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What are the unusual punctuation marks in your language?
Survey question, and I’m looking forward to someone bringing up the Amharic sarcasm mark.
Greek punctuation functionally corresponds to English punctuation—mostly.
- Upper dot <·> corresponds to semicolon.
- In Ancient Greek typography, the upper dot is usually also used in the function of the English colon. Modern Greek typography uses the colon.
- Ancient punctuation had a middle dot as well as an upper dot, for different length pauses. Modern typography does not differentiate a middle dot from the upper dot.
- The Greek interrogative is identical to the Latin semicolon <;>.
- Quotation marks in Modern Greek typography have traditionally been the French guillemets <« »>. Through English influence, you will now see more English double quotes.
- Like French, Greek uses the quotation dash <―>.
- There is a native counterpart to the ampersand, the kai ligature <ϗ>, but it is no longer in wide use.
- Abbreviations are occasionally marked with double prime <″>, although that is quite old fashioned. The only instance anyone living is likely to have seen is Χ″ as an abbreviation of the surname prefix Χατζη- “Hatzi-”; e.g. Χ″μάρκου “Hatzimarkou”. Much more common now is the solidus </>; e.g. παν/μειο = πανεπιστήμειο “university”, Κων/πολη = Κωνσταντινούπολη “Constantinople”.
Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country?
To expand on Fey Lepoura’s answer to Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country?
Historically, Greece contained a large number of ethnicities, and a large number of distinct cultures to go with those ethnicities:
- Greek
- Orthodox
- Catholic
- Muslim
- Turkish
- Arvanite
- Albanian (in the Northwest, mostly Muslim, but also Christian)
- Aromanian
- Megleno-Romanian
- Macedonian (Slavonic)
- Bulgarian
- Christian
- Muslim (Pomak)
- Roma
- Armenian
- Jewish
- Romaniote
- Sephardic
- Italkian
Of those ethnicities and cultures, the Muslims left most of Greece in 1923, the Jews were mostly extirpated through the Holocaust, and the Christians were mostly assimilated to the Greek culture.
I think you can still legitimately claim that Greece is multiethnic, and that Arvanites, Aromanians, Slavophones, Pomaks, Turks, Roma, and Sephardic Jews are distinct ethnicities that are still identifiable in Greece. (That’s not to mention the substantial number of immigrants to Greece since the 1990s.)
But multicultural has come to mean something more. Multicultural has come to mean that, even if there is a dominant culture in the country, the state will not pressure its population to assimilate to that culture, and will accept the coexistence of different cultures in the country as an asset.
For better or worse, the Greek state has never been multicultural in that way.
How many types of dictionaries are there?
This presentation offers the following typology of dictionaries:
- Bilingual/Multilingual (translating one language into another)
- Monolingual
- Synchronic (contemporary usage)
- Limited (a particular field, e.g. medical; a particular register, e.g. slang)
- General: Comprehensive (all of the language, multi-volume) or Standard (single volume, mostly for paedagogical use)
- Diachronic
- Historical (the historical paths that words have taken in their usage and forms)
- Etymological (the origins of words)
Dictionaries often combine several categories. The Oxford English Dictionary is all of Historical, Etymological, and Comprehensive. There are dictionaries that are purely etymological, though historical dictionaries almost always are also etymological. You can also have bilingual dictionaries that are not just translations, but etymological or historical (the big dictionaries of Classical languages fall in that category), or synchronic and limited (e.g. Greek–English medical dictionary).
What is your opinion on the unidirectionality hypothesis of grammaticalization?
I am much more of a functionalist than Daniel Ross and Brian Collins, so I am much more sympathetic to unidirectionality, and the fact that there are counterexamples does not bother me.
It did bother Brian Joseph, who’s one of the big names against unidirectionality, and who also marked my thesis. He found it pretty good, despite the fact that it was written within the grammaticalisation framework.
Hypothesis is likely too strong a word, since it’s opened up to refutation through the counterexamples. But the tendency towards more grammatical, more reduced, more bounded, more obligatorified, is a thing, and it’s both quite useful in reconstruction (as Daniel concedes), and something to be explained.
Formalists in an online discussion on unidirectionality I read once dismissed unidirectionality in grammaticalisation as an epiphenomenon. The retort was: aren’t most interesting phenomena?
Answered 2017-04-22 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
Are there similarities between Turkish and Greek Music?
There are underlying similarities between Turkish and Greek music at a deeper level, and there are clear similarities between Greek pop and Turkish pop at a more proximate level.
