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Are Greeks truly “western”? How can they be western if they are orthodox? In that case, why aren’t the other orthodox countries considered western?
Originally Answered:
How western is the republic of Greece and its locals?
Vote #1 Goru Yamato: Goru Yamato’s answer to Are Greeks truly “western”? How can they be western if they are orthodox? In that case, why aren’t the other orthodox countries considered western? Μπράβο σας, Γιαμάτο-σάμα!
I’ll just add that the struggle between the Hellenic and the Romaic, the Western and the Eastern orientation of Greece, was a defining cultural conflict within Greece. Greeks were not Westerners on the foundation of the Modern Greek State. Greeks had to be taught they are Westerners. A lot of Greek culture is still not Western. And Greeks throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, referred to Western Europeans as Franks. Which they wouldn’t do if they considered themselves Western Europeans.
The term Franks has fallen into disuse in the past generation or two. Not coincidentally, Greeks have embraced the project of the European Union: for all that they loathe Germany right now and are pushed against the wall, they really do want to stay in.
Greek culture has been in transition; but then, all cultures always are. More importantly though, Greeks themselves have come to embrace a Western identity. Which matters more.
… What are you doing here still? Vote #1 Goru Yamato: Goru Yamato’s answer to Are Greeks truly “western”? How can they be western if they are orthodox? In that case, why aren’t the other orthodox countries considered western?
What is the timeline of the Greek breathings?
I’ve written a fair bit up about this at http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… . All secondary research, but it’s secondary research that seems to have been cited at Wikipedia.
Your timeline is right:
- There was a distinct heta letter for /h/, which looked like H, but it was not used in all locations.
- There was an innovation in antiquity (ca 400 BC), whereby Greeks in Southern Italy broke H in half, and used that for /h/: Ͱ
- From there, Greek papyri use one half of H as a diacritic to indicate an H is present, and the other half to indicate they are missing: x҅ x҆ . (I didn’t write down when, but my page says “by the time Greek starts showing up in papyri”, so it would have been around 300 BC—before /h/ stopped being pronounced.
- Those symbols survived long enough to be passed on to Early Cyrillic, and thus Unicode.
- In Greek manuscripts by the 12th century, the diacritics ended up being curved: ἀ ἀ
- Notice that the symbols were used long after the /h/ stopped being pronounced. In fact, accents and breathings started being notated as diacritics, precisely because they were starting to be lost in pronunciation. They were first used to teach proper speech, and after they had completely disappeared, they kept being used because the ancients had used them.
What are some common and popular Greek beverages?
- Coffee:
- Turkish coffee (renamed Greek coffee) for the older generation
- Frappé coffee for the younger generation
- Instant coffee (“Nes”) as a lighter, more western option
- Variants such as Vienna Coffee for a night out
- Nursed for hours at a café
- First beverage at home in the morning
- Herbal teas
- Sage, Camomile, Nettle
- Drunk when you’re ill, as a restorative
- Stereotypically associated with old people; hence Zambetas’ great lyric, Οι νέοι θέλουν έρωτα, κι οι γέροι χαμομήλι, “The young need love; the old need camomile”
- Tea
- That thing that English people drink
- Traditionally treated as a counterpart of herbal teas: a health drink, rather than a social drink
- Wine
- The traditional drink of feasting and celebration; can be seen at the dining table
- Not watered since Byzantium
- But already resinated since Byzantium (see below)
- Traditionally, there’s some homebrew lurking around in the village; buying a decent commercial vintage is a nouveau things
- There are fine venerable distinctive grapes in Greece—Category:Grape varieties of Greece – Wikipedia is a long list. But traditionally, people drink whatever’s handy locally. In my experience, it’s on the sour and unsubtle side.
- Retsina
- Resinated as a preservative
- A tart taste that makes no sense outside Greece, but a lot of sense with lamb chops with oregano
- Default drink of the taverna
- Endearingly served in tin pitchers
- Beer
- Introduced with the Bavarians in the 1830s. The venerable and recently revived brand Fix was originally Fuchs.
- In my youth, there were just two brands: Amstel and Heineken (locally called “Green”), with an occasional showing of Löwenbräu. There’s a lot more now, including local brews (and the beginnings of microbrews).
- Traditionally the secondary, lighter alternative to wine; more common (I think) when going out than in feasts at home.
- Raki/Tsikoudia/Tsipouro
- Traditional hard drink
- Drunk straight in shot glasses
- If you’ve had grappa, you’ve had raki. It’s a Pomace brandy.
- Drunk with mezze (tapas)
- Much more a drink of manly men celebrating each other’s manliness than a feast drink
- Ouzo
- Variant of raki
- Drunk straight in shot glasses, or watered down in tumblers
- Actually corresponds to Turkish rakı, with the whole aniseed flavour and the turning white with water
- Drunk in ouzeries (tapas joints), and I assume by manly men celebrating each other’s manliness
- Whisky
- The urban and urbane counterpart to raki
- The choice of the Greek going to a Western-style bar
- The choice of the Greek showing off their affluence
- Coke
- Default soft drink, like it is eveywhere
- Sprite
- Second default soft drink, like it is eveywhere
- Gazoza
- Traditional equivalent to Sprite, though a bit more lemony
- Fell out of favour in the last few decades
- Visinada
- Sour cherry juice (or cordial, and sometimes carbonated)
- Byral
- A local imitation of Coke
- Big in the 60s, before Coke was launched locally
How is the enmity between Greece and Albania different to that between Greece and Turkey?
