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Why is Hermione pronounced like her-MY-on-ne in English? Does it follow the rules? It doesn’t seem phonetic, and the Greek is probably different.
It follows the rules alright. They’re just rules that have nothing to do with the original Greek.
Traditional English pronunciation of Latin – Wikipedia
In the middle of a word, a vowel followed by more than one consonant is short, as in Hermippe /hərˈmɪpiː/ hər-MIP-ee, while a vowel with no following consonant is long.
Hence, Hĕrmīone. (Long and short as in Modern English spelling: long i = [aj].)
Endings: … The first class consists of vowels alone, i.e. -a, -e, -æ, -i, -o, -u, -y. In this class, the vowels are generally long, but -a is always /ə/.
Hence, Hĕrmīonē.
Latin stress is predictable. It falls on the penultimate syllable when that is “heavy“, and on the antepenultimate syllable when the penult is “light”. … A syllable is “light” if it ends in a single short vowel.
Hence, Hĕr-mī´-o-nē.
However, when a vowel is followed by a single consonant (or by a cluster of p, t, c/k plus l, r) and then another vowel, it gets more complicated.
- If the syllable is unstressed, it is open, and the vowel is often reduced to schwa.
Hence, Hĕr-mī´-ŏ–nē, [hɜɹˈmajəniː]. As opposed to the Ancient Greek [hermiónɛː], or the Modern Greek [ermiˈoni].
Which Turkish words adopted by the languages in the Ottoman territories have been most grammatically productive (in those languages)?
I’m not proud to bring up puşt “bottom, male homosexual on the receiving end of anal sex, faggot”, because homophobia is not something to be proud of. But the word has certainly been productive in Greek, as you might expect of an insult.
From the Triantafyllidis Dictionary: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής
- pustis ‘faggot’ (used as insult; used as admiration of someone cunning; used as informal friendly address)
- Diminutives: pustraki, pustrakos
- Augmentatives: pustara, pustaros
- Feminine (used mostly of men): pustra
- pustario ‘group, collective of pustis’
- pustia ‘dishonourable conduct’
- Diminutive: pustitsa
- pustikos ‘adjective of pustis’
- Prefix:
- pustoɣeros ‘derogatory term for old man’
- pustoferno ‘to act like a pustis’
From SLANG.gr, omitting clearly nonce jocular coinings:
- pustrilikia, pustlukia (literally faggothoods, with Turkish suffix): ‘sexual insults’
- pustevo, pustrevo ‘to become gay; to become degenerate, effete’
- xepustevo (‘faggoting out’): ‘to cry out with joy in an effeminate manner’
- pustriði ‘insulting diminutive of pustis’
- pustarikos ‘affectionate diminutive of pustis, someone not fully sexually aware’ (portmanteau with pitsirikos ‘kid’)
- pustosini ‘gayness, gaydom’; deliberately grandiose-sounding, by analogy with ðesposini ‘majesty’, romiosini ‘Greekdom’
- pustraðiko ‘gay shop, gay establishment = Mykonos’
- Lots and lots of prefix instances; puštokalamaras ‘faggot penpusher’ deserves prominence as the default derogatory term Cypriot Greeks apply to Greece Greeks. (‘penpusher’, because they speak Official Greek as distinct from Cypriot dialect.)
- Lots and lots of suffix instances; e.g. xeftilopusta ‘laughing-stock pustis’, poniropustas ‘cunning pustis’, trambukopustas ‘thug pustis’
- If I can be allowed one jocular coinage from slang.gr: [h]eteropustas ‘metrosexual’
What if when it’s time to go to school my son speaks only Klingon and I refuse to teach him English? Would it be considered child abuse or something?
For a less emotive response, let us substitute Klingon with Norwegian, outside of Norway.
It is not child abuse to bring up your kid to speak only Norwegian in Australia. As another respondent said, if they arrive at primary school with no English, they will pick up English pretty quickly at school. As is the case for countless immigrant kids. And if the kids socialize at all outside the home, or watch TV, they will have picked up English anyway.
