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What word in ancient Greek would be used to describe scientific discoveries like when the laws of physics were first worked out?
Ancient Greek for scientific discovery, eh?
Well, don’t go to Google Translate, man. That’s Modern Greek.
Start here instead: English-Greek Dictionary
“Discovery” gives us heuresis, aneuresis; mēnysis (disclosure), heurēma and exeurēma (invention, thing discovered).
Mēnysis is “messaging”, so it’s not what you’re after. The others are all derived from the verb heuriskō “I find” (as in Eureka). Of the two suffixes, –ma is a thing discovered, while –sis also allows the meaning of the action of discovery.
The prepositional prefixes in Greek are often not very important; aneuresis is “up-finding”, which can have a more intense connotation of bringing something to light, not just finding it. Similarly exeurēma “out-find” is about bringing something out as a discovery.
I think heuresis is your safest bet, but aneuresis is pretty close.
What is the ancient Greek word for “love for food”?
Philositos “fond of food, fond of eating” occurs in Plato’s Republic 475c. (It’s ambiguous with “fond of wheat”, which is how it is used in Xenophon.) The related noun philositia “fondness of food” turns up at least in Gregory of Nazianzen.
If somebody with no Arpitan heritage wanted to learn the Arpitan language, which dialect of Arpitan would you recommend that they learn?
All other things being equal, I’d be heading for a dialect that has had significant literary production (so you can find things to read in Arpitan), and a dialect that still survives to at least some extent (so you can at least theoretically find someone to talk to in it).
I’m biased, as my bio shows, towards the Val d’Aosta. But honestly, I don’t know another region that will satisfy both. Franco-Provençal has been dead in French Switzerland for two centuries, and is not doing that much better across the border in France. Its status in the Val d’Aosta is kind of artificial, and certainly much confused with the status of French; but it is still much healthier there than anywhere else.
If I learned modern Greek, would I be able to read the New Testament in its original language?
Like the others said: no. Certainly not the more educated writing, like Paul or Luke. You’d know what was going on, more or less, but you would be liable to be confused, by the syntax or by the false friends.
I’ve just gone through an exercise in Nick Nicholas’ answer to How much of a text by Aristotle or Procopius would speakers of modern Greek get?, of trying to render Aristotle and Procopius with a knowledge of Modern Greek alone. (Native Modern Greek, and I’m going to have to assume you pick up a comparable level of learnèd vocabulary.) Let me do the same with Mark and Paul.
Archaic words that might not be in your list as a Modern Greek learner, in italics. I’m outright omitting words a Modern Greek speaker would not guess. False friends followed by (!)
Mark 2:1–5
1Καὶ εἰσελθὼν πάλιν εἰς Καφαρναοὺμ δι’ ἡμερῶν ἠκούσθη ὅτι ἐν οἴκῳ ἐστίν. 2καὶ συνήχθησαν πολλοὶ ὥστε μηκέτι χωρεῖν μηδὲ τὰ πρὸς τὴν θύραν, καὶ ἐλάλει αὐτοῖς τὸν λόγον. 3καὶ ἔρχονται φέροντες πρὸς αὐτὸν παραλυτικὸν αἰρόμενον ὑπὸ τεσσάρων. 4καὶ μὴ δυνάμενοι προσενέγκαι αὐτῷ διὰ τὸν ὄχλον ἀπεστέγασαν τὴν στέγην ὅπου ἦν, καὶ ἐξορύξαντες χαλῶσι τὸν κράβαττον ὅπου ὁ παραλυτικὸς κατέκειτο. 5καὶ ἰδὼν ὁ Ἰησοῦς τὴν πίστιν αὐτῶν λέγει τῷ παραλυτικῷ, Τέκνον, ἀφίενταί σου αἱ ἁμαρτίαι
And entering again into Kapharnaum through days, it was heard that he was in a house. And many gathered, so that even the things towards the gate would no longer fit, and he was speaking the word to them. And they come bringing him a paralytic, being lifted by four. And unable to … him because of the mob, they de-roofed the roof where he was, and digging out they destroy (!) the bed where the paralytic was lying down. And seeing their faith Jesus says to the paralytic, Child, your sins are let off.
