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How did you learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, and how long did it take?
- Two or three lectures spent on understanding the axes of the IPA charts: place of articulation, manner of articulation; vowel height, frontness, and rounding.
- A round of the class all calling out the cardinal vowels in unison. /iiiii eeeee ɛɛɛɛɛ æææææ, uuuuu ooooo ɔɔɔɔɔ ɑɑɑɑɑ/. I got to make my first year students do that, when my turn came. Good times, good times.
- Learning the values that fill the slots in the charts then comes remarkably easily, once you’ve grokked the axes. Most are reasonably mnemonic.
Answered 2016-12-08 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
Why is there no Unicode Italic H?
Because it was already created elsewhere, as U+210E PLANCK CONSTANT ℎ. Unicode will not differentiate between the symbol for the Planck Constant, and a mathematical italicised lowercase h (which is what the Planck Constant is).
Is it possible to invent a word which would describe rule by the loudest?
Not δυνατότερο. One, because that’s Modern Greek, not Ancient; Two, because Modern Greek doesn’t have a distinct word for “loud”, it just uses the word for “strong”, dynatos. (In fact the OP’s form is “stronger, louder”.)
Actually looking at Woodhouse’s English-Ancient Greek Dictionary, Ancient Greek isn’t much better. The words given for “loud” are literally: big, sharp, clear-sounding, upright, bitter, piercing, over-toned, shining, noisy, roaring (of waves), sonorous. They’re mostly ambiguous, which disqualifies them for me.
Gegōnocracy, “rule of the sonorous” is the least ambiguous as a word, but it would end up ambiguous in English with gegonocracy “rule of facts (what has happened)”; in fact, I wasn’t familiar with the adjective gegōnos.
If I had to pick one, I’d go with rhothiocracy, “rule of those roaring like waves”. I don’t love it, it’s not actually that commonly used of people. But Aristophanes did use it to refer to popular acclamation (albeit in a mariner context): “raise loud waves of applause in his favour this day” (Knights 546)
My preference would be to go with shouting as the root notion here, certainly out-shouting your opposition: “Rule of Shouting”. Boo-cracy (< bo-ē) is ambiguous with the Rule of Oxen (< bo-os), though that may be a feature and not a bug. (EDIT, h/t John Gragson: maybe instead Boēto-cracy “Rule of the Shouty”.)
Craugo-cracy (< krazō, kraugazō) works best for me, and a kraugē is typically an angry, not a joyful shout.
In languages with formal/informal pronouns, do people explicitly tell you to switch pronouns?
Modern Greek speakers tend to squirm when addressed in the politeness plural, unless they are deliberately being high and mighty. The politeness plural connotes negative, not positive politeness to them, and emphasises social distance. Greeks don’t like social distance, they like being friendly and in your face. The exception these days would be officialdom and other explicit hierarchies, and even there, I’m stretched to think how much of that survives. I suspect it survives more in the Church.
As a diasporan, I approach new acquaintances in Greece online, using the politeness plural a fair bit. They will put up with it in the first exchange, and no longer. The explicit signal to cut it out, if you persist, is στον ενικό, είπαμε. “I told you: singular!”
Can learning Modern Greek be helpful for studying philosophy?
I dearly, earnestly, ardently want you to learn Modern Greek for the pop culture.
But don’t do it to help you with Ancient Greek philosophy. You’ll trip over more false friends than you can shake a stick it. Meanings and connotations of words have changed over the millennia, and nowhere is getting the precise connotations of words more important than philosophy—especially given how hopelessly vague Ancient Greek philosophical terminology is.
Do however relish the magnificent juxtaposition of Heraclitus and St John Damascene in this 1993 pop song:
Τα πάντα ρει, τα πάντα ρει
Γι’ αυτό απόψε είναι Λαμπρή
Ta panta rhei, Everything Flows.
So let’s make tonight an Easter party!
[St John Damascene wrote the Easter hymn “Day of resurrection, let us be bright ye peoples”, Ἀναστάσεως ἡμέρα λαμπρυνθῶμεν Λαοί. Bright-Day is the colloquial Greek word for Easter.]
What’s the whole thing about the widow in Zorba the Greek?
Depends what whole thing you’re asking about.
The village widow comes up again in Kazantzakis’ Christ Recrucified, as the stand-in for Mary Magdalen: in traditional Greek society, a young widow was the only available sexual outlet for men—unmarried women were guarded by their fathers, married women by their husbands. So lots of barely repressed stuff there with the author.