So the issue is not depriving a child with access to English.
Let’s substitute Norwegian with Esperanto, or Latin. There are, after all, something like 1000 native speakers of Esperanto. Have these kids been subjected to child abuse?
I mean, sure, their peers will think it’s weird and they will make fun of them. Their peers also made fun of the immigrant kids who ate weird food and looked different. And by all accounts, kids brought up speaking Esperanto end up perfectly well adjusted, although not many of them retain an interest in the language. Peer pressure is effective, after all.
And as I have said in a different answer, I’ve cyberstalked the kid who was brought up to speak Klingon (and lost interest), and I found a picture of him as a teenager in a mosh pit. I’m not worried about his long-term socialisation.
So what in this scenario makes people so aghast at Klingon? I’ve heard the child abuse accusation from professional linguists too. But a kid is hardly going to sustain brain damage from a language that violates a couple of phonological universals. No one should be taking Chomsky that seriously. If a kid can deal with a pidgin as linguistic input, and come up with a creole, they can certainly deal with Klingon. Not to mention, any Klingon that a parent would produce day to day would not be all that alien.
The only rationale for a claim of child abuse would be fear of difference and fear of unconventionality. Hippies have done far worse to kids.
What does the term “turn turk” mean and how did it originate?
‘Turn turk’ in the Renaissance meant to convert to Islam. The Turks were the Muslims that the English had the most contact with, through the Ottoman Empire.
A Christian Turn’d Turk (1612) is a play by the English dramatist Robert Daborne. It concerns the conversion of the pirate John Ward to Islam.
Because of the entrenched association of peoples until recent times with religion, changing religion was broadly regarded as betraying one’s core principles, and being literally faithless, renegade. It is so used, metaphorically, in Shakespeare:
- [Hamlet, Hamlet to Horatio] if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me (if my fortune betrays me)
- [Much Ado About Nothing, Margaret to Beatrice] an you be not turned Turk, there’s no more sailing by the star. (Margaret alludes to the fact that Beatrice has fallen in love with Benedick, despite her protestations: as complete a change as someone converting to Islam)
Hence, surprisingly enough, an accurate definition in, of all places, Urban Dictionary: to turn turk:
Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary adds: “to go to the bad: to become hopelessly obstinate”. The value judgement of Islam = bad is what you’d expect from a majority Christian culture; the obstinacy is surprising, unless it is the generic obstinacy of a renegade.
What are some of the strangest loanwords in your language?
For Modern Greek:
- parea ‘group of people hanging out socially’. Either our solitary Catalan loan, or one of our few Ladino loans, from parea (Spanish pareja) ‘couple’. The Catalan etymology is seductive, as it involves the Catalan Company, a parea marauding the Greek countryside.
- tsonta ‘porn film’. From Venetian zonta ‘joined on’ (Italian giunta); originally meant ‘freebie, lagniappe, baker’s dozen’. Which tells you a lot about Greek cinema practice in the 50s, and their male audiences.
- teknó ‘toyboy, twink’. From Romani tiknó ‘small child’, via Kaliarda, the Romani-based Greek gay secrecy language, influenced by Church Greek téknon ‘(spiritual) child’.
- varvatos ‘macho, manly’. From Latin barbatus ‘bearded’.
- glamouria ‘glamour (sarcastically), flashiness’. From English glamour (itself ultimately from Greek grammatikē via Scots), + the colloquial suffix –ja ‘a strike of something’.
- zamanfou ‘indifference, complacency’. From French je m’en fous ‘I don’t give a fuck’. Also zamanfoutistas ‘I don’t give a fuck-ist’, zamanfoutismos ‘I don’t give a fuck-ism’.
How come rude is not pronounced as /rjuːd/?
