Subscribe to Blog via Email
March 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Are there any dialects of Greek that Nick Nicholas can’t understand?
First up, my vanity is well gratified!
Well, there’s the question, and then there’s the details.
Can I understand someone speaking modern Tsakonian, or read ancient Arcadian and understand it, sight unseen?
Mate, I struggled to understand the Cypriot of my cousin’s husband Fotis; and I have no idea what Homer is on about. Homer!
I’m a really bad example, because I’ve approached Greek as a linguist rather than a classicist, so I’ve learned only the bits I’ve needed. I know that when I was studying my thesis on Modern Greek dialect, I was familiar enough with Pontic that I could read it without a problem, and I probably could hold a conversation in Tsakonian. It’s patchier 20 years on. And I would still struggle with Cypriot basilect, or Samothracian.
Ditto Ancient Greek, and that’s exacerbated by my imposter syndrome. I can kinda understand Attic, but I will sneak peeks at the dictionary when I don’t think you’re looking, and I ain’t touching no Thucydides. I know the Doric shibboleths, so I can probably deal with the Doric in Aristophanes and Archimedes; maybe not Alcman and Theocritus. I did intensive work with Alcaeus and Sappho, so I’m better than the usual classicist on Aeolic. But, because the TLG lemmatiser already dealt with Homer and Herodotus, when I first obtained it as Morpheus from Perseus, I never needed to brush up on my Epic/Ionic.
And non-literary dialects? I’ve read the handbooks of Ancient Greek dialect, such as Thumb and Buck and Bechtel, so I’ve *seen* North-West Greek and Arcadian and Cretan. Understand them? I’d be struggling. I’d pick out a few words more than the average classicist, perhaps, but that wouldn’t be enough for me to do a translation viva.
Edward Conway brings up Linear B in comments, and I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear him. 🙂
Now, to go to your details: can you triangulate dialects (let alone intermediate stages of the language) from Attic Classical Greek + Standard Modern Greek?
Intermediate stages: Usually. Dialects: Less so.
We don’t have as much Greek attested between Attic and Early Modern Greek as you might think, because most people tried to write Attic. (A very artificial Attic.) Koine is not really challenging if you know Attic; you’ll be relieved at the simplifications, and the occasional Doric-looking words won’t throw you. The papyri are as much Greek as a Foreign Language as they are Koine, but they won’t really throw you either. In between the papyri and Early Modern Greek, we have bits and pieces: snatches of songs, inscriptions written by Greek POWs under the Bulgars. Again, no problem.
Actual Early Modern Greek starts 1100, more or less. There are going to be some archaic words and grammatical usages that will throw you a bit more, if you’ve got just Attic and SMG, and you want to be on the alert for false friends. You’ll understand the gist of things, but you may miss the fine print.
When I co-translated a poem written in 1364 (An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds), we looked up every single word in the Early Modern Greek Dictionary, because there were a lot of words that changed in strange ways. The modern word for “pew” for example, στασίδι, was just the mediaeval word for “a spot”: the Rat went back to his spot in the assembly, not to a church pew. The future tense looked very different from Modern Greek, with the modern form originating only in the 1400s, and not really settling down until the 1700s; so you could be missing some nuance there. Prepositions also worked slightly differently.
But honestly, most of the difficulty you’ll find in Early Modern Greek will be dialectal, rather than chronological. If you’re going to read Early Modern Greek, you’re going to find a lot of Cretan material in particular. Dialects are often archaic in some ways, but just knowing Ancient Greek isn’t going to be enough to work them out.
As a little sampler: here’s one of the very few private unlettered letters we have preserved in Early Modern Greek, from 1420 Crete.
Manuel Chantakites, Away from Crete, 1420
Chantakites: Linguistic analysis
I’m curious how easy Greek Quorans—particularly those unfamiliar with Cretan dialect—find it to read.
What are some interesting examples of Ancient Greek vernacular?
This is (a) very old and (b) profane. Hope it’s what you’re looking for, Vangeli. Whether or not it’s what you’re looking for, it’s what you’re getting from me.
The Greeks got hold of the alphabet in the early 8th century BC. If you’re studying the history of the Greek alphabet, as I’ve done, you will inevitably come across the graffiti found in 1898, near the Thera gymnasium. Dating from the late 8th century BC, they use a version of the Greek alphabet so archaic, it lacks not only an omega, but even a phi: the /pʰ/ sound was written out just as it was by the Romans, as a pi followed by a Heta.
