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How accurate is this quote from Henry Kissinger about the Greek people in Greece?
It’s a Greek urban legend, of the type Greeks love to boost their persecution complex. On the debunking of the urban legend by language blogger Nikos Sarantakos, see:
- Η περιβόητη δήλωση Κίσινγκερ και ο Λάκης Λαζόπουλος
- Ο μύθος για τη δήλωση Κίσινγκερ
- Και πάλι για τη δήλωση Κίσινγκερ
Was it 1974? Or 1973? Or 1997? Was the issue of Turkish Daily News where it was supposedly published wiped from the archives, as Liana Kanelli claimed? Really?
And as Sarantakos said,
Βέβαια, η διάψευση θα έπρεπε να περιττεύει. Οποιοσδήποτε άνθρωπος έχει λίγο μυαλό στο κεφάλι του, καταλαβαίνει ότι είναι απολύτως αδύνατο ένας παμπόνηρος διπλωμάτης σαν τον Κίσινγκερ να ξεστομίσει τόσο ωμά λόγια! Ακόμα κι αν τα πίστευε αυτά, ποτέ δεν θα τα έλεγε –ή, αν τα έλεγε, θα τα γαρνίριζε με πολυπολιτισμικές και ανθρωπιστικές σάλτσες.
There should have been no need for a denial [by Kissinger]. Anyone with half a brain would know that it is utterly impossible that a wily diplomat like Kissinger would speak so bluntly. Even if he believed all that, he’d never give voice to it; and if he did, he’d garnish it with multicultural and humanitarian sauces.
Not to mention, as commenters on his blog pointed out, phrases like cultural roots, historical reserves, removing them as an obstacle to do strike one as being translated from Greek. (And any native speakers of English reading this, look at the question details. Does that sound like Kissinger to you?)
After some digging, it seems the ultimate source of the alleged quote is something Charles K. Tuckerman, first US ambassador to Greece, wrote in 1872.
p. 145.
The principle upon which the Western powers have governed Greece since her independence of the Turkish power, has been that which Pitt declared in 1792 to be “the true doctrine of balance of power” — to wit, that the power of Russia should not be allowed to increase, nor that of Turkey to decline. After the battle of Navarino, Wellington, the demigod of Englishmen, who had pronounced that victory an “untoward event,” was for making Greece “wholly dependent upon Turkey.” This idea was supported by Lord Londonderry [Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh] who wished to render Greece “as harmless as possible, and to make her people like the spiritless nations of Hindostan.” These views seem to have prevailed in effect over the liberal ideas of Palmerston, who desired to see Greece as independent of Turkey as possible.
The quotes ended up attributed to Castlereigh and Palmerston, but Sarantakos found no corroboration that Castlereigh actually made the Hindostan jibe.
Sarantakos suspects the Kissinger statement was devised by someone inspired by a conflation of Tuckerman’s observation, which had circulated in Greek translation, with something Macauley allegedly said about Hindustan (Speeches in British Parliament, 1835):
I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace the old and ancient education system, her culture, because if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them to be, a truly dominated nation.
Mind you, Sarantakos, as a card-carrying Euro-communist, has no problem with the statement accurately reflecting US imperialist attitudes. He does have a problem with people making statements up as proof.
If you were allowed to add a symbol to unicode, what symbol would it be, and what would it mean?
I should be recusing myself from this question, because in fact I have added dozens of symbols to Unicode, both as an employee of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and as a tapped on the shoulder expert.
When Asmus Freytag tapped me on the shoulder, though, and said to me “We want to finalise Greek: Suggest all the characters we will ever need, so we can close the book on it”—there’s one decision I made that skipped a character, and that I feel a little bad about.
Unicode Greek includes three archaic characters that I proposed to them:
- Heta, <Ͱ>, was one way of writing the version of eta that some Greek alphabets used for /h/ instead of /eː/. In fact, most scholars just write it as a Latin <h>, e.g. hιππόλυτος for Hippolytus (Ἱππόλυτος); but you will see the tack symbol used occasionally. (U+0371)
- The Tsan and Pamphylian Digamma were two different sounds in two different dialects of Greek, that had the same glyph, <ͷ> (U+0377).
