000 people to cover the needs of partygoers (μερακλήδων). Later on they started using plaster copies of plates, to prevent injury and reduce costs.
Per Greek Wikipedia, Σπάσιμο πιάτων – Βικιπαίδεια,
Plate-smashing is a Greek folk custom, which reached its peak in the 60s and 70s. It was usual in nightclubs, as an example of Greek celebration. After it was banned by the Greek dictatorship, it retreated in the early 90s, but has made a return despite the financial crisis.
[…]
The only remaining workshop making plaster plates in Greece is Tsiourlis Bros. in Evosmos of Thessalonica, established in 1975. The practice of plate smashing seems to have been replaced by throwing flowers onto the stage, something inaugurated by the singer Marinella.
See also Plate smashing – Wikipedia, and Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer to What is the history of the Greek tradition of breaking plates and yelling “ooopaaa”?
Which is correct, “Describe who you are” or “Describe whom you are”?
I am going to refine Justin Franco‘s reasoning, while agreeing with his answer.
Justin says that it’s “describe who you are”, because
We wouldn’t answer “Who are you?” with “You are him.” We’d answer it with “You are he.”
Oh really?
- the ruppes: Jesus, You are Him
- You are him by Margo
- You are him, you are the guy that raped Anna for about five years. https://books.google.com.au/book…
The explanation is not that all predicates of linking verbs in English are always nominative. A lot more people say “it’s me” than “it is I.”
The explanation is that there are two different registers of English at play here, with different grammatical rules. And, as Christopher Ray Miller’s answer has pointed out, belonging to different centuries.
Whom belongs to the centuries older variant of English, the one where people could say “it is I, Hamlet the Dane”. Whom is alien to the contemporary variant of English in which one can say “you are him”. And that is why the acceptability of “you are him” is irrelevant to the usage of whom: you don’t say “describe whom you are,” because back then you didn’t say “you are him”.