This particular metrical inscription captured my interest (Inscriptiones Graecae xii 3.537 = Iambica Adespota 29Aa):
ΝΑΙΤΟΝΔΕΛΠΗΙΝΙΟΝΕΚΡΙΜΟ
ΝΤΕΔΕΟΙΠΗΕΠΑΙΔΑΒΑΘΥΚΛΕΟΣΑΔΕΛΠΗΕΟ
If you clean it up, introduce word spaces, and guess which vowels were meant to be long, you get:
ναι τον Δελπ⊢ινιον ε̣ Κριμο̄ν
τε̄δε ο̄ιπ⊢ε παιδα, Βαθυκλεος αδελπ⊢εο[ν]
And if you use conventional Greek orthography:
ναὶ <μὰ> τὸν Δελφίνιον,
ἦ Κρίμων τῆδε ᾦφε παῖδα Βαθυκλέος, ἀδελφεόν.
“Truly, by the Delphic Apollo, here have I, Crimon, something the son of Bathycles, brother of…”
So, what was written down as oiphe, with a <p> and an <h>, is indeed ɔ́ːipʰe… Ok, so what’s the something?
At the time I read this, I had just got hold of the source code of the Perseus Project’s morphological analyser, Morpheus. I typed the word in…
… and got bupkis. I got bupkis, even though the verb ᾦφε belongs to was included in the Morpheus lexical database. The catch is that the verb is on the obscure side with regard to the Classical canon; so it had not been entered manually: it had been automatically extracted from LSJ. And the extraction (at the time) was so poor, that list of verbs was just ignored when the source code was compiled.
That discovery set me on the path to improving Morpheus over the next 12 years, for use in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, until my contract was not renewed last year; on which see The Decalogue of Nick #2.
But… I’m getting off the topic. That ᾦφε verb, it turns out, is the past tense of οἴφω. And what does οἴφω mean?
If you look it up in the Victorian-era LSJ dictionary, you will get a Victorian-era definition:
οἴφω, Dor. = ὀχεύω I, but only of human beings, τὰν Χελιδονίδα Plu.Pyrrh.28, cf. IG12(3).536 (Thera, vii B. C.), Leg.Gort.2.3; οἰφεῖ, as if from οἰφέω, in prov. ἄριστα χωλὸς οἰ., Mimn.15 Diehl, Com.Adesp.36, Diogenian.2.2. (LSJ)
And… what is this cross-referenced ὀχεύω?
of male animals, cover.
So, oiphō is the Doric for “to cover”, referring to male animals, only oiphō refers specifically to human beings.
There is, of course, a more direct way of glossing the old Doric verb:
“Truly, by the Delphic Apollo, here have I, Crimon, fucked the son of Bathycles, brother of…”
One can debate how obscene the verb actually was. Greek Homosexuality argues that since the word was also used in the Law Code of Gortyn (“oiphō by force” = “rape”), it isn’t meant to be coarse; but it isn’t meant to be as delicate as “cover”, either. (Then again, did profanity work in the same way in Ancient Greek society?) There’s also been fertile debate (see Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece) about whether this situated pederasty in a religious context (invoking the god), or just as commonplace bragging.
But whatever the social interpretation, this is indeed an interesting example of Ancient Greek vernacular.
On social media, I notice that people deliberately omit the word ‘I.’ What might be behind that?
None of the answers satisfy me, though Logan R. Kearsley’s is by far the closest to satisfying me.
EDIT: Uri Granta’s answer satisfies me more than mine. Go read that.
There is a colloquial register in English, in which the first person subject is omitted routinely. It predates social media; see, for example the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. The bits Lennon wrote use the pronoun; the middle section McCartney wrote skips it:
Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed I was late.
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream
But contra Logan, I don’t think this is just spoken English. I think this is a particular narrative register of spoken English—it’s a conventionalised way of telling stories, in a punchy way. I don’t think you’ll find it in different kinds of speech, such as say persuasive speech or instructional speech.
How many letters does Unicode currently include in the Latin script, no matter the language, but ignoring upper vs. lower case differences?
Latin script in Unicode – Wikipedia
As of version 9.0 of the Unicode Standard, 1,350 characters in the following blocks are classified as belonging to the Latin script
Let’s remove the uppercase letters; and that leaves us with your answer. From eyeballing:
26+30+128+104+14*8+12+12+67+26 = 517
That leaves 833.
If I’m wrong, I’m not wrong by much.
EDIT: Derek Zech’s answer to How many letters does Unicode currently include in the Latin script, no matter the language, but ignoring upper vs. lower case differences? leaves out more letters than I do, is more thorough, and he sounds more correct. Go upvote him: Vote #1 Derek Zech.