- The Archaic Sampi, <ͳ>, was the use of sampi as a letter of the alphabet, corresponding to σσ—as distinct from the normal use of sampi <ϡ>, as the numeral 900. For example, τεͳαράϙοντα “forty” in Ephesus, corresponding to regular Ionic τεσσαράκοντα. (U+0373)
My compunction comes from what I did with the Pamphylian sampi. To quote Wikipedia:
A letter similar to Ionian sampi, but of unknown historical relation with it, existed in the highly deviant local dialect of Pamphylia in southern Asia Minor. It was shaped like
According to Brixhe it probably stood for the sounds /s/, /ss/, or /ps/. It is found in a few inscriptions in the cities of Aspendos and Perge as well as on local coins. For instance, an inscription from Perge dated to around 400 BC reads: ͶανάͲαι Πρειίαι Κλεμύτας Λϝαράμυ Ͷασιρϝο̄τας ἀνέθε̄κε (=”Vanassāi Preiiāi Klemutas Lwaramu Vasirwōtas anethēke”, “Klemutas the vasirwotas, son of Lwaramus, dedicated this to the Queen of Perge”). The same title “Queen of Perge”, the local title for the goddess Artemis, is found on coin legends: ͶανάͲας Πρειιας. As ͶανάͲα is known to be the local feminine form of the archaic Greek noun ἄναξ/ϝάναξ, i.e. (w)anax (“king”), it is believed that the ͳ letter stood for some type of sibilant reflecting Proto-Greek */ktj/.
I am, temperamentally, a lumper rather than a splitter. It was my decision that the Pamphylian letter was a variant of the archaic sampi, and should be treated as a glyph variant of that codepoint, rather than as an independent codepoint.
[math]huge{ͳ}[/math]
This means I have made life difficult for anyone working on Pamphylian. They will have to commission a different font, with the archaic sampi pointing the other way around. Or, rather more unlikely, commission a font with two variant glyphs for the archaic sampi, and use software that allows them to pick which variant to display. Or just shrug, and use the Ionian glyph instead of the Pamphylian glyph. (Like my Wikipedia cite does.)
Sorry guys.
Why doesn’t Mongolia use the Uighur script again and leave out Cyrillic?
Read the fine print of the caption in the image of what Wikipedia would look like in Mongolian script, at Mongolian script – Wikipedia.
Mongolian Wikipedia preview. A representation of what mn.wiki would look like if Mongolian script support was properly implemented. Mn.wiki already exists, but support has not been implemented. Not all text is “real Mongolian” — only the actual text of the article, and the name thereof.
Vertical scripts are not well supported on computers. Until they are, abandoning Cyrillic would be suicidal for Mongolia. Conversely, of course, if they don’t abandon Cyrillic, there is little incentive for anyone to improve vertical script support.
There are cases where national governments have lobbied Silicon Valley to improve their scripts support. I wish I remember which Asian country it was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Mongolia.
The Death of Twyborn
Digenes Akritas was a hero of mediaeval Acritic songs, ballads celebrating the deeds of border guards of the Byzantine Empire. The hero survived into Modern Greek folk song, and The Death of Digenis is a song that got a lot of renown.
I cited its depiction of the Grim Reaper at https://necrologue.quora.com/Som… , since I’ve come to be regarded as a Grim Reaper of Quora on Necrologue. If I’m to start rendering the folk song in blank verse, well, I might as well see it through.
The hero Digenes “Two-Race” was so called because his father was an Arab and his mother Greek. The name got alchemised into Twyborn by Patrick White, in The Twyborn Affair—White having heard of Digenes from his Greek boyfriend. Twyborn fits English metre better.
Tuesday was Twyborn born; he dies on Tuesday.
He bids his friends and all the brave come gather,
Menna, Black Ali, and the Ogre’s Son,
and Trembling-Lip, whom world and earth both fear.
They went and found him lying in a field.
He moans—the mountains quake. He moans—fields quake.
“What is it, Twyborn, makes you wish to die?”
“Friends, you are welcome, friends and dear to me;
sit down, be quiet. Let me tell my tale.
Mountains of Araby, and Syrian valleys,
where two men dare not march, three dare not talk,
but fifty, a hundred men tread fearfully:
I’ve passed through them alone, on foot and armed,
my sword four cubits long, my lance three fathoms.
I’ve trod through hills and fields, through fields and summits,
on moonless nights, on nights without the stars.
And living all these years above the ground,
I’ve felt no fear for any of the brave.
I see now a barefoot man, with shining clothes;
his blazon from the lynx; his eyes are lightning.