It used to; the [j] was regularly dropped after certain consonants:
Phonological history of English consonant clusters – Wikipedia
The change of [ɪ] to [j] in these positions (as described above) produced some clusters which would have been difficult or impossible to pronounce; this led to what John Wells calls Early Yod Dropping, in which the [j] was elided in the following environments:
- After /ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/, for example chute /ʃuːt/, chew /tʃuː/, juice /dʒuːs/
- After /j/, for example yew /juː/ (compare [jɪʊ̯] in some conservative dialects)
- After /r/, for example rude /ruːd/
- After stop+/l/ clusters, for example blue /bluː/
Apparently Welsh and some other dialects kept [ju] as [ɪu], did not undergo yod dropping, and as a result they pronounce chews /tʃɪʊ̯z/ and choose /tʃuːz/ differently. I can’t tell from Wikipedia whether that extends to rude being pronounced as ree-ood.
Could I just treat Ancient Greek adjectives like nouns?
Historically, the distinction between adjectives and nouns is a fairly recent one—not entrenched before the 18th century. The classical grammars referred to nominals, which included adjectives and nouns.
In addition, Greek, unlike English but like many other languages, can routinely use adjectives on their own without a noun. In fact, neuter adjectives were how Classical philosophers referred to abstractions: τὸ ἴσον, “the equal”, was how someone like Plato would refer to Equality.
There is only one way in which Ancient Greek adjectives differ morphologically from nouns. Feminine 1st declension nouns that are accented on the penult in the singular are accented on the penult in the plural: κινάρα ‘artichoke’, κινάραι ‘artichokes’. If a feminine adjective is accented on the penult in the singular, it is accented on the antepenult in the plural, by analogy with the masculine plural: δεύτερος, δευτέρα: δεύτεροι, δεύτεραι (not: δευτέραι).
With typical cluelessness, 19th century grammars say that ethnic names are an exception to the accentuation rule for nouns: Ῥοδία “Rhodian woman”, Ῥόδιαι “Rhodian women”, not the expected Ῥοδίαι. But of course, that isn’t an exception at all. That just shows you that to Ancient Greeks, Ῥόδιαι was not a noun but an adjective.
Are Ancient Greek ο declension masculine and α feminine the most perfect declensions?
Fascinating question.
I mean, adjectives and nouns have declensions, and so do articles and pronouns. If an article is going to have a declension, better it have a declension that’s strongly associated with genders (since gender signalling is a core function of adjectives), than the third declension, which did not differentiate masculines and feminines. The first declension is feminine, with distinct-looking masculines as a late development in proto-Greek; the second declension is masculine/neuter, with feminines as an occasional exception. So they did correlate with gender strongly.
Of course, most pronouns share the alternation of first and second declension that adjectives have anyway; and the article originated as a pronoun.
There’s probably some Indo-European behind why so many pronouns decline that way, patterning with adjectives and indicating gender overtly; then again, the first declension was a late development in Indo-European.
Perfect? Maybe. But careful with your direction of causation. The first declension appeared probably a millennium before the articles did; the articles had the form they did because the declensions were a good match for gender, and that was something that happened in adjectives way beforehand.
Third declension adjectives do exist, and third declension nouns definitely exist; they don’t differentiate masculine and feminine, and there aren’t as many pronouns in the third declension. (Of course, τίς, τί ‘who’ is hardly an obscure pronoun.) By some criteria, I guess that makes them less perfect. By some, they’re rather more perfect…
What did Socrates mean when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”?
Not quite “not worth living”. The Greek is more absolute than that.
I’ve been feeling guilty about Nick Nicholas’ answer to Since the active and middle voices of the 2nd aorist forms of “to stand” are intransitive (ἵστημι – ἔστην vs ἐστάμην), are these forms synonymous?, where I basically dismissed nuance in Ancient Greek as something transitory, and not to get too hung up about. The rendering of Plato’s maxim is an instance where there is a little bit of nuance, and I’m hijacking this question to do penance.
I could have done Sappho instead; her second best known poem, Aphrodite of the dappled throne, has Aphrodite repeat three times δηὖτε, which gets translated as ‘again’:
you, Blessed One,
with a smile on your unaging face
asking again what have I suffered
and why am I calling againand in my wild heart what did I most wish
to happen to me: “Again whom must I persuade
back into the harness of your love?
Sappho, who wrongs you?