At a deeper level, the scales and instruments used by Turks and Greeks are related, through close to a millennium of coexistence. The tunings and modes of Byzantine chant have undergone microtonal influence from Turkish classical music. (The Greek chant preserved in Corsica does not have the same microtones.) Both the wind and the stringed instruments of the region have travelled in both directions. And of course the folk music of Christians and Muslims living in the same region was usually indistinguishable, whether it was Greece or Turkey. (Crete appears to have been an exception, but Christians took up the Muslim repertoire anyway after the Muslims left.)
At a more proximate level, the pop tradition of Greek music started with Rebetiko, and Rebetiko itself is clearly rooted in Smyrneika (Ottoman café music associated with Smyrna/İzmir). The scales and style were clearly Ottoman in the 1920s, although they evolved in more Western directions in Greece, from the 1930s (the Piraeus style) on.
Even before Rebetiko, there was a parallel outright Western pop tradition in Greek music, and the two traditions have mostly remained distinct; rebetiko has turned into Laïko (which in other answers I’ve termed “bouzouki pop”), and Western operettas of the 1910s have given way to rock, R&B stylings, and Euro disco.
Greeks are well aware that their Laiko tradition, and the revered Rebetiko that it comes from, has Turkish roots. Occasionally a nationalist might grouse about, but for the most part they’re happy that they’ve nativised it. It is worth noting that the Rebetiko that there is the most reverence for is not the Smyrneika of the 1920s, but the more nativised Peiraeus style of the 1930s.
With the thaw in Greek–Turkish relations since the 1990s, there has been a lot of traffic of “serious” musicians between the two countries; the Wikipedia article I linked to points out that contemporary performers of Rebetiko, if anything, overemphasise the Turkish style of the music. There has been some traffic of pop songs between the two countries, although that in itself is not remarkable; Arabic and Indian pop songs have also been covered in Greek.
In discussion with Turks on Quora, I’ve found that we understand each others’ music, it is familiar to us—but also that we would not mistake one’s music for the other. One user (and I’m annoyed I don’t remember who: it was in a comment, so good luck searching it) offered to me that there was something more impassioned about Turkish music, and more fatalistic about Greek music (“What can you do? Let’s have an ouzo”). That threw me, but then I realised that what came across to them as fatalistic comes across to me as stern and restrained: that was the contribution of the Piraeus style.
Which languages lend themselves particularly well for poetry?
They all do. And let me elaborate on that.
For starters, there’s the element of formal craft in poetry, and there’s the allusive use of language in poetry. Both of them are essential.
For allusiveness, what you need is a culture expressed through that language. All natural languages that people live their lives in are vehicles for culture. Yes, some literature cultures will have a huge backlog of canon to allude to; but oral cultures are no slouches there either. The subtle allusions to layers of Roman mythology make Latin literature very dense, and difficult to get through for an outsider. But Roman mythology is not that far removed from the religion of any given preliterate tribe, and their oral literature will not be any less powerfully allusive for it.
The languages that are in a disadvantage there are constructed languages. Esperanto is not at a severe disadvantage, since much of its literature for the most part is still squarely in the European tradition, and there are both internal and external allusions it still makes. But compared to ethnic languages, it’s fair to say, Esperanto is a bit more of a blunt instrument.
Klingon’s even blunter, though at least Klingon has a mythos. I still have a soft spot for the Klingon terza rima I came up with though…
Then there’s the formal element of poetry. I have to say, talk of which languages it’s easier to rhyme in is cheap. The forms adjust to accomodate the possibilities of the language. If rhymes are easy, you have rhyme-rich forms like the Petrarchan sonnet. If rhymes are less thickly strewn on the ground, you dial that back to the Spenserian or the Shakespearean sonnet. If rhymes are hard, you’ll allow all sorts of off-rhymes; if rhymes are facile, you’ll frown on suffix rhymes, and put hurdles in the way like Rime riche. The resources of the language are so harnessed in the language, that the exercise of craft is enough of a challenge to be appreciated, and not so much of a challenge as to be impossible.
Not all poetic traditions use rhyme, but many poetic traditions do something like that. (I’d like to think all do.) In Latin poetry, having the ictus coincide with the metre (stress coinciding with the feet of quantitative metre) was gauche, tolerable only in the very first poets in the language like Ennius.
So, I could say that Italian is a rhyme-rich, clear-sounding, culturally fertile language, well suited for Petrarch. And English is rhyme-poor, muffled, and came into the 17th century blinking and deracinated. So Early Modern Italian must be better suited for poetry than Early Modern English, right?
Yet, Shakespeare.
Is Sanskrit still spoken today?
By way of corroboration of Chandra Mohan’s answer to Is Sanskrit still spoken today?—
The villages mentioned by others in their replies are just show pieces. They do use some Sanskrit in communication, which was taught to them by some activists, but I was given to understand that their vocabulary may not be more than a couple of hundred words and they can’t use it except for their routine communications. It’s more like a trained parrot reciting some sentences.
