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In First Corinthians 13:5, what do you think Paul had in mind when he uses the word ‘unbecomingly’ to describe what love isn’t like?
Vote #1 Colin Jensen and Joe Fessenden, who have nailed it.
To add a bit.
It is the height of arrogance to fast forward to Modern Greek. But I’ll do so anyway.
In Modern Greek, the adjective askhimos < askhēmōn means ‘ugly’.
The etymology of askhēmōn is ‘un-shape-ish’. So unshapely, not with a nice shape. Deformed, as Thayer’s Lexicon put it. Not pleasant to look at.
The verb askhēmonein means ‘to act in an unshapely manner’. To act ugly. In a way that is not pleasant to experience.
You need to dig beneath the Olde English of unbecomingly, unseemly. They are correct, but you may well miss the connotations because they are Olde English. To act unbecomingly mean acting in a socially unacceptable way. It is a socially ugly way.
From the Byzantine usage I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure that includes behaviour which society (at the time) condemned as lewd, sexually ill-disciplined. But it’s not just about the sex, it’s about the ugliness.
FWIW, the LSJ (Classical Greek) definition of the verb is ‘behave unseemly, disgrace oneself’.
Would you give up your mother tongue for a common world language, if you knew that it would unite all people?
Thx4A2A, Irene. I’d say that in Armenian, but my wife doesn’t speak it. 🙁
This is a painful question for me, as I was an Esperantist for a fair while.
But even before the Espereantists split about whether the “final victory” was worth messianically waiting for, they were very careful not to convey a message that Esperanto would displace ethnic languages (even though, if the hegemony of the final victory ever happened, that would be the expected outcome). Esperanto was always meant to be a second language only.
I won’t address the fact that the hypothetical is implausible, that a common language would not unite all people, as proven by every civil war ever.
I will say that my identity as an English-speaker and a Greek-speaker is definitional to me, and I will not wish to relinquish it.
The march of technology means that we’re going to see similar challenges to our identities within our lifetimes, even if not this one. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be on the wrong side of those challenges, myself.
Which Greek island is the best for traditional music and culture?
You want an island that’s a little out of the way of mass tourism, so you can see some local music and culture. Or an island that’s big enough that not every part of it is soaked with mass tourism.
You won’t see much, this is 2016 after all. And as I posted here (Nick Nicholas’ answer to What should I know (but don’t) about the culture and history of the Cyclades in general and Syros in particular?), the indigenous dialect of the Cyclades (the most archetypal Greek islands) died out a century ago.
I actually haven’t done the Greek islands, partly because that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d be looking for, myself. I’ll make a wild guess:
- Of the Ionian islands, not Corfu, probably not Zante. Maybe Cephalonia.
- Of the Northern Aegean, Thasos and Samothrace definitely (but why would a tourist want to? 🙂 , likely Lemnos. Lesbos is big enough that there are traditional bits left, and even visible differences within the island (I’ve been there), but you have to hunt them down.
- I don’t even think of Euboea as an island, but: Euboea.
- Of the Cyclades, I’d go with any island you haven’t heard of. Folegandros, maybe, or Amorgos. But I’m guessing here.
- Of the Dodecanese, I suspect all of them; 11 of the 12 are tiny and out of the way, and the 12th, Rhodes, is big enough that something indigenous will have survived the tourists.
- Crete. Of course. Not the coast around Iraklion. Ever. But the hinterland? Yes.
What is the etymology of “Therasia”?
The Just-So story of antiquity is as Konstantinos Konstantinides put it: Thera the island was named for its colonist Theras, and Therasia for his daughter.
Yeah, I find that too convenient too.
I’m not looking up Pauly or anything reputable like that, but I will work from the corresponding common nouns. Thēr means a wild animal, and thēra meant the hunt, hunting for wild animals, game. Thērasios is the adjective of thēra, “of or relating to the hunt”. The feminine of Thērasios is Thērasia. So “hunt” and “hunting (island)”.
Oh, and Theresa does indeed come from the similar adjective Thēresios. It started out as a synonym of Artemis, the hunter goddess.
Identify how linguistic is related with historical linguistics?
Well, linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is language.
Historical linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is the development of language through time. It explains language in terms of how it historically developed to get to this point (its diachrony).
Up until the 1920s, historical linguistics was the mainstream of linguistics. Saussure, himself an important historical linguist, identified that language is a system which needs to be made sense of on its own terms, as a contemporary phenomenon (its synchrony).
