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Does the middle voice of τιμάω (τιμάομαι) in Attic Greek usually have an active (i.e. Epic: “to avenge”) or a mid/passive meaning (“to be honored”)?
Perusing the entry for τιμάω in Liddell–Scott, the negative meaning you mention is not Epic, and first turns up in Plato and Aristophanes; LSJ describes it as an “Attic law term”. The transition is:
- to honour (since Homer)
- to award (as an honour) (in Tragedy)
- to award a penalty to someone, including a fine or a death sentence (in Attic legal contexts)
- (medial) to estimate the extent of one one’s own penalty (in Attic legal contexts)
It is a specialist meaning, and I’d expect that the main meaning, ‘to be honoured’, continued to be dominant; it certainly is the meaning you would expect in a non-legal context.
Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes?
Evangelos Lolos’ answer to Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes? gives the prominent Latin affixes of Modern Greek.
No, I’m not going to cite them here. You’re going to have to go over there and upvote him yourself.
The suffixes Evangelos quotes are vernacular; they aren’t part of the whole apparatus of scholarly Latinate terminology.
Greek has had a very, very long history of calquing Latin terms with Greek affixes and stems. In fact, Greek even translates Linnaean binomens (or it used to; I’m pretty sure they’ve given up now). Then again, a whole lot of Classical Latin terms were calqued from Greek anyway.
So there is no precedent, or appetite, for using Latin prefixes or suffixes in Greek. Hybrid terms like automobile or television end up rendered as Greek only terms: autokinēton, tēleorasis. Modern coinages get calqued: amphiphylophilos (‘both gender loving’) for bisexual, metapoikiakos for post-colonial, diapanepistēmiakos for inter-university. The international Latin scientific vocabulary was never going to be a match for Greek cultural pride.
It’s only very, very recently that Greeks have stopped calquing; hence transexoual is much more common than diemphylikos ‘across-in-gender’. (There’s a nice subtlety in em-phylos ‘in-gender’ being a gender you were born with—the analogy is with innate; so that diaphylikos ‘across-gender’ is reserved for ‘intersex’.) But, as Christina-Antoinette Neofotistou, the trans woman involved in the coinages herself conceded, the Greek coinages don’t have the positive connotations that the English loans do, and she’s ended up just saying trans or transdzender and intersex, and dismissing the Greek coinages as pedantic.
I’ll admit to wincing when I saw her write, a bit further down, transfovia. That’s the kind of hybrid word Greek was never ever ever supposed to accept. But like I said: things have changed. At least (thank God) she said ousiokratia instead of esentsialismos.
Yes, of course we calqued essentialism.
See also: A cis lament for the Greek language by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile
Why do Australians prefer plain easy English over rich English?
The other answers are good, but I like to step back with questions like these, to the cultural context.
In former times, expertise and professional use of language were elite activities; people who would use language professionally had an education that encompassed the literary canon and rhetoric; and the dominant literary aesthetic prioritised an extensive, nuanced vocabulary and shows of erudition.
Currently the literary aesthetic has changed, to something more sparse and less preoccupied with nuance and flourish. Professional use of language has been decoupled from literature and erudition. And Plain English has been elevated as a priority in that professional use of language, particularly given the amount of information professionals are expected to digest daily. People write in dot points, not in paragraphs. People write for other people who would rather not be reading your stuff at all, and certainly don’t look to be entertained by it.
That’s not just in Australia. That is throughout the Anglosphere.
It does not extend to the entire world, though. In particular, it does not extend to the Subcontinent (if I can surmise correctly from OP’s name), at least not in the education system. Babu English may be a nasty colonialist term, but it does continue to reflect a disconnect in values around language aesthetics and utilitarianism, between the subcontinent and the rest of the Anglosphere. There is a concern about using rich vocabulary and structure, which other countries have simply abandoned in their education systems, in favour of efficiency and clarity.
I’m trying to avoid value judgements here. Some things were lost in the transition, other things were gained. I am certainly not proud of point form becoming my native discourse. And in fact, I have used words here that have made me feature in Masiello’s Mega Words.
But I don’t use those words in my day job. And I don’t expect to read them there either.
OP is certainly right about one thing. This is indeed a cultural difference.
Why are the taxes so high in Greece?
Excellent answer from Alket Cecaj, Alket Cecaj’s answer to Why are the taxes so high in Greece?
- Clientelism is how it started
- The government must provide; there isn’t a native notion of ground roots enterprise and small government. If the government must provide, well, that costs money. So far, as Alket argued, that’s no different from Scandinavia.
