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Where do the distinctive Greek names for chemical elements come from?
My thanks to Konstantinos Konstantinides, Joseph Boyle, and Jorvon M. Carter, who have answered most of this; this answer is based on their work.
My agenda, more cynically, was “which country did Greek copy, and where did it decide to do its own thing.” Languages did decide to do their own thing occasionally; the Russian (and hence Slavic) word for silicon, kremnij, for example, is a 1834 coinage based on Ancient Greek krēmnos, ‘precipice’.
For most of these, if Greek hasn’t patterned with English, it’s because it has patterned with the actual prestige languages of the time, French and German. My guess is, German unless German used a Germanic term, in which case, French.
- N: French (German has Stickstoff)
- Na: German
- K: German
If a Greek term was used early on and then abandoned, Greek would be delighted to hang on to the Greek term.
- F: Phthorion (suggested by Ampère in 1810)
- Zn: Pseudargyros was used by Strabo, and identified with Zinc. Greek was certainly not going to pass by a term with classical pedigree.
And for three elements, Greeks did their own translating:
- Pt: Greeks seems to have been desperate to avoid the Spanish Platinum; I’d have thought the 1752 description of it as a “white gold” would have been an obscure place to go, but clearly not obscure enough.
- Si: Pyrition “flint-ium” is a translation of the usual European term silic-ium.
- Al: Argilion “clay-ium”, based on the presence of aluminium in aluminium silicate, the basis of clay; aluminium in the West was instead named for alum, which also contains potassium. The decision by Greek to go a different way with the naming of Aluminium is puzzling; all the more so because Wikipedia cites the 1782 French paper by Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, who first proposed the name alumine—and who expressly rejected a name like argilium as redundant:
“La seconde terre est celle qui sert de base à l’alun: en la nommant argille, il faudroit chercher un autre nom au minéral, qui n’en recèle jamais qu’une portion; il faudroit, suivant notre second principe, substituer le mot argilleux au mot alumineux, pour tous ses composés. Il est plus simple de conserver le dernier, & en tirer un substantif, pour indiquer l’étre primitif. Ainsi, l’on dira que l’alun ou vitriol alumineux a pour base l’alumine, que la Nature nous offre abondamment dans les argilles.”
(The second earth is what serves as the base in alum: by naming it “clay”, one would have to seek another name for the mineral, which never harbors even a part of it; one would have to, following our second principle [for naming chemical compounds], substitute the word “clay-ish” for the word “aluminous” in all its compounds. It is simpler to retain the latter and to draw a noun from it, in order to indicate the primitive entity [i.e., element]. Thus, one will say that alum or aluminous sulfate has as [its] base alumine [i.e., aluminium], which Nature offers us abundantly in clays.)
EDIT: from exchange with Joseph Boyle in comments, there’s one possibility for why Greeks avoided the literal translation styption of aluminium: alum, being an anti-bleeding agent, was a traditional remedy for, among other things, haemorrhoids. In fact, I remember thinking “there’s something disreputable about stypsis in Greek, and I can’t quite remember it”: that must have been what I was trying to remember.
Which languages use a bare dental click for a plain no? Did this originate from a single language and spread to others?
Dental clicks may also be used para-linguistically. For example, English speakers use a plain dental click, usually written tsk or tut (and often reduplicated tsk-tsk or tut-tut; these spellings often lead to spelling pronunciations /tɪsk/ or /tʌt/), as an interjection to express commiseration, disapproval, irritation, or to call a small animal. German (ts or tss), Hungarian (cöccögés), Portuguese (tsc), Russian (ts-ts-ts; sound file) Spanish (ts) and French (tut-tut) speakers use the dental click in exactly the same way as English.
The dental click is also used para-linguistically by Middle Eastern languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Pashto, and Persian where it is transcribed as ‘نچ’/’noch’ and is also used as a negative response to a “yes or no” question (including Dari and Tajiki). It is also used in some languages spoken in regions closer to, or in, Europe, such as Turkish, Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian or Serbian to denote a negative response to a “yes or no” question. The dental click is sometimes accompanied by an upward motion of the head.
So Ali, you are onto something: there is one continuum of languages using it for “no”—and another continuum of language in which it conveys disapproval. Spanish and Portuguese, it seems, are common to both.
