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What did Greeks contribute to the world in the last thousand years?
As Pieter van der Wilt said in comments:
Well nothing really very outstanding. The great achievements of mankind during the last 200 years come mainly from highly industrialized nations (UK, France, Germany, USA, etc…). Greece is a small country with a fairly high level of creativity.
All nations are great, because humanity is great. The literature and music of Modern Greece have unparalleled depth and diversity and lyricism, and are a gift to the world. (Though that is just as true of the literature and music of Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, and Bolivia, and Vanuatu.)
As Pieter said in his answer, Byzantium preserved ancient Greek scholarship—but didn’t build on it: that was left for the Western Renaissance. I could add Orthodox Christianity; but as theology rather than ritual, all the work had been done by 800 AD anyway.
If you’re after technological achievements, well, there are individual Greeks who have done things; overwhelmingly and inevitably, they’ve done things in the UK and the US.
We’ve made much more of a recent impact on our immediate region of the Balkans, as anyone in the region will tell you. But you spoke of the world, not of our neighbourhood.
From your comments to Pieter, OP, it looks like you’re reaching at a comparison with the Muslim world. But the game now in advances for humanity is a globalised game. The Ummah doesn’t get its own Golden Age any more; we’re much too interlinked for that. The Ummah gets to contribute to the advances for humanity, by taking part in the research and the stewardship spearheaded (for now) by the West. The West will likely yield its mantle within our lifetimes to China. The part of the Ummah that has relied on oil will have to work out what to do once oil no longer matters—and how to work with the West and China on the cleanup.
And I should hope that over a billion Muslims don’t need to draw lessons by comparison with a small bankrupt country of 10 million.
What is the best way to say “innovative agile support” in Latin?
Remixing the others’:
Ut succurramus innovantes agiliter: To support by agilely innovating.
Should “Türkiye” become the official name for country of “Turkey” in English language?
Yok, Mehrdad dostum. İstemiyorum.
Assimilating country names into a target language is something I have a lot of affection for. I don’t regard it as disrespectful, but as familiarising; I regard the alternative as exoticisation. I get greatly annoyed when I hear Greeks speak of themselves in English as Hellenes, or refer to Hellas.
We have six centuries in English of referring to Turkey as Turkey in English (and the -y suffix shows how old the word is in English; it’s not a new word like Serbia or Lithuania). That’s not a bad thing, that’s something to be proud of. It’s history. And respect for a country is also about respect for your history with that country.
How different are the dialects of your mother tongue within your country?
How does one measure it? I’ve already responded to something similar: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does the Greek language have a variety of regional dialects? and Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which of the Greek dialects sound harsh to a standard Greek speaker?
The most deviant “dialect” of Greek, Tsakonian, is not mutually intelligible with Greek, and outside of Greece is generally referred to as a distinct language.
I’d rather answer the question details:
Which one is regarded as being the closest to the standard language?
Peloponnesian. In fact, as a result of that, Peloponnesian dialects have been studied only minimally; people assumed there was nothing interesting there. Nikos Pantelidis has made his career as a linguist from pointing out that isn’t true; but I fear Pantelidis came along a century too late to find the really interesting stuff.
Which one is considered the most divergent?
Tsakonian and Cappadocian of the obscure dialects. Of the widely known and still spoken dialects, Pontic, followed by Cypriot.
Is there any kind of prejudice attached to those who speak any of these dialects?
Oh yes. They all bear the stigma of country bumpkinness; Greece is culturally very centralising. Northern Greek dialects (which sound the most different, because they’re missing half their vowels) get the stigma routinely; but all the dialects suffer it, ultimately. My cool aunt in Athens told me how lovely and singsong Cypriot was, not like her native hillbilly Thessalian (“stinks of the barn” is how she put it). A few days later, we’d channel-surfed past Cypriot TV, and she said “I always find it difficult to take them seriously, speaking their dialect on TV.”