He bids us fight on marble threshing floors:
whoever wins will take the other’s soul.”
They went and fought on marble threshing floors.
Where Twyborn strikes, blood flows, and forms a ditch.
And where Death strikes, blood flows, and forms a moat.
Why is Cæsar pronounced “seezer” and not “sayzer” or “sahzer”?
Traditional English pronunciation of Latin – Wikipedia
One of the characteristic features of Anglo-Latin is that the diphthongs æ and œ merged with e. This is fully represented in the American spelling of Latin loanwords, though the simplified spelling is not consistently applied:
æon and eon, æther and ether, amœba and ameba, anæmia and anemia, anæsthesia and anesthesia, cæsura and cesura, chamæleon and chameleon, dæmon and demon, diæresis and dieresis, encyclopædia and encyclopedia, fæces and feces, fœtus and fetus, hyæna and hyena, prætor and pretor
In particular, names were not respelled. So Cæsar was pronouned in Anglo-Latin Cesar—even if it wasn’t spelled Cesar.
When the Great English Vowel shift came to town, the long e ended up changing pronunciation to /iː/, just as it did in English proper. So Classical Latin kajsar > cajsar > tʃajzar > sajzar > Middle Anglo-Latin seːzar > Modern Anglo-Latin siːzar.
What is the difference between egoism and egotism?
As I harrumphed in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is the etymology of the word “egotism”?:
There is a recherché distinction that some people have made between egotism and egoism in English: egotism is a bad thing, egoism isn’t. But that distinction is pretty much made up, and noone really bothers with it any more.
In which parts of Greece do people pronounce the word “και” as “che” instead of “ke”?
Lots. Your search term is tsitakismos, the Greek name for the affrication of palatal /k/ [c] to [tʃ, tɕ, ts], as exemplified by the pronunciation of /ke/ “and” as /tʃe/ instead of Standard Greek [ce].
Going through the Centre for the Greek Language’s writeup of Modern dialects, and looking for that tsitakismos keyword:
- South-Eastern
- Some islands in the Dodecanese
- Chios
- Cypriot (as [dʒe])
- Northern Dialects
- Lesbos, Skyros, Mykonos
- Cappadocian (refugee, moribund)
- Southern Italian Greek (not in Greece)
- At least some parts of the Peloponnese
- Tsakonian
- Old Athenian (including Aegina, Kyme, Megara)
- Cretan and the Cyclades
In fact, as I’ve already mentioned in another answer, somewhere, the better questions to ask is: Where does tsitakismos not happen? The answer appears to be the Greek mainland and the Ionian islands, some bits of the Peloponnese and Attica excepted.
Incidentally, Greek dialectologists seem to have only worked out in 1983 (Contossopoulos’ paper) that the real split between Greek dialects is the word for “what”: τι vs ίντα, separating Aegean Islands and Old Athenian from the Mainland. That split corresponds closely to the tsitakismos isοgloss. The three Northern dialect exceptions, for example, are islands.
EDIT: cc Dimitris Almyrantis Philip Newton I’ve just stumbled on this paper from last year by Pantelidis: http://ins.web.auth.gr/images/ME… , which fascinatingly suggests that there are old connections between Old Athenian and Peloponnesian, and concludes that Old Athenian used to be spoken in Eastern Central Greece, which now speaks Northern Greek or Arvanitika. He notes, pp. 307–8, that tsitakismos turns up in bits (bits) of both the Peloponnese and Central Greece, though there is just too little data to work out how old and extensive the phenomenon is.
equitable
- having or exhibiting equity : dealing fairly and equally with all concerned an equitable settlement of the dispute
- existing or valid in equity as distinguished from law: an equitable defense
Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017?
So here’s the deal. I’m not writing any more answers for this site. I’ll watch. Maybe you can ban me for that. If so, fine. Blow me. If not, fine. Blow me.
Meanwhile, maybe you could let someone smarter than your whole brain trust put together — his name was Aristotle, you should look him up — offer a cogent gloss on your application of your policies. I will write here again if and when this site becomes “equitable” rather than what (supposedly) passes for merely “just.” Otherwise, this is not worth my time any more.
Why is the letter x doubled in neologisms such as doxxing and anti-vaxxers?
Speculation, but I’m assuming there’s a direct line from haxxor to doxx(er) to vaxxer.