Turkish is in the middle of the first, and the first is Southern European and Middle Eastern and Central Asian, Spain through to Xinjiang (Wong Yoon Foong’s answer). Turkish could have been one vector of this, but with the feature also turning up in the Western Mediterranean, it can’t be the only vector. Greek or Latin could have been one vector of this, but again, with the feature also turning up in Central Asia, it can’t be the only vector. There’s likelier to have been multiple waves of this feature diffusing.
The feature could be innate and pre-linguistic; but I don’t get the impression that it is: it doesn’t seem to be attested in Africa or the New World.
The feature could be a Nostratic innovation (yes, I went there!), inherited into all of Indo-European, Semitic, and Turkic—diverging in Northern Europe into disapproval rather than negation. But that’s suspect as well, and areal diffusion is likelier.
And paralinguistic features (like grunts) and gestures do diffuse culturally. The head-toss for “no”, mentioned at the end of the Wikipedia quote, is a famous instance of this, turning up in Greece, Bulgaria, and Greek-influenced Southern Italy
Answered 2017-07-12 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
What is the Greek population in Melbourne?
The census data for 2016 has been released as of 27 June 2017, and is available in breakdowns from Census DataPacks. And the Australian Bureau of Statistics loves their Microsoft Excel.
It isn’t immediately obvious from the zip file what’s going on, but with perseverance, it turns out that 162,103 people from the Greater Melbourne Area claim Greek ancestry, and 36,758 of them have both parents born in Australia.
Are there any books that are written in Ancient Greek?
If the question means, are there any contemporary books in Ancient Greek: not a lot, but a few:
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Ancient Greek Edition): J.K. Rowling: 9781582348261: Amazon.com: Books
- Bruno Coitinho’s answer to What modern books have been translated to ancient languages?: Don Camillo, Sherlock Holmes
- Eleftherios V. Tserkezis’ answer to What modern books have been translated to ancient languages?: Asterix
- Astronautilia
- The Little Prince … in Ancient Greek: Translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original text, with vocabulary help: Juan Coderch: 9780957138742: Amazon.com: Books
Why shouldn’t Greece’s regions have autonomy?
The fact that Greece modelled itself after France, as a strongly centralising state, is not a reason why there shouldn’t be autonomy. Autonomy can work financially, after all; the autonomy of the Val d’Aosta after WWII, forced on Italy by de Gaulle proposing to invade, was part of the reason the Valley did so well in the 60s: it could pursue and manage its own initiatives. And contra Ioannis Kokkinidis’ answer, I’m sceptical that centralisation was a spontaneous demand from the people resenting feudalism, as opposed to an imposition from on high.
As Joe B’s answer points out, there is in fact some decentralisation and political autonomy now that wasn’t there before. Being much larger, the regions are more capable of getting things done than the prefectures used to be when I was a kid.
The real reason of course is Greek anxiety about secessionism, which you can see reflections of in Niko Vasileas’ answer. There has not been any serious talk about secessionism; in fact, outside of a fringe in Crete, there hasn’t been *any* talk that I know of of secessionism. But notice Greeks’ reactions to such hypotheticals: not laughter, but anger.
(Imma just leave this here: Is 2012 The Year Cretans Decide If They Want Out (from Greece)? And no, there was no expiration of a treaty joining Crete to Greece.)
Why do English-speaking people not prefer to say natrium, silisium, kalium, and use other Latin names of elements instead?
EDIT: QUESTION HAS BEEN MANGLED BY QCR: It is about Natrium, Kalium, Silicium vs Sodium, Potassium, Silicon.
Faulty premiss.
Sodium – Wikipedia, Potassium – Wikipedia.
Sodium and Potassium are not more or less Latin than Natrium and Kalium. (If anything, that K in Kalium is not particularly Latinate.) They are just alternate names proposed for the same element, just as Tungsten and Wolfram were.
Humphry Davy in Britain came up with Sodium and Potassium, while Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert in Germany, a couple of years later, proposed Natronium (later Natrium) and Kalium.
None of the words are Latin in origin. In particular, Sodium comes from the Arabic suda “headache” (soda helps alleviate headaches), while Natr(on)ium derives from Natron, which is ultimately Ancient Egyptian. Potassium comes from English potash (ultimately Dutch), while Kalium comes from alkali < Arabic al-qalyah “plant ashes”.