The nice thing is when the prestige accent of Athens gets counterstigmatised. Mostly in Cyprus, for sociocultural reasons (they’re an acrolect of a live diglossia), but I’m pretty sure I heard the rapid-fire unaffricated speech of Athens mocked in Crete too.
Could someone into Greek Orthodox Christianity define “καθωσπρεπισμός”?
Like Dylan Sakic, I’d need a lot more context, but here’s a stab.
Καθώς πρέπει is a calque of French comme il faut, “as it should be done”. It refers to social propriety, observing social etiquette, but it has an intense connotation of hypocrisy and stuffiness; it’s the kind of thing that “bourgeois” gets inevitably prefixed to.
Why are you picking up a Greek Orthodox angle to it? Presumably because the Orthodox Church is the repository of social conservatism in Greece, especially now that Greece is no longer a traditional society.
What is your favorite proverb from your culture or country? What country is it from?
I did a rich assortment of off-colour Greek proverbs over at Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some weird expressions?
A tuthree more off-colour sayings. Which I’ve actually tried to use in English, with decidedly mixed results.
- Τα μεταξωτά βρακιά θέλουν και επιδέξιους κώλους. Silk undies require agile arses. One must be equipped to handle the challenge one undertakes.
- Η γρια η κότα έχει το ζουμί. The old hen makes the [best] broth. Mature women are sexually satisfying.
- Από της μυλωνούς τον κώλο μην περιμένεις ορθογραφία. From the miller’s wife’s arse, one expects no orthography. If someone is uncouth, they will act accordingly.
- There’s some just-so story associated, of how the miller’s wife sat on some flour, and her assprint left an omega in a context where an omicron was expected.
Some sayings on Greek impulsiveness:
- Κάλλιο γαϊδουρόδενε παρά γαϊδουρογύρευε. Better to tie up the donkey than to go looking for the donkey. One should take precautions and think ahead.
- Του ρωμιού η γνώση έρχεται ύστερα. A Greek’s knowledge comes later (attributed to Turks). Turks think that Greeks do not take precautions and think ahead.
- Όπου ο Θεός δε δίνει γνώση, δίνει ποδάρια. Where God does not grant knowledge, he grants feet. If one does not take precautions and think ahead, one ends up running around playing catch-up instead.
A lovely couplet on someone making no sense, that my uncle used to use at me:
- Από την Έμπαρο κρασί, κι από τη Βιάννο λάδι/ κι από το Μυλοπόταμο ένα σακί κρομμύδια. Wine from Embaros, oil from Viannos, and a sack of onions from Mylopotamos.
And maybe the best meta-proverb ever, in Tsakonian:
- Τουρ οργήνιε του γέρου να νίνερε, του πφούντε σι να μη σι νίνερε. Hearken to an old man’s counsels—not his farts.
Is pronunciation speed a meaningful feature when discussing languages?
I don’t know that this has really attracted the interest of typologists, though I’m happy to be corrected. The phonologist I used to work for as a research assistant was considering writing an article, comparing the speed of newcasts, but I don’t think he went ahead with it.
I think the impression we have that Spanish is faster than Swiss German is real; but Roger Hughes is quite right that there will be extensive variation, not just between speakers, but also between registers, genres, and emotions. It’d be averageable, and measurable especially within the same genre (which is why my boss wanted to use newscasts). But I haven’t noticed it becoming a thing with linguists.
The real distinction linguists make, as Roger also points out, is syllable-timed vs stress-timed languages, which is a phonological, not a quantifiable phonetic attribute. That one actually surfaces a lot here on Quora.
How did the surname “Featherstonhaugh” get its completely unintuitive pronunciation?
Not getting an answer online, or in Patrick Hanks’ The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland .
I do get this from Wells, J. C. (2000), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary: Odd pronunciations of proper names – examples: there are four recorded pronunciations of Featherstonhaugh:
/ˈfɛð ərst ən hɔː/ (Featherstonhaw)
/ˈfiːst ən heɪ/ (Feestonhay)
/ˈfɛst ən hɔː/ (Festonhaw)
/ˈfæn ʃɔː/ (Fanshaw)
Let’s us out Feestunhay, which is something else going on, presumably dialectal. We have fɛðərstənhɔː > ˈfɛstənhɔː , eliding the second syllable. So now we need to get from Festonhaw to Fanshaw.