—I have been copy-editing a paper on the Sanskrit spoken in the village of Jhiri. The researcher estimates that of the 600 villagers, 20 have conversational competence in Sanskrit; and (as you’d expect) there is clear syntactic influence on their Sanskrit from Hindi. The revival effort in Jhiri, as elsewhere, is through the work of Samskrita Bharati, although the village has stopped working with them.
Of course, 20 out of 600 is not the impression you get from googling Jhiri. There is a lot of romance to the notion of reviving Sanskrit.
Why do I have to place an emphasis mark on some vowel in every Greek word on writing, even if the meaning might not even change if you just leave it?
Well there’s the simple reason, and there’s the historical justification for it.
The simple reason is: BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE RULES.
🙂
And if it were up to me, you’re not putting enough accents on Greek words. The blanket rule that all monosyllabic words are unstressed, whether they are function words or content words, does not correspond to how the language is actually spoken. And it was the kind of rule only a committee could come up with; it wasn’t the monotonic system that actual linguists like Kriaras had come up with.
Why?
Ancient Greek had pitch accent, and did not write any of its accents down: it was tolerant of accentual ambiguity, whether in location or kind of accent. In fact, Ancient Greek was also not written with any spaces between words. Writing and reading were difficult, and not widely known skills.
When the pitch accents started shifting to stress accents, scholars started indicating the different kinds of accent and their location on words, so that Ancient poetry could be read properly. That gave rise to the polytonic accentual system (“many accents”), which was the only way to write Greek anywhere for the next two millennia.
Starting in the 19th century, there were spelling reform proposals to simplify the accentual system, which was recording pitch and breathing distinctions that had died out two millennia ago. There were occasionally atonic proposals (“no accents”), to do away with any indication of stress. But the majority of proposals were monotonic (“single accent”), and in 1982 that was the reform that prevailed, after being de facto in wide use for a decade.
Why monotonic and not atonic? Greeks will tell you that there are still words that differ according to where you place the accent; and that is true. But comic strips are written in all caps, and so are headlines; and Greeks have no problem reading them, with only very occasional use of accents as disambiguators (almost always Ή “or” vs Η “the”). You’ll also often see no accents used in texting.
The real reason is that completely removing accents was a step too far, for people who had been writing and read accents on every word all their lives.
Why did you think the Greek population disappeared so completely from Anatolia after the Ottoman conquest?
To clarify what this question is likely talking about:
We know that there was a continuous Greek presence in Thrace up to Constantinople, the Pontus (Black Sea), and Cappadocia, after the arrival of the Ottomans.
We know that there was a substantial Greek population in Western Asia Minor in the 19th century, which is linguistically distinct from Thrace, the Pontus, and Cappadocia: the dialect spoken in places like Smyrna was closer to Crete and the Cyclades.
We know that there was movement of Greek populations within the Ottoman Empire; we know for example that Bithynia was resettled from Epirus in the 17th century, and we know that the Tsakonian colony near Erdek/Artaki cannot have been indigenous, and likely dates from the 18th century.
We know that to the Ottomans, Christian and Muslim, ethnicity was not particularly important; religion was. “Greek population” would have been understood by everyone at the time to mean “Christian Orthodox population”.
So at issue is: whether the Christian population in Western Asia Minor disappeared, or remained continuous: whether that population entirely represents resettlement from Greece, or whether a Christian population remained in place in Western Asia Minor in the 15th century.
This is a topic Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I have disagreed on, and unlike me, she has read the mainstream tract outlining the theory of discontinuity, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor, and found it unconvincing.
If the population was discontinuous, and that’s how I’m interpreting the question, the answer is assimilation. The Greeks of Western Asia Minor weren’t massacred, they were converted to Islam. That there was conversion is known to be true; the debate is really whether there were any Christians left in Western Asia Minor in 1500 or not.
Presumably Thrace and the Pontus held out because they were conquered later, once the Millet system was in place, so there was less social pressure for conversion; and Cappadocia presumably was relatively inaccessible.
What does the suffix “ostomy” mean?
stoma is Greek for mouth.
–stomia is stoma plus an abstract noun ending: “-mouth-ation”.
In medicine, a Stoma (medicine) is also a surgically made opening. So a colostomy is a surgical intervention creating an opening (a stoma, a “mouth”) in the colon: kōlo-stom-ia > colostomy, “colon-mouth-ation”. The Wikipedia article gives 16 other stoma operations.
The -o- is not part of any suffix: it’s how Greek connects words together in a compound.