The national breakdown of Sodium/Natrium and Potassium/Kalium divides Western and Central/Eastern Europe: countries culturally closer to Germany went with Gilbert’s German proposal (Dutch, Russian, Greek, and all countries in between), countries culturally closer to Britain used Davy’s original English proposal (French, Italian, Spanish).
EDIT: The question has been edited to ask about Silicium vs Silicon as well.
This time, Humphry Davy is behind the German name: he called it silicium, because he thought it was a metal. Nine years later, Thomas Thomson (chemist) called it silicon, because he thought it was a non-metal, like carbon and boron. It is in fact a Metalloid, which is in between.
This time, English is on its own: French, German, Italian, Spanish all call it silicium. Russian (and hence the Slavic languages) coined its own form kremnij from Ancient Greek krēmnos ‘cliff’. The other languages that use silicon are those under strong English influence: languages of the British Islands, and countries formerly under British or American colonialism: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Africa:
- Afrikaans (but not Dutch!)
- Welsh
- Gaelic
- Kikuyu (Kenya)
- Hawaiian
- Malay & Indonesian
- Sundanese
- Tagalog
- Waray
- Swahili
- Somali
- Yoruba
Why are the 1st, 2nd and 3rd declensions called this way?
The Ancient Greek (Roman-era) grammarians, Dionysius Thrax and Aelius Herodianus, were giants that we are in debt of for a lot of our understanding of grammar, and traditional grammar comes from them.
But they did not quite get declensions. They certainly did not get the number of declensions in Greek down to something manageable. We owe a tractable number of declensions to the grammarians of Latin, who got it down to five. The Greek declensions 1, 2, 3 corresponding to the Latin declensions 1, 2, 3, and were arrived at in the Renaissance, when Greek grammar was brought in line with Latin analysis.
From Thematic list, it looks like the notion of five declensions in Latin is original to Priscian, around 500 AD. I’ve browsed through the text of his Institutions of Grammar, and I don’t see anything like an explicit statement of quinque sunt declinationes linguae latinae [there are five declensions in Latin]; he mentions the first declension in passing in his chapter on letters, and as soon as he gets to the noun chapter, he immediately starts mentioning first or fifth declensions without explaining what they are.
That hints that the notion was already familiar, and there are four centuries between Quintilian, the previous major Latin grammarian, and Priscian. (There’s also Aelius Donatus the previous century from Priscian, but he doesn’t mention declensions in his work at all.)
No justification for the ordering is apparent from Priscian, and the ordering certainly has nothing to do with historical reconstruction and Proto-Indo-European; I can guess the motivation for the ordering though. 1st, 2nd, 3rd are very common, 4th and 5th much less so. 1st ends in –a and 2nd in -u(s/m), so alphabetic sorting might be at work; 1st and 2nd are quite regular compared to 3rd, so they could have gone first as easier to learn.
How is Keneh Bosem translated in different versions of the Greek old testament?
So the passage in question is Exodus 30:23.
The place to look up the other Ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew Scriptures (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) is the Hexapla, a collation by the Christian theologian Origen.
A modern edition has been coming for over a decade, so the edition to consult is still Origen Hexapla : Field, Frederick from 1875.
The Septuagint translates the verse as:
Do thou also take sweet herbs, the flower of choice myrrh five hundred shekels, and the half of this two hundred and fifty shekels of sweet-smelling cinnamon, and two hundred and fifty shekels of sweet-smelling calamus,
(Exodus 30:23 – LXX – Do thou also take sweet herbs, the flower of ch…)
The sweet-smelling calamus is the herb kaneh bosem whose translation is contentious.
The Hebrew word בשמים (bosemim, right?) has the note: Οʹ. ἡδύσματα. Ἀ. ἀρώματα. That is, the Septuagint translates it as “sweeteners” and Aquila as “perfumes”. But that’s the word rendered above as “sweet herbs”. The next divergence noted in the Hexapla is the reference to cassia in the next verse. Kassia is noted as an alternate reading; the Septuagint’s reading is ἴρεως, refering to the genus Iris (plant).
Because Origen did not supply an alternate translation for Kaneh bosem, it is likely that the other three translations rendered it the same way as the Septuagint.
The other translations, btw, were often more accurate than the Septuagint, but they were also later. If the knowledge of what the kaneh bosem was, whether calamus or cannabis or chamomile, had already been lost, then the other translations could well have just copied the Septuagint.