Leetspeak, the affective use of creating spellings in hacker communities, has taken up the use of -xxor or -xx0r as a creative spelling of –cker; thus, haxxor for hacker. haxxor – Wiktionary. The duplication of <x> is an affectation. In fact the very use of <x> instead of /k/ is an affectation: it is misusing the plural hacks (hax) as the stem of the noun hacker (†hacks-er) instead of hack. The spelling haxx – Wiktionary is also used for hacks and hacking, and I’m assuming it is a back formation from haxxor.
dox – Wiktionary is the Leetspeak respelling of docs (abbreviation of documents) in the sense of “Documents, especially information sought by hackers about an individual (address, credit card numbers, etc.)”
When it came time to form a verb out of the action of seeking dox on someone, the spelling doxx – Wiktionary prevailed. I am assuming it was done by analogy with not just haxx (still a noun), but also the verb *to haxx implicit in haxxor. Hence why the noun dox is more often spelled with a single x, and the verb doxx with a double xx (although both spellings are used). And I think this was affective analogy; I don’t think you needed the intermediate step of doxx0r (document hacker) for that to happen.
Now, English has a longstanding spelling convention that when you add a suffix to a word ending in short vowel + consonant, you double the consonant to keep the vowel short. Sit > Sitter. Spam > Spammer. You could say that by analogy, dox > doxxer. But there was no use of xx like that before in English: box > boxer.
Nor am I convinced that the need to make the vowel before the <x> short played a role: I just don’t think leetspeak would have ever spelled baker as baxor, for example, so that you would need to spell backer as baxxor to contrast the vowels.
So what I think happened is that the –xx spelling of haxxor and doxx opened up the possibility of applying the consonant doubling rule to other verbs. Once doxx was in place as a verb, and haxxor was already there, it became easier for verbs ending in /ks/ to be spelled with an xx, and even more easy for –xer nouns to be spelled as –xxer—as long as they are analogous to doxx: that is, primarily used online and informally, and clearly abbreviations of of something else. In fact, the parallel of haxxor made it possible to go straight from dox to doxxer, without even positing an intermediate verb to doxx—you can just draw an analogy now with spam > spammer.
The adjective is anti-vax – Wiktionary. By analogy with doxx and haxxor, and for that matter spam > spammer (a rule now applied to anti-vax by analogy with haxxor): anti-vax > anti-vaxxer – Wiktionary.
Answered 2017-03-23 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
What are all the Greek star names?
Drawing on:
History of Constellation and Star Names
In Greek astronomy the stars within the constellation figures were usually not given individual names. (There are only a few individual star names from Greece. The most prominent stars in the sky were usually nameless in Greek civilization. If there was a system of Greek star names then it has not come down to us and also would appear unknown to Ptolemy.)
List of proper names of stars – Wikipedia
From the Wikipedia page, clearly the only prolific namers of stars were the Arabs and the Chinese.
EDIT: I am adding data from Κατηγορία:Αντικείμενα Bayer – Βικιπαίδεια and Κατηγορία:Αστέρες ανά φασματικό τύπο – Βικιπαίδεια from the Greek Wikipedia. Additions are asterisked. As it turns out, several Latin names are translations of Classical Greek names.
In this catalogue, Ancient names are in boldface. The provenance of unbolded “traditional” Greek names is not always clear from the sources, but I am assuming they are post-Classical.
- θ¹ Eridani: (Arabic) Acamar. “The Greek-Persian astronomer Chrysococca [Georgios Chrysokokkes: Γεώργιος Χρυσοκόκκης – Βικιπαίδεια] called it Aulax in Greek, meaning the Furrow” Αὖλαξ.
- *α Tauri: (Arabic) Aldebaran. Greek name was (descriptive) “south eye of Taurus”; Ptolemy called it “bright star of the Hyades”; Modern Greek name is Lampadias Λαμπαδίας.
- α Scorpii: Antares Ἀντάρης
- α Boötis: Arcturus Ἀρκτοῦρος (already in Homer)
- ι Carinae: Aspidiske Ἀσπιδίσκη (per Iota Carinae – Wikipedia, Greek translation of Arabic Turais)
- ξ Puppis: Asmidiske †Ἀσμιδίσκη (Xi Puppis – Wikipedia: “a misplacement and mistransliteration of Aspidiske, the traditional name of ι Carinae; hence the name Asmidiske for Xi Puppis is not currently IAU-approved”)
- *α Orionis: (Arabic) Betelgeuse. Georgios Chrysokokkes called it Ōmon Didymōn Ὦμον Διδύμων “Shoulder of Gemini”
- α Carinae: Canopus Κάνωπος
- *α Aurigae: (Latin) Capella. Greek Aix Αἶξ (Aratus), Olenia Aix Ὠλενία Αἶξ (cf. Ovid: Olenium Astrum), Amaltheia Ἀμάλθεια. Capella “goat” is a translation of Aix; Amaltheia was the goat that brought up Zeus.