Romans 2:1–5
1Διὸ ἀναπολόγητος εἶ, ὦ ἄνθρωπε πᾶς ὁ κρίνων: ἐν ᾧ γὰρ κρίνεις τὸν ἕτερον, σεαυτὸν κατακρίνεις, τὰ γὰρ αὐτὰ πράσσεις ὁ κρίνων. 2οἴδαμεν δὲ ὅτι τὸ κρίμα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν κατὰ ἀλήθειαν ἐπὶ τοὺς τὰ τοιαῦτα πράσσοντας. 3λογίζῃ δὲ τοῦτο, ὦ ἄνθρωπε ὁ κρίνων τοὺς τὰ τοιαῦτα πράσσοντας καὶ ποιῶν αὐτά, ὅτι σὺ ἐκφεύξῃ τὸ κρίμα τοῦ θεοῦ; 4ἢ τοῦ πλούτου τῆς χρηστότητος αὐτοῦ καὶ τῆς ἀνοχῆς καὶ τῆς μακροθυμίας καταφρονεῖς, ἀγνοῶν ὅτι τὸ χρηστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ εἰς μετάνοιάν σε ἄγει; 5κατὰ δὲ τὴν σκληρότητά σου καὶ ἀμετανόητον καρδίαν θησαυρίζεις σεαυτῷ ὀργὴν ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ὀργῆς καὶ ἀποκαλύψεως δικαιοκρισίας τοῦ θεοῦ,
For which you are unapologetic (!), O every human who is judging? For in what you judge the other, you condemn yourself, for you do those things, you who judge. But we … that the shame (!) of God is in truth on those who do such things. He should consider (!) this, O human judging those who do such things and do them, that you will avoid the shame (!) of God? Or do you have contempt for the richness of his usefulness (!) and his tolerance and patience, being ignorant of the fact that God’s useful thing (!) leads you to repentance? But according to you harshness and unrepentant heart, you store up treasures for yourself of rage in the day of rage and of the revelation of the just judgement of God.
The basics are there, sure (though a Modern Greek as Foreign Language learner would miss the italicised stuff). But I don’t think that counts as reading Koine, and I’m assuming less discomfort with Koine grammar than a MGFL learner would have. And those exclamation points? There’s some basic misunderstandings lurking there: loosening down the bed, not destroying it; God’s judgement, not shame.
How did Greek language survive despite centuries of foreign domination?
For all that Greek was spoken in areas of foreign domination,
- It was the prestige and government language in the East Roman Empire—Latin never had a serious chance of displacing it.
- It was the acknowledged and prestige language of the Rum millet under the Ottomans—Turkish never had a serious chance of displacing it, except in Cappadocia where the Greek-speakers were isolated and outnumbered.
- It was the language of the Orthodox population in post-Crusade French/Italian held lands, and there was never a serious attempt to do away with it, even if the Franks weren’t as deferential to Greek as the Ottomans were.
Greek was never threatened. Through those centuries of foreign domination, Greek was never even marginalised.
The one place Greek was wiped out was the Middle East—Egypt, Syria, etc after the spread of Islam, Anatolia after the spread of the Turks. And even the former took a century or so after the Muslims started running Egypt.
Why are OSV order languages so rare?
Brian Collins says:
Those are the type of questions only a few people like Bob Dixon are willing to touch with a 17ft pole.
Only Dixon, may his soul be blackened (or indeed blacklisted)? Surely not. Surely we haven’t run out of functionalists in Australia!
Here’s a functionalist take, though it will have some holes in it. I’m not looking up any sources.
- Some languages have strict syntax, and well defined word orders following the template of one of SVO, SOV, etc.
- Some languages have free (or freer) word order, and calling them SVO or SOV is really trying to jam them into a schema by grabbing a default. It’s what typologists have to do, of course, to say anything meaningful.
- Those languages work more according to pragmatic (information-flow) principles of word ordering.
- The pragmatic ordering is typically topic–comment.
- Typically, the topic is the subject, and the predicate is the comment.
- The predicate includes the verb and the object.
- So there is a bias towards SVO and SOV languages, whether they are pragmatically ordered or syntactically ordered: they put the subject first as a topic, and they put the predicate after the subject, as a comment.
- A predicate is a predicate whether the object precedes or follows the verb: what matters is that the object is next to the verb.
- The tendency (again, only a tendency) is towards head–dependent harmony: a language with VO will also tend to put nouns before adjectives, prepositions before nouns, and possessors before possessees. A language with OV will tend to do the opposite.
- It is only a tendency, and in fact English is a notorious counterexample.
- A Verb-fronted language is possible: the bias towards SVO and SOV does not exclude them. In fact, Celtic VSO languages developed out of SOV Indo-European, and Greek SVO gave rise to Cypriot, which has been argued to be VSO.
- I’m vague as to what process fronts verbs historically, but it’s clearly a thing. Brian probably knows more about it, if he’s bringing up prefixing.