How do I fathom the 3rd declension?
And I weigh in too, though my answer is not really different to Desmond’s.
The way to fathom the 3rd declension is via proto-Greek. That’s what the grammars do, whether it’s the most useful thing to do or not.
Focus on the recurring endings: -(ς) -ος -ι -α -Ø, -ες -ων -σι -ας -ες (or -α -ων -σι -α -α in the neuter).
Focus on the genitive singular, because that always clues you in to how the noun’s declension actually works. ἅρπαγ-ος > *ἅρπαγ-ς > ἅρπαξ.
Don’t focus on each distinct pattern of the third declension. For passive recognition, it isn’t worth it.
Resign yourself to the fact that the nominative singular will be strange.
Treat the dirty vowel stems (3, 4, 5 in your list) as separate declensions. You can, with enough concentration, discern the recurring endings there too; but you might as well not; there’s been too much intervening sound change to make it worthwhile.
Do not even bother learning the highly irregular patterns, like ναῦς and ἀνήρ and γυνή. They’ll be frequent enough that you’ll pick them up from context anyway.
Does the use of line breaks in text incentivize (critical) thinking?
I think you could argue the reverse, if anything, though I still think that linebreaks are preferable anyway.
Let me take an historical approach to this.
We use space and punctuation and typography to chop up written discourse into digestible units. Once we have these units, we use our thinking to build up a model of how those units fit into a rhetorical structure: what is a major point and what is minor, what is a supporting point, what is incidental, and so on.
Those devices are specific to written discourse. Spoken discourse has its own devices—including volume, gestures, eye contact, and pitch—to make the structure of what is spoken clear; written discourse did not have access to those devices, and has had to put up its own equivalents.
In antiquity, those devices of writing were rare to non-existent. There were no italics in Ancient Greek; everything was in all caps; punctuation was invented late and used grudgingly. Several ancient scripts used mechanisms to break up words; Greek and Latin were not originally among them. Recall the new-fangled fancy grammatical terminology that Euripides uses in Aristophanes’ Frogs, including sentences. To his old adversary Aeschylus, there are only epea, utterances, which can be as short as a word or as long as the Iliad.
All this made reading laborious. And that was OK: the number of literate people was small enough that reading could be an elite skill, and the culture of literate people was homogeneous enough that they could fill in the blanks (actually, the non-blanks).
The Alexandrians came up with punctuation and paragraphs, though there wasn’t much spacing involved originally. The notion of the punctuated sentence and phrase, and the spaced word, were stable in mediaeval times; the paragraph reinvented via the pilcrow (¶). By the mid-Renaissance, the tools we now use to chop up written discourse into digestible units were all in place.
Those tools made reading less laborious; and with the advent of first printing and then universal education, reading became more widespread.
But stylistic convention still favoured the long, periodic sentence, by emulation of the Classics. Partly this emulated a time when an elite could take the time to pore over the long sentence, and work out how its bits fit together. Partly this emulated languages which had mechanisms for chaining sentences together, which made much more sense in Greek and Latin than they did in French and English. But the sentences are at least supposed to be periodic—meaning, with identifiable subunits and structure that fits together. If you just take the time to concentrate on the connectives, as both the links between the phrases, and (too often) the separators between the phrases, in the absence of generous commas.
If we fast forward from the 1700s to the 2100s, we are now in a time when long periodic sentences are avoided, in favour of short choppy sentences; when long paragraphs are avoided, and indeed criticised as unreadable, particularly online; and when the internal structure of paragraphs and sentences is often made blatant through dot points and indentation.
This is partly fashion, driven I suppose by Hemingway and modernism. Partly, it is that we have to read more than ever before, we have to read stuff we don’t read for fun and leisure, we need to skim, and we don’t have the patience to wrestle with long Dickensian sentences.
So. In the olden days, there was less white space. People had to look carefully for connectives and punctuation, be conversant with rhetorical strategies, and have a decent amount of cultural preparation, in order to make sense of the structure of written text.
Nowadays, there is a lot more white space. The building blocks of the rhetorical structure are much more obvious; conversely, there is much less signalling of what the connection is between the building blocks, via connectives.
I think this means that the vertical space gives people room to think about what the connections are—and they need the room to think, because some of the other structural cues are no longer used or presupposed. I also think this still causes less of a strain than the olden day long sentences and paragraphs did.