This led to Structuralism, which uncovered a lot of the structures of language that Historical Linguistics had missed, because they were treating language as a process and not a system. Historical Linguistics for example did not really differentiate phones and phonemes; it didn’t need to. The distinction is essential to phonology. And after Structuralism, other approaches to linguistics have continued to be synchronic.
Historical linguistics has been marginalised in all of this, and is very much niche now. Historical linguistics has been enriched by our better understanding of synchronic linguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. But it is unfortunately out of fashion, with a lot of shortsighted linguists thinking it’s boring and old hat.
Fashion. Never forget that all of scholarship—not just the squishy humanities, but the sciences as well—are about fashion. There are fields of inquiry that fall out of fashion, and it’s not always for objectively sound reasons.
Why didn’t the reformation spread between Orthodox Christians?
I encourage my followers stumbling on this to read the other answers. (I always do!) My perspective is rather different from theirs.
I’ll speak to Constantinople rather than Moscow, though I suspect it’s the same story.
Under the Ottoman Empire, the Orthodox Patriarchate was two things which would have blocked the Reformation.
- The Patriarchate was the ethnoreligious authority for the entire Rum Millet, the Orthodox Christian subjects of the empire. If you gave up on being Orthodox, you gave up on being Roman, as far as both the Christians and the Muslims of the Empire were concerned. (And Greek Catholics were not Romans, they were Franks.) So switching denomination was not meant to be a casual thing, it was a wrenching thing with huge implications for you, both politically and socially.
- It wasn’t really much different in Germany at the time, I guess…
- The Patriarchate was a deepset force of reactionary conservatism. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh and Voltaire-ish, but it really was. Just the venom heaped on vernacular Greek renderings of the Gospels is enough to tell you that. And Greek nationalists may well not have learned this at school, but the Patriarchate condemned the emergence of nationalism in the 18th century, as an unwelcome Western heresy. Not because the Evil Turks told them to. But because the Millet system worked just fine for them too.
There are only two Patriarchs from the Ottoman Empire that anyone outside a seminary has heard of, and I would love to be proven wrong.
- Gregory V of Constantinople was hanged at the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. Not because he was a Greek nationalist: he was the guy condemning the emergence of nationalism. But a useful martyr to have on your books.
- Cyril Lucaris
OK, you may not heard of Lucaris. But plenty of Greek intellectuals have.
Know why people have heard of Lucaris? He was a thinker. He promoted education. He sponsored the first vernacular translation of the Gospels. He was in dialogue with Calvinists and Anglicans. He may have been responsible for a Calvinist-oriented Confession, and of course there was raging controversy, both then and now, about whether he had crossed over to Calvinism himself.
He was the closest the Patriarchate came, in fact, to the Reformation.
He had lots of enemies in the intrigue-ridden Church, he was deposed four times (!), and he was hanged by the Ottomans in 1638, on the pretext of disloyalty.
His legacy within the church?
The Council of Constantinople in 1638 anathematized both Cyril and the Eastern Confession of the Christian faith, but the Council of Jerusalem in 1672, specially engaged in the case of Cyril, completely acquitted him, testified that the Council of Constantinople cursed Cyril not because they thought he was the author of the confession, but for the fact that Cyril hadn’t written a rebuttal to this essay attributed to him.
In my opinion, that’s why the Reformation didn’t spread between Orthodox Christians.
Is it grammatically correct to use “they” as a singular pronoun?
There’s some critical nuance being missed in answers so far (though I strongly suspect it’s come up elsewhere here). The closest is in the sources mentioned by Mark A. Mandel, and the answer given by Matthew Carlson.
- The old use of singular they is with reference to an non-specific entity, where the use of gender would be misleading (the gender of the non-specific person is not known, and even if it is known, it is irrelevant). Hence, Shakespeare used:
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friendThe singular they is not because the gender is not known, but because it’s an non-specific referent: not a man but = every man = any man.
- The grammaticality of singular they was disputed when the prescriptivists came to town, because “not logical”, i.e. “not how Latin does things”. It’s not how most languages do things. But it is how English does things. And it’s an asterisked logic, as language logic is.
- The new use of they as gender-neutral, and the even newer use of they as non-binary may take getting used to—although I find that hard to believe for the former (which after all, is still pretty much used in non-specific contexts). The latter is much harder, because it applies to specific referents; that’s not a “logical” constraint, but a semantic constraint. I know that I keep fucking it up in my correspondence with Sam Murray, just to namedrop. But the linguistic extension is straightforward, and it’s really a matter of familiarisation to get over the definiteness block.
- And as an English speaker, I’m profoundly grateful to those in the genderfluid community who choose to go with they. Singular specific they is nothing. Neologisms like zhe and hu: those are the real linguistic annoyance.