Is Kokakarsas a Greek last name?
Yiannis Papadopoulos has done the right homework, OP, of finding Greek Wedding 1879 Melbourne, mentioning your ancestor.
For those confused by that: A Constance Ocass of Cerigo (= Cythera) got married in Melbourne in 1879. Tahlia O’Cass (the OP) is his descendant, and posted in that thread. The surname is clearly mangled from something Hellenic, and another descendent, Rita Kocass, posted that her family’s information was that the surname was Kokakarsas, and that he was from Skorpios near Ithaca.
1879 is extremely early, and both Ithaca and Cythera are completely plausible for migration from Greece that early (the only other place Constance might have come from was Kastellorizo).
Yiannis Papadopoulos is right that Kokakarsas does not sound Greek, and Google reports no such surname; given the penetration of the Web by now, including historical archives, I’m reasonably confident there wasn’t ever such a surname, and that something got mangled in the Kocass family tradition.
Given User-13249930999434776143’s answer that Kokakarsas is a bunch of Albanian vulgarities, it’s not impossible that an Albanian trolled the Kocass family about their surname, but I think it’s demographically unlikely. Neither Cythera nor Ithaca are Arvanitika territory, so I don’t think indigenous swearwords are the pathway for the surname either.
There’s a book on Cythera surnames (Καλλίγερος, Εμμανουήλ Π.: Κυθηραϊκά Επώνυμα. Εταιρεία Κυθηραϊκών Μελετών. First edition: 2002, Second edition: 2006), and Untitled Document lists the 258 surnames discussed in that book. None of them look like –(k)okas–. Kalie Zervos in that genealogy thread guessed that it might be “Cassimaty or Castrissios” , and Κασιμάτης and Καστρίσιος from the book’s list are indeed the only matches to Kas-. Karatzas isn’t much closer. Maybe Γεωργάς Georgás? But surely that would have just ended up as George.
There’s a monograph on Ithacan surnames from 1959 (Τοπωνυμικόν της νήσου Ιθάκης και επώνυμα Ιθακησίων / Σπύρου Ν. Μουσούρη (Φώτου Γιοφύλλη).), which is not online. There is a huge list of Cephallonian surnames (Ithaca being the island next door), compiled by Miliarakis in 1890: Anemi – Digital Library of Modern Greek Studies – Γεωγραφία πολιτική νέα και αρχαία του νομού Κεφαλληνίας υπό Αντωνίου Μηλιαράκη., digitised list at the end of Ιστορικές διαδρομές. From that list of some 1200 surnames, I get a few more possible matches, but they’re still distant: Oktoratos, Orkoulas, Kokkolatos, Kokkosis, Kaskanis, Kassandrinos.
The Melbourne Greek Orthodox Community has put up images of its minutes from 1897 to 1916: Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria. (Btw, that is *not* how you publish archival images. A simple PDF would have been a lot better.) Nothing jumped out as matching O’Cass there either, and Constance Ocass died in 1896. At any rate, he became Anglican, so his progeny wouldn’t have shown up in the Orthodox church’s logs—though as the genealogy thread says, one of his sons may have married in the Orthodox Church in Sydney.
I don’t think I’ve helped you, Tahlia. If you have more patience than me, you can pore over the 1897–1916 ledger, but I suspect your ancestors won’t show up there. If you *do* get somewhere, please let us know!
euhemerism
Michael Masiello’s answer to Was God a person?
No, but it is refreshing to see someone flirt with euhemerism on Quora.
Euhemerism is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhemerism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores. It was named for the Greek mythographer Euhemerus, who lived in the late 4th century BC. In the more recent literature of myth, such as Bulfinch’s Mythology, euhemerism is termed the “historical theory” of mythology.
What is the meaning of meaning, philosophically speaking?
I’m going to give the linguistic meaning of meaning; certain (old school) philosophers would accept it as an answer, and Gottlob Frege, who came up with the crucial distinction, is considered a philosopher and not a linguist. (Back in the 1890s, linguists weren’t really doing semantics.)
Language is a code. A code is a system of signs. A sign is a mapping of an utterance (e.g. a word) to something in the world (e.g. a thing).
The meaning of a word is its mapping.
