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What is the translation of the inscription outside Phanar Greek Orthodox College?
Πατριαρχικὴ Μεγάλη τοῦ Γένους Σχολή. αωπ.
The Patriarchal Great School of the Nation. 1880.
(ου is written as the ligature ȣ.)
More prosaically, it is now known in English as Phanar Greek Orthodox College, and in Turkish as Özel Fener Rum Lisesi. It was established in 1454 and was the premier institute for schooling of Greek Orthodox students in the Ottoman Empire. The date refers to the current building, which Wikipedia informs me was constructed in 1881–83.
Its fame endures in Greekdom. In fact, the Greek translation of the Police Academy (franchise) films was Η Μεγάλη των Μπάτσων Σχολή: The Great School of the Cops.
What does the name “Teah” mean?
*Looks at profile of OP Tia, hoping for a hint*
… You’re Australian, and in fact live on the same train line as me (my wife used to live in Berwick).
Well, shit, Teah, that doesn’t help me at all. You’re Australian, so that name could be from anywhere. 🙂
Let’s think.
Names ending in -ah? That suggests either English (and a recent phonetic spelling in English at that), Hebrew, or Malay.
Let’s go to Google:
The name Teah is a Greek baby name. In Greek the meaning of the name Teah is: Goddess; godly. Also abbreviation of names like Althea and Dorothea. The mythological Thea was Greek goddess of light and mother of the sun; moon and dawn.
Well, no, Teah is not a Greek baby name. Thea is the Greek for Goddess, and shows up in Dorothea (Gift of the Goddess—or actually, feminine version of Dorotheus, Gift of the God). And what Greek goddess of light and mother of the sun?
It’s almost like you can’t believe anything you read online any more.
So if Teah is meant to be Thea, someone at some time was sydlexic.
Teah is a spelling variant of the name Tia (English).
Tia: The name developed as a short form of names ending in ‘-tia’, or names starting with ‘Tia-‘.
That at least looks more plausible to me.
Teah (Girl): All about the name Teah
Teah appeared on the charts for the first time in 1977 on position #3390 … The baby girl name Teah was given to 6 baby girls in 2012, ranking #4908 on the national girl baby name top chart.
So rare and recent.
The only instances under Teah in Wikipedia are two Liberian soccer players, one with Teah as a first name, one with it as a surname. If you don’t have any Liberian heritage or associations, OP, that’s likely a coincidence; it’s a short name, after all, so coincidences are bound to happen.
That’s what I’ve got, Teah. Nice to have made your acquaintance!
EDIT: Thank you Janet Renner for staying on the case.
cc Joshua Bowman Philip Newton Tia Edward Conway Dimitris Almyrantis Yash Geryani
[It would be nice if we had an option to renotify people of an update to an answer]
Well, I found out who the mother of the Sun was supposed to be: Theia. Still not buying it: she may have been a big deal to Hesiod, but she was pretty obscure all round.
Tea (given name) shows that Croats, Bosniaks, Georgians, and Finns have the name.
Téa name checks Georgians, but points to Téa Leoni, born Elizabeth Téa Pantaleoni. Her dad was Italian.
As Janet points out, Téa Leoni was big when Teah Petrušić would have been born (and she’s big again now). So quite a likely source for the name Teah.
Thea (name) is explained as “short for Theodora, Theadora, Dorothea, or Althea (also spelled Elithea)”. If the Téa is meant to be Italian (with the acute indicating the pronunciation), I can see it as short for Dorotea. If Teah Petrušić has a Croatian name, and Teah is an Anglicised namesake of Téa Obreht née Bajraktarević or Tea Palić, well, Dorotea Sutara is Croatian too.
So. Revise “the name developed as a short form of names ending in ‘-tia’” to “the name developed as a short form of names ending in ‘-t(h)ea’”, with Téa Leoni and Croatian (and Serbian?) Tea as equally possible antecedents.
It’s still nice to have made your acquaintance, Teah! And thank you again Janet!