- And yes, if someone uses them, it is polite to respect that too. But thank you to those who use the resources already there in the language.
See Singular ‘They’ for a nice succinct summary of non-binary they.
Don’t read the comments offered via Facebook if you value human dignity. “Social engineering” my tuchus.
EDIT: Thanks to Clarissa Lohr for correcting me on specificity.
How much does our knowledge of obscure languages depend on missionary work which preserved and exposed them?
Quite a bit.
I trained around fieldwork linguists. Which was a colossal mistake for someone working on a European language. But useful if you want to be exposed to typology. I hear the IPA horror stories of my peers here, and blanche. Can linguists differentiate between all the sounds of the IPA?
Now. Fieldwork linguists tend to like the cultures of the people they work among. And they tend not to like people they perceive as working to eradicate those cultures. They are academics, so they’re already on preponderance predisposed against religion. (The most visionary linguist we had was a pastor in training, and eventually moved across to theology—and anti-Islamic rhetoric. Our homegrown computational linguistics giant was a fieldworker, and a missionary. Both were regarded by their colleagues with amused detachment.)
I learned more about typology working as a research assistant than doing a PhD. Just as well, because my PhD wasn’t in typology. I was research assistant for a prof doing a phonological survey of Papua New Guinea.
PNG has, what, 1/8 of the world’s languages? 1/6?
How many academic linguists have signed up for a lifestyle of malaria and dysentery, so they can record obscure languages there?
More than there used to be. We’ve run out of new languages among our Indigenous Australians, so PhDs wanting to write a grammar of an underdocumented language are sent to PNG now. But still, of the 800-odd languages there, I’d be surprised if even more more than 50 are documented to an acceptable scholarly level.
You know who’s prepared to sign up for a lifestyle of malaria and dysentery, to record languages in PNG for their own motives?
Of course you do.
Academic Linguists owe a lot to SIL International. Some of them wish they didn’t. While the SIL missionaries are sometimes linguistic incompetents, sometimes they are brilliant linguists; it’s mixed.
I know one thing, though. Vanuatu has the highest density of languages on earth: 110 languages, population of 300k. Vanuatu, for reasons that a lot of linguists would be sympathetic to, has barred SIL from working there.
And Vanuatu, not PNG, is the most linguistically underdocumented country there is.
If New Testament has κρεμάμενος “hanged” referring to Jesus, why has the word been rendered as σταυρωθείς, “crucified”?
Well, both do indeed occur in the New Testament. “Crucify” σταυρόω is the usual verb, but Galatians 3:13 uses ὅτι γέγραπται Ἐπικατάρατος πᾶς ὁ κρεμάμενος ἐπὶ ξύλου “for it is written: cursed is he who hangs from a pole.”
Galatians 3:13 uses hangs from a pole to refer to Jesus, but in fact it is quoting Deuteronomy 21:23: you must not leave the body hanging on the pole overnight. Be sure to bury it that same day, because anyone who is hung on a pole is under God’s curse. Deuteronomy is referring to death by hanging from a pole. Acts 5:30 also uses that expression to refer to the crucifixion, and the commentaries explain it as an allusion to the same source.
Greek Orthodox hymns generalise this quotation to refer to the crucifixion, on both Holy Thursday and Good Friday: see Επί ξύλου κρεμάμενοι όλοι μας. But translating crucifixion on a cross into hanging on a tree is hardly rare in different cultures. I’m pretty sure it shows up in Old English, though I’m not finding the source on Google.
What is the etymology of the surname Soros?
As in George Soros?
Likely Esperanto. “He will soar”. Possibly Hungarian: “Next in line”.
His father was called Tivadar Schwartz, and was an important figure in Esperanto culture (Teodoro Ŝvarc): not so much for stuff he wrote (including under the pseudonym Teo Melas—yes, the guy knew his Ancient Greek: Melas = Schwartz = Black), but because he founded Literatura Foiro, the defining Esperanto literary journal.
Having a Jewish name in pre-war Hungary was not a life-enhancing move, and Theo changed the surname in 1936. The Esperanto Wikipedia (George Soros – Vikipedio) is skeptical whether Esperanto was the prime mover behind the surname change; the English Wikipedia (George Soros – Wikipedia) mentions that the palindrome was also attractive.
George Soros was exposed to Esperanto plenty as a kid, though apparently he is not a native speaker, and he doesn’t speak it now. He hasn’t had much to do with the language since his youth, though the Esperanto Wikipedia mentions he was dragged to From Zamenhof to Soros: A Symposium organised by the Universal Esperanto Association in New York, 2010.