I’m going to speak from a Greek perspective, and I hope that Turks and Albanians will weigh in.
The hostility between Greece and Turkey is very old, and definitional to their identity. They came to regard each other as the Primordial Enemy. (Hence the immortal line on Ekşi Sözlük: “The good old days, when Greece was the National Enemy.”)
Greeks really did come to define themselves as Not-Turks. The world was viewed through a binary lens of enmity, and had been since the Seljuks came to Anatolia; the credal difference between Islam and Christianity was all enmeshed with the ethnic difference (and in reality took priority over it). And there are defining incidents in Greek history which can serve as rallying points for that enmity. 1071, 1453, 1669, 1821, 1897, 1923, 1974.
Enmity between Greeks and Albanians just does not have that kind of heritage. Until the forced islamisations, Albanians were another annoying Balkan ethnicity. In situ in Albania, there were yet another people with an uncouth language for the Byzantine elite to look down on. As the Arvanites, they were warlords and settlers in Greece; they were stereotyped as pigheaded, and either admired or feared as warriors, but they were close-by neighbours.
Once the islamisations happened, Muslim Albanians were Turks. The Millet-based split was total; to Greeks, Muslim Albanians were Muslims first, Albanians second. Hence the confused appelation Turkalvani, which does not mean Turkish Albanians at all, but Muslim Albanians. In the Greek War of Independence, Orthodox Arvanites fought Muslim Shqipetars; they spoke the same language (maybe in a different dialect, maybe not); but as far as Greeks were concerned, the Arvanites were Greeks, and the Shqipetars were Turks.
That’s why any enmity of Albanians and Greeks is pretty recent. A notion of Albanian nationhood was stymied through to the end of the 19th century, because not only the Greeks, but the Albanians themselves regarded themselves as Christian or Muslim first, and Albanians second. That’s why it was so important for Albanian nationalists to proclaim that the religion of Albania is Albanianism: without Albanianism, there could be no Albania.
And hate to say it, but because of all that, Greeks have hardly noticed Albania as an enemy. Anything up until 1912 was chalked up to the Turks—including Ali Pasha of Ioannina. (How many Greeks realise he was Albanian? How many care?) The raids of the Christian Arvanites against their neighbours, which gave Greek its word for “plunder” (πλιάτσικο < plaçkë “thing”—plaçkë e luftës “thing of war” is implied) have been long forgotten.
There was an ongoing enmity against Turks until recently (and of course, the atavistic stuff still lurks in the collective subconscious, despite the Thaw). In the face of a bogeyman that imposing, any hostility against Albanians from Greeks was secondary, and localised. (And I know very well that Albanians have not felt the same way.)
Albanians became prominent in the popular conscious again with the mass migrations of the 1990s. There was a lot of hostility, and I’ve heard reports that the Arvanites were particularly hard on the Albanian migrants: they had something to prove. But it was really not the fear and existential stuff that was invoked with Turks; it was looking down on them.
Since then, the reaction has gone two ways (from what I gather from a distance). On the liberal side, the Albanians are the model minority, admired for their work ethic, and even seen as a welcome addition to the polity. (That’s a pretty extreme view for Greece, of course.) On the reactionary side, well, one of the favourite chants of the thugs is Δεν θα γίνεις Έλληνας ποτέ, Αλβανέ, Αλβανέ-έ-έ “You’ll never be a Greek, Albanian, Albanian!”
But from memory, hostility towards Albania has never roused the level of ire or passion that hostility towards Turkey has.
Is use of diminutives that lost their diminutive meaning a common phenomenon in the development of languages?
I believe it is (add Russian, bigtime), but I’ve just gone through half a dozen historical linguistics textbooks, and it’s not discussed separately in any of them. I was even struggling to find a good term describing this phenomenon: lexicalised diminutives I guess is the best.
The problem is that semantic change is massively variegated, and the typologies of semantic change (which covers this) are pretty vague. This could be argued to be an instance of litotes/understatement, or an instance of generalisation, or an instance of bleaching.
Ancient Greek: where is a “w” sound used in Greek?
OK, Nick wading in.
Like James Garry and Robert Todd said: the digamma, ϝ, is an archaic letter of Greek, pronounced as /w/. It is present as a sound in Linear B, and it survived into Aeolic, but it did not survive into the other *written* dialects of Greek.
We know it was there in Ancient Greek for three reasons.
- First, Indo-European reconstruction. Like James said, we know that οἶνος oinos used to be ϝοῖνος woinos, from other Indo-European languages preserving a related sound; e.g. Latin vinum.