It doesn’t just mean ‘again’. It means ‘but now too’. It’s double-emphasised. You can see Aphrodite actually rolling her eyes: “what have you suffered THIS time, and why are you invoking me THIS time, and who do I have to persuade THIS time?”
But I’m alighting on Plato instead. So.
Ancient Greek has participles. It has oodles of participles. It has actives and middles and passives. It has future and past and progressive [present] and perfective.
And that’s not what Plato used. Plato used verbal adjectives.
There are two types of verbal adjective in Greek. The first ends in –teos, and corresponds to the Latin gerundive; it means ‘should be X-ed’. So zētēteon ‘should be sought’ is the term for a logical problem. erastea is someone who should be loved, corresponding to Latin Amanda.
So Plato could have used biōteos, ‘should be lived, is to be lived’. But he didn’t. He used biōtos: ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ, ho de anexetastos bios ou biōtos anthrōpōi. “But the unexamined life is not lived for a human.”
Biōtos, and for that matter anexetastos, are the second type of verbal adjective. They kind of mean the same thing as a passive participle. But a participle is still a verb: it has an agent, and it has a time, and it has an aspect. An adjective doesn’t: it just is.
So if you take the verb passō ‘to sprinkle, to salt’, you could say that fish is passomenos ‘being salted’, or pastheis ‘that was salted’ or pepasmenos ‘that has been salted’. But you don’t. You just say fish is pastos, ‘salted’. You don’t care when, you don’t care by who. In fact, the question of when or by who does not really even make sense; it’s an adjective, it just is.
When it’s negated, the notion of it being a state, and not an event, is even stronger. Anexetastos ‘unexamined’ is such a negated verbal adjective. It doesn’t mean ‘currently not being examined by someone’ (mē exetazomenos), or that it didn’t get examined (mē exetastheis); it’s just unexamined. Examination doesn’t happen around it.
In fact negative verbal adjectives connote so strongly that the event doesn’t happen, they are often translated into Latin and Western languages with adjectives indicating impossibility. ‘Indeclinable’ in Greek is aklitos, un-declined. Because it’s an adjective and not a participle, the notion of who does the declining does not even show up, and the notion of when the declining happens and whether it’s ongoing does not show up. It just is.
Same here. An anexetastos life is not a life that didn’t get examined by someone at some time. It just isn’t examined.
Same with biōtos. Plato doesn’t use biōteos, “shouldn’t be lived”, so a notion of ‘worth living’ isn’t there. He said it is not lived. Not by someone, at some time: it’s just not lived at all. Any more than a preposition is declined, or a whale is examined. In fact, abiōtos gets rendered as ‘unlivable’. LSJ translates it as “not to be lived, insupportable”; the implication is that the situation is no more able to sustain life than the lunar surface.
I mean, sure, ‘worth living’ is sometimes an appropriate rendering. Aristophanes in Plutus says Abiōton einai moi pepoiēke ton bion, “he’s made my life be unlivable”, and the expression has been revived in Modern Greek: mu ekane to vio avioto “he made my life unlivable”. (abiōtos had not survived in Modern Greek, but verbal adjectives have, so Greeks still have an intuitive understanding of the expression) In English, we would say “he made my life not worth living”. But the Greek is more absolute: “there’s no life to be had there”.
And Plato did not say abiōtos either. He went one step further: he said, not ‘unlivable’ (or ‘unlived’), but ‘not lived’ (or ‘not livable’): ou biōtos. It’s just that bit more emphatic.
What did Plato mean? The tone is all wrong, but it comes across as something like: “An unexamined life? That’s not living. For anyone.”
If present/imperfect middle forms of ἵστημι can be transitive or intransitive, is their intransitive meaning similar to the perfect/pluperfect forms?
Ancient Greek verbs. Gotta love ’em.
Well, actually, no. Don’t gotta love ’em.
So. As Stephen Nelson continues to be thrown by the middle voice, I continue with the series “Ancient Greek Middle Voice: Booooo”, last installment being Nick Nicholas’ answer to Since the active and middle voices of the 2nd aorist forms of “to stand” are intransitive (ἵστημι – ἔστην vs ἐστάμην), are these forms synonymous?