The naive understanding of meaning is its denotation: the set of all things in the world that a word maps to. So the denotation of apple is the set of all apples in the world (that were, or are, or ever will be). The denotation of Nick Nicholas is the set of these guys (among others):
Swift sent this up in Gulliver’s Travels, with the scholars of Laputa lugging sacks along of a bunch of stuff, which they could pull out and point to, to establish the denotation of what they were talking about. “Cat! You know! One of these! *pulls cat out of a bag*” “*Mrowwwww!*”
It gets a good deal messier with adjectives and verbs, but still not intractable. The denotation of yellow is the set of all yellow things in the world. The denotation of sleep is the set of all animals sleeping. The denotation of give is the set of all people giving things to someone.
You may have started seeing the problems with this approach for verbs. But Frege identified it more straightforwardly with nouns. His example was the Morning Star and the Evening Star. In class, I used Clark Kent and Superman.
You and I know that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person. So “Clark Kent” and “Superman” have the same denotation. But Jimmy Olsen doesn’t know that. And in fact, even if we do know that, Clark Kent and Superman don’t mean the same thing. Clark Kent means “some geeky guy with glasses who works as a journalist at The Daily Planet”. Superman means “some musclebound himbo who wears his underpants on the outside and leaps tall buildings in a single bound”. (That’s leaps, not flies.)
Frege’s example is along the same lines: we know that the Morning Star and the Evening Star have the same denotation, {Venus}. But the ancient didn’t, and even now, they don’t have the same meaning. The Morning Star means “the really bright star you see in the morning”, and the Evening Star means “the really bright star you see in the evening”. The fact that we have now established they are the same thing does not mean those definitions are identical.
Frege identified sense as distinct from denotation. Sense is not the set of all things that the word means. Sense is the criteria you use, to work out whether something belongs to the set of all things that the word means. Those definitions I gave of Clark Kent and Superman are different, even if their denotations are the same: they are different senses.
Denotation naively assumes there is one objective meaning in the world for any noun, that you can point to. Sense walks it back: meaning is a set of instructions to working out what a noun points to. And notice that those instructions are themselves language. It was the start of realising, increasingly, how subjective meaning is, and how divorced it can be from the outside world: how meaning is trapped within language.
In fact, that realisation was earlier than Frege. Remember the definition of sign I gave above? “A sign is a mapping of an utterance to something in the world”, and the mapping is the meaning? That’s Saussure’s simplified model. The Semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, decades before Frege, adds a third element to a sign: the interpretant sign. It’s not the person interpreting the sign: it’s the interpretation of the sign—which is itself a sign. Turtles all the way down.
vertiginous
If you can still believe in naive teleology after you read this essay by Stephen Jay Gould , try reading it again. And the panda’s thumb, I’m afraid, is the tip of a vertiginous iceberg.
Look, not to experience emotional distress, you have to be willing not to experience emotional exaltation. No suffering means no vertiginous peaks of shared joy.
Michael Masiello’s answer to What is Ludwig van Beethoven’s greatest work and why?
his heights are so vertiginous that one gets a nosebleed thinking about them
- a : characterized by or suffering from vertigo or dizziness; b : inclined to frequent and often pointless change : inconstant
- causing or tending to cause dizziness the vertiginous heights
- marked by turning : rotary the vertiginous motion of the earth
“Vertiginous,” from the Latin vertiginosus, is the adjective form of “vertigo,” which in Latin means a turning or whirling action. Both words descend from the Latin verb vertere, meaning “to turn.” (“Vertiginous” and “vertigo” are just two of an almost dizzying array of “vertere” offspring, from “adverse” to “vortex.”) The “dizzying” sense of “vertiginous” is often used figuratively, as in “vertiginous medical discoveries may drastically change life in the 21st century.”
A Veridical harvest
Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui? has triggered this from me:
- Esoteric does not just mean “obscure”, it means understood only by very few select people, who are initiated into knowledge. The Greek means “insider”. It’s not the kind of thing that any fool can pick up a dictionary and learn; it’s supposed to be secret, and there’s a reason its connotation is one of cults and guilds.
- Ennui is not just boredom. It might be just boredom in French, but that’s not how the word is used in English. In English, it refers to the kind of existential, weary, discontented boredom that makes you give up on life itself. A misplaced hyperbolic reaction to being bored by someone’s big words.
It has triggered this from the Magister:
Neither of these motives seems particularly noble or intelligent to me. One might say that the deployment of polysyllabic grandiloquence by a querent, whether the intentional dimensions of the utterance are defined by pavonine preening or the self-consuming ironization of discursive modes nonetheless known to the inquirer in an unsubtle, reductive, and ultimately anti-intellectual intimation that all such verbiage is vapid, is hardly laudable.