- OSV and OVS are extremely rare, and you’d expect that. Whatever process is putting the O first, it’s not a commonplace one, and you’d expect it’s a fluke, rather than whatever commonish process fronts V. OSV in particular breaks up the predicate (O and V), and buries the S mid-sentence (where it isn’t going to be a topic). But OVS, which at least keeps the predicate together, is not substantially more common.
Answered 2016-12-17 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK. and
, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Free University of Tbilisi.
What is the relationship between Greek nationalism and the Greek Orthodox Church?
Before the Greek War of Independence: the Orthodox Church was hostile to nationalism. Nationalism was this newfangled, godless French thing that set the people against their god-appointed ruler. The Patriarchate was particularly outspoken against it, and described it as a heresy.
That’s nationalism. Yes, you can say the Orthodox church helped preserve a notion of Greek identity. But that notion was safely ensconced within the Ottoman millet system, and the Orthodox church was a beneficiary of it: they certainly didn’t chafe against it.
The Greek War of Independence was formally started, as all Greek schoolchildren learn in school, by Germanos bishop of Old Patras on 25 March 1821. (They don’t learn that skirmishes had started a few days earlier.) And clergymen like Papaflessas and Athanasios Diakos were at the forefront of the fighting. But that was local lower clergy; it was not the policy of the church (though the Patriarch was hanged anyway).
Once Greek became an independent state, the Orthodox church was in an awkward position. It was still administered out of Istanbul, and its senior administration had obviously been an intrinsic part of how the Ottomans had ruled Greeks—so it had been collaborationist.
The former embarrassment was eventually rectified by the establishment of the autocephalous (“locally led”) Church of Greece, in 1870. The latter was rectified with some creative propaganda, such as the notion of the “secret school” (Krifo scholio)—that monks kept Greek culture alive through underground education. (No mainstream historian believes that to be true; after all, where did all the educated clergy come from, and how would the millet system have functioned without them? Few Greeks outside academia believe it to be false.)
Since independence, the Church has been firmly enmeshed in Greeks’ notion of what it is to be Greek: Orthodoxy is the state religion, Orthodox clergy preach loyalty to the state and open schools and parliament, the Greek church regards itself as the custodian of Greek national virtues.
How have English punctuation conventions changed over the centuries?
David Crystal’s recent book Making a Point has a rundown of the changes and a very clear framework for discussing them. I’m not going to do it justice, especially because I don’t remember every bit of it. But:
- There has been a tussle in the history of English punctuation from the invention of printing on, between punctuating according to syntax, and punctuating according to meaning. The former would never allow you to put a comma between a subject and a verb; the latter will let you put a comma after anything, so long as it’s long enough and a single syntactic constituent.
- Extreme meaning-based punctuation is why renaissance English seems so random. Extreme syntax-based punctuation is why 18th century English seems so mannered.
- We still rarely put a comma between a subject and a verb; but commas are now much more about meaning than they were two centuries ago.
- Big complicated multipart sentences are out of favour. The semicolon has suffered from that change in fashion.
- Punctuation online, and in texts, is newly creative, and is establishing its own distinct norms.
Why are Greek cities so ugly?
As usual, there is a better answer than this answer. Vote #1 Yiannis Papadopoulos: Yiannis Papadopoulos’ answer to Why are Greek cities so ugly?
Two factors that have to be added though:
- The deluge of refugees coming to Greece in 1924. Athens was a beautiful city in the 19th century, as you can tell if you look around the backstreets of Plaka long enough. Greece simply didn’t cope with the sudden increase of its population by a third, whether the refugees were in shanty towns, or when they eventually got apartments of their own.
- Lack of maintenance (which correlates with Yiannis’ mention of poverty). I spent an evening in the Sint-Jans-Molenbeek suburb in Brussels, a few years before it became famous as jihadist HQ. It was cheap and near the railway station. And it reminded me intensely of Greek country towns. The same crap faded paint, the same blocky buildings, the same vague feeling of staleness.
And Yiannis, of course the Salonica waterfront is prettier than Athens. Hardly a fair comparison. 🙂 (And it’s still not as pretty as it could have been; on my last visit it did look a little run down.)
Should I take that some Cypriot Greek speakers do call Pounds sterling as “λίρες εγγλέζικες” (English pounds) because the notes…?
Cypriots refer to English pounds, for the simple reason that colloquial Greek refers to English rather than British exclusively. Note that your phrase uses the colloquial εγγλέζικη, rather than the formal αγγλική for “English”.
The formation of the United Kingdom never made much of a popular impression on Greeks. In fact even in more formal Greek, the British rule of Cyprus is referred to as the Anglocracy, Αγγλοκρατία, not the Brettanocracy.