ἵστημι ‘to stand’ appears in the active, and in the middle. If we are lucky, then the active forms are transitive, “to stand something up, to make something stand”, and the middle forms are intransitive, “to be standing”, and things would be clean.
If we are unlucky, then the present middle forms (ἵσταμαι) can be either transitive or intransitive, and the perfect active forms (ἕστηκα) can also be transitive or intransitive, and the two might mean the same thing, “to be standing”.
Which would be just like Greek. And yes, we are unlucky.
LSJ, what sayest thou?
LSJ starts by differentiating the two meanings. Good, good:
- I: Causal, make to stand.
- II: Intr., stand.
And then refines them:
- A. Causal,
- I. make to stand, set up
- II. set, place, of things or persons
- III.
- 1. bring to a standstill, stay, check
- 2. set on foot, stir up
- 3. set up, appoint
- 4. establish, institute
- 5. determine
- 6. fix by agreement
- 7. bring about, cause
- IV.
- 1. place in the balance, weigh
- 2. weigh out, pay
- B. Pass and intr tenses of Act. = to be set or placed
- I.
- 1. stand
- 2. take up an intellectual attitude
- 3. in pregnant sense [i.e. to be facing a prospect]
- II.
- 1. stand still, halt
- 2. metaphorically: stand firm
- III.
- 1. to be set up or upright, stand up, rise up
- 2. to be set up, erected
- 3. arise, begin
- 4. to begin, in marking time
- 5. to be appointed
Lovely. So how do the voices match up with these?
The start of the entry on ἵσταμαι is in fact a giant mapping of verb tenses to the two classes of meaning. But you should already know how this is going to go, from the definition of B. And because this is Greek:
- Pass and intr tenses of Act
The active means transitive “to make something stand”. The passive means intransitive “to be made to stand”, i.e. to be standing. And the active has “intransitive tenses”. Meaning exceptions.
The mappings given are:
A. Causal. Active: present ἵστημι, future ἑστήσω, first aorist ἔστησα, ἔστασα, perfect ἕστακα; also ἕστηκα in trans. sense; ἕστακεῖα trans. in Test.Epict.
B. Intransitive. Active: second aorist ἔστην, perfect ἕστηκα; late present ἑστήκω formed from perfect, hence future ἑστήξω. Passive: present ἵσταμαι, future σταθήσομαι, aorist ἐστάθην, perfect ἕσταμαι. (It isn’t Doric, it’s Attic.)
*phew*
Allow Dr Nick to elucidate.
The bad news is that there are active forms that still mean “to be standing” and not “to stand something up”.
The very very good news is that this was too confusing even for the Ancient Greeks, so they made sure that the active tenses that meant “to be standing” and the active tenses that meant “to stand something up” did not look like each other: ἔστησα vs ἔστην, ἕστακα vs ἕστηκα (with an exception in one text). There’s also ἵστημι vs ἑστήκω and ἑστήσω vs ἑστήξω, and that’s actually a brand new verb made up from the perfect intransitive ἕστηκα.
The actual question Stephen is asking is: if the active perfect ἕστηκα and the middle present ἵσταμαι both mean “to be standing”, is there some nuance of meaning differentiating the two?
I really hate to say yes, especially given the last answer I gave, but probably yes. A perfect tense is all about being in the aftermath of something, in a state resulting from something. So a perfect tense for “I am standing” is going to be more stative, more durative, than a simple present; maybe more like “I’ve been standing”. You will see some Greek grammars awkwardly hint at this with “I have set myself” vs “I stand”, or as with this German PDF, ich stelle mich “I place myself” vs ich habe mich gestellt => ich stehe “I have placed myself = I stand”.
Unfortunately Greek grammars were mostly written in the 19th century, when people still had a very vague notion of semantics. I’m sure some linguistics postgrad somewhere has worked out a proper treatment of this distinction in the past 50 years, but it won’t have made it into the teaching grammars.