- Mistrust of institutions is how it is indulged
- This is the unhealthy flipside to clientelism, and that’s the kind of thing you don’t see in Scandinavia. Malcolm Gladwell actually used Greece as an example a decade ago. Greeks don’t dodge taxes because there’s lack of enforcement. Greeks dodge taxes because they don’t trust their government. Any more than their government trusts them. (Or rather, they only trust it to dispense clientelism.) The more they dodge taxes, the more the government taxes the dupes who still pay taxes.
- Inefficiency and profligacy is how it is perpetuated
- We’re a long, long way from Scandinavia now…
- Μαζί τα φάγαμε, as Pangalos said. “We wasted it together.” A genuine government–people collaboration.
- From time to time, even on Quora, someone brings up the reparations that Germany should have paid Greece for WWII—reparations that the Greek government had agreed to forego in the early 60s. If only those reparations had been paid, the argument goes, Greece wouldn’t be in the mess it is now. I was overjoyed to see a blog commenter snark once, “Right. Because we would have wisely invested that money, and not thrown it around to buy votes.”
- Neoliberal EU orthodoxy is how it has gone haywire.
- The Greek government can’t deflate its currency, and it needs to keep repaying impossible loans to its creditors; so it desperately raises whatever revenue it can, including taxing anyone left in Greece who still has any money. That of course guarantees that tradespeople are driven out of business or even further into the cash economy (has barter started there yet?); and any business that could have invested in Greece flees to Bulgaria instead.
What other races have the Greeks absorbed?
Here’s a laundry list. Some to a greater extent, some to a lesser. Some as cultural assimilation, some as more straightforward displacement.
- Pelasgians (or whatever the pre-Hellenic population of Greece was)
- Minoans (who are presumably the same as the Eteocretans)
- Eteocypriots
- Lemnians (assuming that their language, which looks related to Etruscan, is not Pelasgian)
- The indigenous peoples of Western Asia Minor (probably): Phrygians, Lydians, Carians, and all the others
- Celts/Galatians (there are red-headed Greeks and Turks)
- Jews (Romaniote, Sephardic, Italkian)
- Romans of sundry provenance
- Goths
- Avars
- Arabs (the Cypriots are more sanguine about admitting this than Greece Greeks are)
- Slavs (certainly the ones that went down south all the way to Mani)
- Albanians (as Arvanites)
- Vlachs
- Probably not the Roma, given the ongoing prejudice against them
- French
- Italians of sundry city states (Venetians, Genoese, Florentines)
- Catalans
- Probably not the Turks; it was likely the other way round, through conversion
- Bavarians (the ones who came down with King Otto)
- Armenians
- The modern-day migrants, whose assimilation is ongoing
What languages accept the use of mesoclisis and/or endoclisis?
Part of the problem is going to be that the terminology can get idiosyncratic to a language. I was not familiar with the terms endoclisis and mesoclisis, though I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere a description of an Italian dialect that sounds like what you’re describing as mesoclisis.
If we treat the Indo-European preverb as a separate word and not a prefix (which it seems to have been originally), some instances of mesoclisis show up in old Indo-European languages; Indo-European Language and Culture lists Old Irish, Gothic, and Avestan examples where a clitic comes between the preverb and the verb. In German now, just as in Homeric Greek, you can put a whole sentence between the preverb and the verb.
Endoclisis is an instance of Tmesis, where the interrupting word breaking up a word happens to be a clitic. Per Clitic – Wikipedia,
The endoclitic splits apart the root and is inserted between the two pieces. Endoclitics defy the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis (or Lexicalist Hypothesis) and so were long claimed to be impossible. However, evidence from the Udi language suggests that they exist. Endoclitics are also found in Pashto and are reported to exist in Degema.
What is the English translation for Greek ενέλιξη?
Well, I had no idea what the answer was.
But I did know that evolution in Greek is εξέλιξη, as an element-for-element calque: both mean “out-twisting”.
And ενέλιξη means “in-twisting”, which should correspond to Latin(-derived) involution.
And I looked up the definition of ενέλιξη, and it gave me a bunch of geometrical stuff: ενέλιξη (from the Papyros dictionary):
Στην προβολική γεωμετρία ε. ονομάζεται κάθε μη ταυτοτική προβολικότητα μεταξύ σχηματισμών α’ βαθμίδας και με τον ίδιο φορέα, που συμπίπτει με την αντίστροφή της. Αν μία προβολικότητα έχει ένα ενελικτικό ζεύγος, τότε είναι μία ε.
In projective geometry, an i. is every non-identity projection between first-grade formations with the same bearer, which coincides with its inverse. If a projectivity has an involutionary pair, it is an i.
(Approximate translation, since I don’t know any Greek geometric terminology.)