John Gragson’s answer to How did the surname “Featherstonhaugh” get its completely unintuitive pronunciation? is pretty damn ingenious, and I commend him for it. But there’s one factor it misses. It’s just a hint in Hanks’ dictionary, under the entry for Featherstonhaugh: “the surname is often pronounced Fanshaw and may have been confused with Fanshawe.”
Fanshawe is a distinct, equally old surname, deriving from fane ‘a temple or church’ and shaw, ‘a small wood or grove’.
So Festonhaw, which is the recorded shortening of Featherstonhaugh, was somehow garbled further to something like Fesnaw or Feshnaw, as John argues. And then—rather than appeal to a vowel shift (which seems somewhat random) or the phonotactic familiarity of shn vs nsh—we can just say that the garbled Feshnaw sounded so similar to the preexisting surname Fanshawe, that people just conflated the two surnames in speech.
But not in writing. After all, the conflation in pronunciation did not entitle any Fanshawes to any Featherstonhaugh estates.
So the absurd pronunciation of Featherstonhaugh as /ˈfænʃɔː/ has a really simple explanation. They’re not actually trying to say Featherstonhaugh. They’ve switched it to a completely different, easier to pronounce surname, and they aren’t admitting it.
What are some human-made things you dislike or like that are present in South (and West) Cyprus?
This actually isn’t my own dislike, but it’s a dislike that really struck me.
My father left Cyprus in 1966. He was in tears the day that Archbishop Makarios III died. I’ve only been back to Cyprus twice, in 1979 and 1989, and briefly and superficially at that.
So I don’t have a clear notion of how Cyprus has evolved and changed, from a colonial backwater of popular revolt, to… well, to what it is now.
I was friends a decade ago with a Serbian postdoc. Before coming to Melbourne, he’d spent time at the University of Cyprus, in Nicosia.
Now, to my eyes, this statue of Makarios at the Archbishopric of Cyprus:
is a reasonable and respectful depiction of the Father of the Nation:
But my friend Vlado did not alight in the Cyprus of 1961. He alighted in the Cyprus of 2005, and he alighted from Serbia, a place where people are skeptical of religious leadership. (In fact they’re skeptical of religious leadership now in Cyprus, too.) And a place where people are even more skeptical about monumental depictions of national leaders.
So he made merciless fun to me of Mecha-Makarios, trampling the streets of Nicosia and crushing all underneath.
That really was a shock to me. But you know, his eyes are probably clearer in this than mine would be.
Is it possible for a person to acquire a written language as their native language?
Hello all the good people, Clarissa and Audrey and Brian. I was going to join in to your discussion under Brian’s answer, but it didn’t head in the direction I was hoping.
Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller, who are the deaf–blind people Brian alludes to, communicated through finger spelling, read Braille, and wrote. Must have been hideously slow. But still, that was all the language they had; and I don’t see how we would usefully say they are language-deprived. They had a language faculty, and their language production was entirely in order. (It certainly helped that they acquired fingerspelling as children.)
If deaf kids can acquire language through a signed modality, and we call them native speakers of a sign language, I don’t see why we can’t say Bridgman and Keller didn’t acquire language through a tactile modality, and the language they acquired was pretty much written English. (This was after all the 19th century.)
Audrey, you’re not agreeing with the premiss I see, but neither of us know enough about deaf–blind language acquisition to have a debate on this. But I did not have the impression that Bridgman and Keller were one-offs; the impression I have is that deaf–blind kids acquire language all the time. What I don’t know is whether there too the primary language acquired, through tactile means, is abbreviated compared to written English—leaving out determiners, for example.
I don’t think it’s quite what Z-Kat was after. But I do think it establishes his scenario as feasible.