Why is the Icelandic language more linguistically conservative than other Germanic languages?
Our guesses:
- Language change is quicker in places where there are a lot of people, lots of social difference, and a lot of traffic. Lots of people generate more random linguistic variation; lots of social difference generates more deliberate linguistic variation; lots of traffic helps idiosyncratic distinctions that one person comes up with propagate.
- Iceland had none of these. It is relatively isolated, small, and homogeneous.
- Iceland has had near universal literacy for a millennium. Literacy is known to be a powerfully conservative force in language change: it keeps centuries-old speech (and notions of speech) in circulation.
- Icelanders are prescriptive about keeping the language stable, so they collude with the conservative force of literacy. The most renowned instance of this among linguists is flamæli: Icelandic (language): What is flámæli? This is a vowel merger from the 1920s that Icelanders actually managed to not just stigmatise, but reverse (at least temporarily). There are cultural factors at play, but the small and homogeneous society also means that cultural conservatism has a much greater chance of success.
Answered 2016-10-13 · 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.
What did the Greeks know about India before Alexander the Great started his campaigns?
Only what was in Ctesias’ work Indica (Ctesias).
The text only survives in quotations from later authors, and in a summary by Photius:
Photius’ excerpt of Ctesias’ Indica
It was second hand information: Ctesias worked in the Persian court, and relayed fanciful Persian notions of what India was like. Megasthenes, the first Greek author to have actually gone to India and recorded his impressions, was an envoy to India of Seleucus I Nicator, one of the successors of Alexander.
How would a society work if everyone was deaf?
Imagine a world in which humans didn’t have Electroreception. None of that electric frisson you get when a predator lurks outside. No ability to use your body as a compass; why, the number of humans that would get lost on hikes! No ability to tell what’s in front of you just by its capacitance or resistance. And how the hell would humans ever develop an intuitive understanding of electrical engineering?
Oh, I’m sorry. I said humans. I was, of course, speaking of sharks and platypuses.
A society that never had sound would never know what it’s missing, just as we don’t know what we’re missing out on compared to sharks and platypuses. (Or for that matter dogs.) So, no music, and no loss: humans are still creative animals, they would divert their creativity to the senses they did have.
Don Grushkin has written a meaty and substantive answer; but I have to say, I disagree with some of it.
- The social imperative that drives people to differentiate their oral languages is human (it’s about group dynamics), and would also apply to signed languages.
- The notion that visual communication inherently minimises conflict is one I would need to be convinced of.
- The former Yugoslavia blew up because people there understood what each other was saying all too well.
- Hearing people have had plenty of contexts motivating collaboration and collectivism; in fact, traditional societies do so in general (you can’t be either a one-man farm, or a one-woman hunter-gatherer). Individualism is a much more recent artefact, and certainly more pronounced in the US than elsewhere.
So the speculation that Eyeth* would be more peaceful, collaborative, and understanding than Earth is one I’m not buying.
Written language would start like Chinese; I don’t know that there would be as much incentive for it to move away from pictograms as there was for abugidas and alphabets, given the complexity of sign language phonologies.
But I agree with Don that Eyeth society would look pretty similar to Earth. (In fact, I’m arguing it would look even more similar.) Society is how it is because of cognition, not modality of perception.
* That is, while the planet of the Hearing is EARth, the planet of the Deaf is EYEth.
In Greek, what does the suffix -or mean?
–tōr is an agent suffix:
Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges (misscanned)
a. The primary suffixes τᾱ, τηρ, τορ, τρο, ευ, denoting the agent or doer of an action, are masculine.
…
3. τορ (nom. -τωρ): ῥή-τωρ orator (ἐρέω shall say, ἐρ-, ῥε-), εἴ-ρη-κα have spoken, κτίσ-τωρ founder (κτίζω found, κτιδ-), σημάντωρ commander poet. (σημαίνω give a signal, σημαν-).