The figure of Madam Hortense in Zorba is portrayed with indulgence and sympathy, as a sexual figure (as women often are in the novels), but also as a misfit, a stranger stuck in Greek traditional society. Certainly with a lot more sympathy than others. Captain Michael has a standin for Kazantzakis bring his Jewish wife back home to Crete, and the ghost of the grandfather tormenting her to her death. I think of Kazantzakis himself, flirting with Jewish women in Berlin in his 40s (“liebe Genossin”), and feel like retching.
That’s two “what’s the whole thing”s, but I’ll add if you get more specific, OP, and if I remember.
What might future languages look like?
One of the foundational assumptions of Historical Linguistics is Uniformitarianism. We assume that, after the initial period of the evolution of language, Language is going to look the same as a structure, no matter if it’s 5000 years ago or 5000 years from now—because language is determined as a human faculty, and humans have not essentially changed biologically. So long as human brains are the same, and the human vocal tract is the same, language will be more of the same.
In fact, even if you take the human vocal tract out of the equation, language is still pretty much the same. One of the more gratifying conclusions from the study of sign languages is that Cherology is not essentially different to phonology. Which is in fact why we no longer use the term cherology.
Now, if the robots take over, the singularity hits and we get plugged into the Matrix, we all drown, or we all nuke each other, all bets are off. But so long as humans remain identifiably human, and live in recognisably human societies, there’s no reason to think that future languages will look substantially different to our current languages, any more than preliterate languages look substantially different to literary languages.
There’ll be bits that are different, sure. Different fads in discourse organisation. Different semantic fields in vocabulary. Different metaphors. Different extents of linguistic diversity, maybe (though dialects are certainly far from dead; they’re just organised along different distributions now). But there will still be anaphors, and word orders, and sandhi, and coarticulation, and synonyms, and presuppositions, and inflections, and tenses. The core of language as a system will remain recognisable.
Answered 2016-12-06 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy. and
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
Does Greek present tense “continuous lifestyle” always mean that x always does y or can it mean x regularly does y for a specified period and stops?
The question is about Grammatical aspect in Koine Greek, as OP clarified. That’s OK, the behaviour of aspect in Greek has not essentially changed since antiquity. In fact, not that I’ve checked, but I’m struggling to think where it’s changed at all.
- x always does y is either continuous aspect (unbroken), or habitual aspect (does it all the time)
- x regularly does y for a specified period [and stops] is iterative aspect.
- Continuous, habitual and iterative aspect are all subclasses of imperfective aspect. They contrast with perfective aspect, which emphasises that the action is complete.
- The “and stops” can make the action perfective; but if it’s happening in the present tense, the “and stops” is in the future, so it would be irrelevant.
- The Greek present indicative (and future, for the inflected tense) does not differentiate between perfective and imperfective at all. τύπτω means “I am hitting” or “I hit (usually)” or “I hit (one-off)”
- Greek distinguishes imperfective and perfective in the past, and in non-indicative presents. ἔτυπτον “I was hitting” vs ἔτυψα “I did hit”; ἐλήλυθον ἵνα τύπτω “I came to be hitting” vs ἐλήλυθον ἵνα τύψω “I came to hit (once)”.
- Koine Greek, it seems, also made this distinction in the present, with auxiliary formations of the form εἰμί τύπτων “I.am hitting”
- None of these distinctions differentiate continuous, habitual and iterative aspect. They’re all expressed in the same way in Greek, whatever the tense.
Why was hospitality so important in the Greek world?
My answer is more a gut-feel from Modern Greek practice, but I suspect it applies to antiquity as well. Dimitris Almyrantis perceptively identifies the (or at least an) underlying reason: avoidance of retribution. Cernowain Greenman identifies the surface reason: code of honour.
The modern Greek code of honour (How do I translate the Greek word filotimo?) also prominently features hospitality. The rationale that I intuit for it there is: it’s all about positive Face. If you can dispense largesse, you will be looked on as a valued member of the community: to be honourable consists of doing right by your fellow human, which means not only giving back (reciprocity), but also giving (generosity).
In that light, honour requires that you be hospitable, just as honour requires that you be diligent and responsible. (The reproach for a slack civil servant or a cheating tradesperson is that they are afilotimos, dishonourable.) You do good for others, not because you expect it in return, but because society as a whole benefits from it.
That’s consistent with Dimitris’ answer, which it ultimately derives from, and it’s a modern elaboration of Cernowain’s.
What is the etymology of Lacedaemon?
I refer you to What is the etymology of “Laconia”? My answer there covers both Laconia and Lacedaemon. Tl;Dr: we’re not sure.