- Second, internal reconstruction. In particular, syllabic augment of vowels. The past tense of ἔργω ergō “I work” should be *ἦργον ērgon, with an eta [ɛːrɡon]. It is instead εἶργον eirgon, with an ei [eːrɡon]. That makes no sense, until you realise (a) that Attic ei corresponds to Homeric ἔεργον eergon [eerɡon], and (b) that happens because there used to be a /w/ there: ἔ-ϝεργον ewergon. So it’s just an epsilon prefixed to a consonant, like all other syllabic augments
- Why yes, *wergō is cognate with English work.
- Linear B is not an argument for working out where digammas were, because that’s circular: we were able to decipher Linear B based on the external and internal reconstruction of Greek.
- The final criterion is hiatus in Homer, gaps between vowels in the metre that do not make sense by how Greek verse is supposed to work. They do make sense, if we posit that there used to be digammas there in the original verse.
There is a delightful Xena fanfic about the digamma: For Ant of a Nail
So digammas are not written down in Homer, but we know they were there. They were only written down in Aeolic and Linear B.
Ioannis Stratakis (podium-arts.com) is meticulous in his reconstruction; I also hear digammas in his Herodotus. ἴδεν, he pronounces as ϝίδεν; we have evidence for that both from Latin, and from internal reconstruction (the augmented aorist is εἶδεν, with a syllabic augment).
ἄστυ – Wiktionary tells me that ἄστυ used to have a digamma too:
From ϝάστυ (wástu), with possible connection with Sanskrit वस्तु (vastu, “house”) and Latin verna.
What unpopular opinions do you have about linguistics?
Not that controversial, but I think there’s a lot to be said for diachronic explanations of language, and the synchronic/diachronic distinction is somewhat artificial.
Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is functional grammar? will explain that a little bit: functional accounts are kind of diachronic to begin with (what function does this linguistic component serve in communication => how did this linguistic component develop to fit this function). And more hardcore functionalism is all about language structures as process rather than as blueprints; hence the more extreme formulation of Paul Hopper’s Emergent Grammar.
There are linguists who think that way, but it’s fair to say it’s a minority view.
I’ve ranted defending philology in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are the differences between linguistics and philology? That looks controversial and fuddy duddy; where it’s actually going isn’t, although again it’s a minority view: language is socially embedded, and ignoring the social to focus only on linguistic structures is a simplification. It is an epistemologically necessary simplification at times, of the kind you see all the time in less mushy disciplines like Physics (frictionless plane).
But language change in particular is always socially mediated; and much more “pure” “synchronic” language stuff is socially messed up than people like to admit. In particular, language phonemes at times seem to me to be a frictionless plane.
What are some examples of sentences that can be either Ancient Greek or Modern Greek?
Hm. No participles, no infinitives, no relativisers, no conditionals. Some conjunctions are the same, but you can already see we’re surrendering a lot of syntactic complexity to do this.
No future or perfect, no unaccented augments, no datives, no prepositions with genitives (and the rest look different anyway), bits of the 1st and 3rd declensions out of bounds, as are most inflections of the copula, and 3pl forms. And of course almost none of the modal particles.
And worst of all: most final nu movables are going to sound archaic in Modern Greek nowadays, and you said Modern Greek, not Katharevousa. Which kills a lot off too.
I mean, it’s doable, but the sentences are going to be clauses early on in Ancient Greek textbooks.
So, I got me an Ancient Greek Textbook: http://cdn.textkit.net/WS_A_Firs…
Not easy. I’m settling for allowing slightly marked sound. And it took me 8 exercises.
- Ὀ φιλόσοφος τὰ καλὰ θαυμάζει, “the philosopher admires beautiful (Ancient)/good (Modern) things.” (Marked syntax in Modern) §8
- Τὰ μεγάλα δῶρα τῆς τύχης οἱ σοφοὶ φοβοῦνται, “wise men fear the great gifts of Fortune (Ancient)/Chance (Modern)” (Marked syntax in Modern) §23
Or:
Ὀ ναύτης ἀκούει ὅτι ὁ μαθητὴς ἔμαθε τὸ μάθημα, “the sailor hears that the student learned the lesson”
Is the Ancient Greek contribution to Western civilization overstated?
Whensoever you get a silly-looking premiss, think harder. 🙂
It’s a very good question, Habib le toubib.
I mean, in one way, of course not, Western civilisation started with the Greeks, and throughout the renaissance, it kept checking back with the Greeks, to see whether they were Doing It Right.
But on the other hand, Western Civilisation as rebooted in the Renaissance wasn’t a direct continuation of the Greeks, and the extent to which Greek civilisation determined what happened in the West can be overstated, if you get too romantic. Things got filtered and reinterpreted and recontextualised. It is still a culture created in Western Europe.
Opera is not a carbon copy on what was happening on the stage in the Dionysia festivals. Representative democracy is not really what the Athenians were doing in the Ecclesia. Lots of our vocabulary is Greek, but we communicate things with that vocabulary that the Greeks never conceived of.
Did George Michael speak Greek?
My father used to to work with a nurse who was from the same village as George Michael’s father. I asked him years ago, and he sneered that George Michael doesn’t know what Greek means.
There’s also this:
“Thank you… for thir-… twenty five… years.”
Very halting, and no accent fluency. Comments in the YouTube thread say he did respond to Greek interview questions in English, so likely some passive competence.