-τωρ and its Latin cognate -tor (e.g. gladita-tor, domina-tor, can-tor), is an Indo-European suffix.
Why do some words come across as more clichéd than others?
Most metaphors, we’d like to assume, were new once. (Likely not all of them: cognitive metaphor is tied up with cognition.)
Some new metaphors, or figurative speech, or just plain collocations, become popular. Others do not.
Some of those popular collocations become so popular, they become entirely conventional and characteristic of a genre. And in most cultures, that’s actually a good thing. These are familiar, comforting signals. They are shortcuts to thinking, for the speaker and the reader both. They are not surprising or vivid or thought provoking, which they may well have been once; but that’s ok.
However there are genres, and more importantly cultures, in which ongoing vividness and punchiness are valued more than familiarity and conventionality. Those are the genres and cultures that decry cliches. And when a particular expression becomes conventional and familiar, they value seeking out other expressions, that are not yet conventional and familiar.
Remember: most cliches started out as novel.
Why are some words clichéd? Because in those genres, they have become the victims of their own success.
What is the hardest concept to understand in Lojban?
Three candidates.
Lexical aspect: the distinction between achievement, accomplishment, activity and state it took from Vendler. It’s not inherently inscrutable, but rattling off Vendler’s nomenclature is not the way to make people understand it.
The shades of difference between abstractors: nu, du’u, sedu’u, ka, su’u. The distinctions are real, but they are more confusing, and natural languages occult those distinctions behind the matrix predicate class or less granular complement markers.
And the articles. They were confusing before; they got revised; they’re still confusing. They may not be wrong, but they are quite alien.
Answered 2016-10-11 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
What is the word to call the husband in your country’s language?
Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”.
Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark.
You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between Turkey and Nigeria, sure, but this was a specifically Ottoman title, and the cultural traffic just wasn’t there.
Besides, when a woman wants to flatter her mate in Greece, and call him “boss” and bring him his slippers and fulfil his patriarchal fantasies, she doesn’t call him “my agha”.
She calls him “my Pasha”. Pashas outranked aghas, after all.
What’s that I hear? Pshaw?
Why yes. Bashaw was an early English rendering of Pasha.
And, as a desultory attempt to answer the question as stated:
Here in Australia, I get hubbo from my wife. Partaking in the age-old tension between the two Australian hypocoristics, –o and –ie. Hubby is far more widespread throughout English.
Qo’noS, the Klingon home planet, uses loDnal. We know loD is ‘man’.
In Esperantujo, it’s edzo. A back formation from edzino “wife”, itself a reanalysis of the Litvak Yiddish pronounciation of the the suffix in Prinz-essin.
In Lojbanistan, it’s speni “spouse”. You can specify the gender as nakspe “male spouse”; I doubt most Lojbanists bother.
What are the characteristics of Greek people?
Originally Answered:
How can you describe the personality of the Greeks?
Noone’s biting?
InB4 “You can’t stereotype all Greeks”, &c &c
Mercurial. Impulsive.
There’s an apocryphal Turkish saying (which in fact, I’ve only found in Greek sources—but then again, I haven’t asked Quora): Gâvurun/Yunanın akili sonradan geliyor. Του Ρωμιού η γνώση ύστερα έρχεται. A Greek’s common sense comes later.
Passionate. Like to yell at each other as a performance piece. Like to disagree for the fun of it. The saying goes “Where there are two Greeks, there are three opinions”. (It’s a saying that Jews also lay claim to.)
Their sense of honour (amour propre: How do I translate the Greek word filotimo?) is a double-edged sword: it makes them generous to a fault, but also very touchy.
Very much about the collective and the social ritual, like many recently traditional societies. Operate through positive politeness (What are the negative and positive politeness strategies?) No interest in “personal space”.
Nationalistic, but mistrustful of authority and of notions of the common good. Enterprising and street-smart (or at least, they used to be). Blame malicious outside forces by default, rather than admit problems closer to home.
*shrug* That’s a start.