I then looked up the definition of involution, and it gave me a bunch of geometrical stuff: Involution (mathematics) – Wikipedia
In mathematics, an (anti-)involution, or an involutory function, is a function f that is its own inverse, f(f(x)) = x for all x in the domain of f.
…
2.3 Projective geometry
An involution is a projectivity of period 2, that is, a projectivity that interchanges pairs of points. Coxeter relates three theorems on involutions:
- Any projectivity that interchanges two points is an involution.
I don’t understand geometric terminology in English either, but I hereby decree that they are same difference.
How can I get Esperanto taught at my school?
Kaylee Lowe’s answer to How can I get Esperanto taught at my school? Read now for the general principles at work. This answer is the added detail.
Kaylee Lowe correctly points out the added constraint of standardised testing and curriculum support; you can’t just waltz in to a school with a copy of Jen Nia Mondo, and start talking. There are accountability constraints at work.
Australia has adopted a national curriculum, and a lot of time has been spent hammering Ancient Greek and Indigenous Language curricula into shape; if there isn’t provision for Esperanto there, most schools would be reluctant to deviate from the national course.
Add that in Australia, State schools don’t have that much autonomy in what they offer, and Catholic schools don’t have that much more.
Honestly, your best bet is to talk to the local Council for Adult Education, and get it offered there. Esperanto was in fact offered in Australian schools in the 1970s (Morwell High School: here’s a description from an alumnus), but we’re not in the 1970s; things in education are much more tightly controlled. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. From the description:
Trouble was, Ivan had to cajole other teachers into taking the classes – he taught them the lesson one day,and they taught it to us the next! We had one text book, and we began at page 1 in Form 1, and began at the same page 1 in Form 2. It is the only subject in which I ever ‘cheated’ – as did most of the class. Sorry Ivan, but we thought it was a bit of a joke. It was a compulsory subject in Form 1 and 2, in Form 3 if we took French we also had to take Esperanto. In Form 4 I opted out of French because although I enjoyed the subject I didn’t particularly like the teacher – but guess what, that year if you didn’t take French you had to take Esperanto. I was finally free of it in Form 5. But in four years we only ever used the one text book, and always started from page 1! It was a small tan coloured soft covered book.
Oh well.
Bonan sukceson, kaj bonvolu komuniki al mi pri pli da detajloj!
What was the role of the Turkish language in the Balkan sprachbund? How was Turkish affected by it or how effected it?
All Balkan languages have borrowed substantial Turkish vocabulary, and all Balkan languages have borrowed some Turkish affixes.
However, the Balkan Sprachbund is defined through the convergence of grammars, rather than just their borrowings from a common source. It is defined by shared morphological categories and syntactic constructions: a convergence such that, if you replace a Greek sentence with Albanian, word for word and suffix for suffix, the results will more or less make sense.
In that regard, the contribution of Turkish has been marginal. The “supposedly” suffix of Turkish, –miş, counts as a new morphological category, and has found favour in at least one dialect of Aromanian. That instance aside, the morphology and syntax of Turkish have remained quite distinct from that of the Balkan languages. (What happened to Greek in Anatolia was a different story, but it does not count as Balkan.)
What do the Greeks think of the Pontic Greeks who converted to Islam?
Greeks in recent years have established contact with the Pontic-speaking Muslims of the Of Valley, who remained in Turkey after 1923. (Their autonym for the language, unsurprisingly, is Romeyka.) They are renowned as devout Muslims, prominent in Islamic learning. (One might ruefully speculate that they feel they have something to prove.) Any promotion of the Greek dialect has unsurprisingly being viewed with suspicion by the Turkish state, and its most prominent advocate Ömer Asan has been prosecuted by the government, and has moved to Greece.
(See Greek-speaking enclaves in Pontus today: The documentation and revitalization of Romeyka (Chapter 8) – Keeping Languages Alive)
What do Christian Greeks think of them? This is necessarily speculative, but I’m drawing on both introspection, and on a couple of Greek TV programs I have seen.
Awkward. On the one hand, they are a living connection to the Lost Homelands. They have preserved a language which in Greece itself is emblematic but moribund. They are friendly to the waves of refugee descendants going on pilgrimage back East. They are, in one sense, Our People.
In another sense, they remain the Other. They are clearly Not Our People. They are clearly Muslim Turks, not Crypto-Christians as the nationalist narrative would much prefer. They are those who got to stay when Our People were made to leave.
I watched a program where an old Muslim Rum sang a Christian song he remembered from his youth, on Greek TV, with several Christian Pontic guests present. The guests looked moved.
But they also looked profoundly unhappy.