- querent
- The most delightful obscure words: grandiloquent, polysyllabic
ironization:
Straightforwardly, the nominalisation of IRONIZE: “to make ironic in appearance or effect; to use irony : speak or behave ironically”. Not in the obvious online dictionaries, and not in OED either.
From the googles, there is also usage related to iron instead of irony:
https://www.va.gov/vetapp15/File…
Concerning the issue of the Veteran's entitlement to service connection for a dental disorder, to include ironization and loss of teeth and bone loss, for VA compensation purposes, the Veteran alleges in a June 2013 statement that, within a year from returning from service in Vietnam, his teeth began falling out. He recalls that his private dentist at that time told him that he had "ironization of the gums" due to excessive levels of iron in his system which he alleges resulted from drinking, over an eight year period, water in Vietnam that had been purified by iron tablets. The Veteran alleges further that he was told years later that he had sustained "massive bone loss."
Ironization (Urban Dictionary):
The process by which an individual “iron-lungs” a vape hit. Withholding vapor to the cages of the lungs in order to increase buzz probability.
Also, can be used to refer to withholding marijuana in the chest to increase the chances of THC absorption.
The breaking down of nicotine in the lungs to increase the passing to the brain.
You just ironized the fuck out of that vape bro.
The ironization of that hit was almost passed threshold.
Holy fuck Bill, that ironization could have killed you if you held it any longer.
laudable:
worthy of praise : commendable She has shown a laudable devotion to her children.
A Nicholas favourite, that one.
intimation:
the act of intimating, or making known indirectly.
a hint; suggestion: The death of his father was his first intimation of mortality.
Intimation of (im)mortality is an allusion to Ode: Intimations of Immortality by Wordsworth.
vapid:
lacking or having lost life, sharpness, or flavor; insipid; flat: vapid tea.
without liveliness or spirit; dull or tedious: a vapid party; vapid conversation.
“My generation, the millennials, are so often viewed in a negative light. We are described with the words ‘lazy’, ‘entitled’, and ‘vapid’. I want to help combat this by growing an image of a young person who does not need to fit these titles, for whom the boom of technology has expanded horizons rather than spoiling attitude.” (No Shrinking Violet: Leah Pritchett dispenses doses of healthy advice by Archie D’Cruz on Quoran of the Week)
pavonine:
Loved this one, because I knew the Latin of it!
- of, relating to, or resembling the peacock
- colored like a peacock’s tail or neck : iridescent
- of the color peacock
Latin pavoninus, from pavon-, pavo peacock + -inus -ine
The metaphorical allusion here is to the proverbial vanity of peacocks; e.g.
1. Of or resembling a peacock.
2. Vain; showy.“The artists were attacked for being a narcissistic, pavonine, and self-regarding group.”
Arifa Akbar; The Cult of Beauty; The Independent (London, UK); Mar 29, 2011.
Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui?
The true and honest and equitable answer is the Magister’s: Michael Masiello’s answer to Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui? Vote #1 Michael Masiello. Vote early and vote often.
The petty and cavilling answer is mine. Others have gone part of the way there, but I’ll finish the task.
No, it is not veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui. Because those are not synonyms of “is it true to say that using obscure words ends up in people getting bored with how you talk”. Big words have nuance. Big words have subtlety. Big words are there for a reason. That’s why you’re supposed to use them sparingly.
- Veridical does not mean “true”. It means “truth-telling”. It refers to a commitment to reflecting the world accurately, it’s not something you can accidentally blurt out or stumble upon. And there’s a good reason the word is mostly used in psychology and philosophy, domains that are concerned with people’s commitment to truth.
- Esoteric does not just mean “obscure”, it means understood only by very few select people, who are initiated into knowledge. The Greek means “insider”. It’s not the kind of thing that any fool can pick up a dictionary and learn; it’s supposed to be secret, and there’s a reason its connotation is one of cults and guilds.
- Culminates refers to something that builds up gradually to a climax or achievement of some kind. You don’t culminate into a passive state, such as ennui. That’s your classic parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. (Or anticlimax, if you prefer.)
- Ennui is not just boredom. It might be just boredom in French, but that’s not how the word is used in English. In English, it refers to the kind of existential, weary, discontented boredom that makes you give up on life itself. A misplaced hyperbolic reaction to being bored by someone’s big words.
- And communicative ennui does not sound like ennui about the communications you hear. It sounds like ennui about the communications you make. Like you’re questioning whether it’s worth continuing to live, as you’re stuck making inane smalltalk.
- Or belittling people’s vocabulary.