- *α Geminorum: (Latin) Castōr. Presumably also Greek Kastōr Κάστωρ. Also in “late Greek antiquity” Apollo Ἀπόλλων.
- α Canum Venaticorum: (Latin) Cor Caroli, Asterion Ἀστερίων
- β Canum Venaticorum: Asterion Ἀστερίων, Chara Χαρά
- This one is messy. Hevelius created the constellation, and named the Northern Dog Asterion and the Southern Dog Chara. β CVn is now named Chara, and α CVn Cor Caroli. Antonín Bečvář assigned the names Asterion to β CVn and Chara to α CVn.
- *α Ursae Minor: Polaris. Ancient name: Cynosure Κυνόσουρα (according to Greek Wikipedia, referred in antiquity only to the entire constellation), Phoinikē Φοινίκη.
- *β Leonis: (Arabic) Denebola. Ancient Greek Alkaia Ἀλκαία “lion tail” (also the origin of Denebola: ðanab al-asad).
- α Comae Berenices A: Diadem Διάδημα
- *ζ Aurigae: (Latin) Haedus. Hipparchus, Ptolemy: Eriphos Ἔριφος “kid goat” = Haedus. If Greek Wikipedia’s Protē Eriphos Πρώτη Ἔριφος “first kid goat” is classical, then η Aurigae: Haedus II would be Hetera or Deutera Eriphos Ἑτέρα/Δευτέρα Ἔριφος, “other/second kid goat”
- ζ Hydrae: Hydrobius Ὑδρόβιος (not official, not mentioned in Zeta Hydrae – Wikipedia)
- β Herculis: Kornephoros Κορ[υ]νηφόρος (properly in Ancient Greek korynēphoros)
- ζ Puppis: Naos †Ναός (Zeta Puppis – Wikipedia: intended to be Naus Ναῦς “ship”, over-Hellenised)
- β Geminorum: Pollux. Presumably also Greek Polydeukēs Πολυδεύκης. Possibly also Heracles Ἡρακλῆς, which was still used in Renaissance.
- *η Geminorum: Propus Πρόπους (in Hipparchus and Ptolemy)
- α Canis Minoris: Procyon Προκύων (in Aratus)
- *α Leonis: (Latin) Regulus. Ancient Greek Basiliskos astēr Βασιλισκὸς Ἀστήρ “royal star”. (Regulus means “little king”); Kardia Leontos Καρδία Λέοντος (? Ancient) corresponding to Latin Cor Leonis and Arabic Al Qalb al Asad.
- *β Orionis: (Arabic) Rigel. Georgios Chrysokokkes called it Pous Didymōn Ποῦς Διδύμων “Foot of Gemini”
- α Canis Majoris: Sirius Σείριος (already in Homer)
- α Virginis: (Latin) Spica (in Aratus: Stachys Στάχυς)
- ω Sagittarii: Terebellum (Terebellum (astronomy) – Wikipedia: originally Tetrapleuron Τετράπλευρον “quadrangle”, an asterism of four stars identified by Ptolemy, of which ω Sgr is the brightest)
- *α Lyrae: (Arabic) Vega. Greek Lyra Λύρα, after the constellation.
- ε Virginis: (Latin) Vindemiatrix (in Aratus: Protrygater Προτρυγετήρ, of which Vindemiatrix is the Latin translation)
- Pleiades:
- η Tauri : Alcyone Ἀλκυόνη
- 21 Tauri: Asterope Ἀστερόπη
- 27 Tauri: Atlas Ἄτλας
- 16 Tauri: Celaeno Κελαινώ
- 17 Tauri: Electra Ἠλέκτρα
- 20 Tauri: Maia Μαῖα
- 23 Tauri: Merope Μερόπη
- 28 Tauri: Pleione Πλειόνη
- 19 Tauri: Taygeta Ταϋγέτη