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Do modern Greek people feel that Istanbul/Constantinople belongs to them?
27 followers. A lot of people are waiting for an answer to this question.
I’ll bite.
With the initial note that this is a different question from Do Greeks want to recover Constantinople?
I’m not necessarily the best person to be answering this: I lived in Greece in the 80s, before the thawing in relations between Greeks and Turks in the ’90s. So my answers will err on the out-of-date side.
The folk song published by Nikolaos Politis in 1914 about the capture of Haghia Sophia was everywhere in the Greek education system. (I don’t know if it still is.) And it is an astonishing poem—
God sounds; the earth sounds; and the heavens sound;
Haghia Sophia sounds, that mighty church,
with two-and-sixty bells, four hundred woodblocks
—even if it’s a pastiche of a couple of dozen actual folk songs. It was all the more popular in Greece because of its ending:
“Quiet, Our Lady Mary, cry not so!
When times have passed, it will be ours once more.”
In fact, Michael Herzfeld’s book about the political uses of Greek folklore is titled Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece. And he makes the point (at some length) that the verse can just as easily be read as “it will still be ours.”
Hence the distinction to be made with Do Greeks want to recover Constantinople? Any Greek who sets foot in Istanbul works out pretty quickly that, as Vasilis Sekal’s answer to Do Greeks want to recover Constantinople? puts it, “There is nothing in Istanbul for Greeks to recover”. The nationalist talk of retaking the City is marginal, and getting more marginal as more Greeks and Turks realise that the Other are not man-eating Space Aliens; such talk seems to be confined to YouTube Commenters.
I couldn’t even find a clear statement of it from the Golden Dawn neonazis; they say the capital of Greece will be Constantinople, but they also say that it was and is Constantinople (Ο Κασιδιάρης ονειρεύεται πρωτεύουσα της Ελλάδας την Κωνσταντινούπολη και βρίζει: Τουρκοπροσκυνημένος ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, ρεμάλια στη ΝΔ [βίντεο]). That isn’t the same thing.
But Greeks can feel that Constantinople is theirs, without going further and saying that it is theirs alone, that they want to drive the Turks out, that they want to push the Greek borders to the Bosphorus. Greeks—and not just Neonazis—are funny to this day about calling the place Istanbul. (The Rum who actually live there are rather more sanguine about it—which offends Greeks.) Constantinople was the centre of Greek culture from 330 AD to well past the establishment of Athens as the capital of Modern Greece in 1833. That’s one and a half millennia of history. And Greeks care about their history, even when it isn’t Classical.
I became infatuated with this folk music show episode that Dimitra Triantafyllidou shared with me. It features the music of Istanbul. It is anti-nationalist to an extent that nauseates YouTube commenters. It takes pain to refer to Rum musicians in Istanbul, not Greek. It takes pains to say that the music of Istanbul was not Greek or Turkish or Jewish or Armenian but Istanbullu. The fiddler Sokratis Sinopoulos has made himself an expert on Ottoman art music, and speaks of the Turkish musician Derya Türkan as his brother.
But for all that, they don’t say Istanbullu in the episode. They say Politiko. And the ethnomusicologist host Lambros Liavas signs off the episode with this:
“Thank you for accompanying us on this beautiful voyage to the City of our hearts, the City of Constantinople. The City is always there, to grant the joy of human expression to all peoples, regardless of religion, language, or ethnicity.”
—before joining in the dance himself.
Do modern Greek people feel that Istanbul/Constantinople belongs to them? In a territorial sense, no. In a nationalist sense, no, outside of a lunatic fringe. In a daily life sense? Like both Vasilis Sekal and Electra K. Vasileiadou said: when you actually go there as a Greek, you realise that 18 million people go about their daily traffic jams and hang out in Üsküdar cafes and protest in Taksim Square, without any notion of belonging to Greece. It will not, once more, be ours.
Is there a Greek emotional attachment to Constantinople? Of course. It will still be ours. That won’t change in a hurry. And as I’d like to think people like Sinopoulos and Liavas show, that’s not a bad thing.
How do I address strangers in Australia?
Other respondents have covered this well (which is a benefit of me putting off replying to A2A’s!)
I’ll just add some metacommentary. People of Quora who get me in their feed because they like me or something: do read the other responses.
- The egalitarian ideal of Australia is that we address each other as mate, because we are not Class-Obsessed Poms [British]. But that’s an ideal, and it has its limits. It’s not really appropriate for someone substantially older than you. Mateship was also was never really a female friendly thing, though that has eroded somewhat.
- There is also something of a class factor to mate. Australians are in denial about there being class in Australia (because, again, We Are Not Poms); but all the grumbling about bogans is nothing if not classist.
- Mate is fine for males younger than you, including teens and kids.
- Darl and love were addressed to women in the bad old days; hence Sarah Boon asking noone keep using them. I have been addressed with darl and love myself by older women, mostly in service industry contexts; but it is decidedly antiquated.
- Zero-address is safe, as others have said, precisely because we’re uncomfortable with more formal alternatives to mate (such as sir—which we wince at even in service industry contexts), and we have a lack of female alternatives. (Mate towards women is limited, probably odd to most people, and certainly only addressed to women you know, not strangers.)
- Ma’am has actually gotten me adverse reactions. I do use it, but as an ironic thing.
If programs can be written in sonnets, why not in Klingon letters?
Of course they can:
var’aq – Esolang. A programming language using Klingon vocabulary.
Of course, the pIqaD (see Klingon alphabets) does not have an official Unicode encoding: the ostensive reason is that Klingonists don’t actually use the pIqaD. The gossip is that the German arm of the ISO vetoed it, for fear of bringing Unicode into disrepute. (Then Unicode went and dumped every daft emoji they could find into the codeset; way to pick the wrong target, German arm of ISO.)
That means you would need to use an unofficial mapping into the Unicode Private Use area (ConScript Unicode Registry), if you want your var’aq program to show in pIqaD. But if you’re going to be programming in var’aq, I suggest the unofficialness of the ConScript Unicode Registry is the least of your problems…
Why does no one put a period after the P in R.I.P.?
Clearly not noone; but there is a global movement in English away from using periods in abbreviations and acronyms—hence RIP rather than R.I.P.
The intermediate form R.I.P looks odd for a reason—why keep some periods in an acronym and not others? But the motivation for it is that abbreviations have been dropping their final period in general: Dr vs Dr., see Why do we have two rules for putting a period after abbreviations?. People who write R.I.P are extending the avoidance of final period in abbreviations, as a hypercorrection, to acronyms.
What are the meanings of lyrics to the Greek song “To Prosfigaki”?
Το προσφυγάκι – Μέλκον Μάρκος – Στίχοι, Video – kithara.to
Translating from the site:
Year of composition: 1950
Singing and Oud by Marko Melkon.
The recording was made in the USA around 1950. The song melody follows the Hicazkâr Makam scale, which corresponds to the byzantine Plagal Second Mode. Besides the oud, there is a violin and a clay percussion instrument.
Markos Melkon was a Constantinopolitan of Armenian descent. Although he sang professionally since the ’20s, he was only recorded after World War II.
The Little Dervish/The Little Refugee
I’m a little dervish, ah I’m telling you
driven out of İzmir
and I keep crying and getting drunk
and smoking hash as well, at the Café Aman [music café]
Ah yavrım aman [Ah my young one, alas]
Ah yadim aman [Ah my remembrance, alas]
When I play a taksim [improvisation] I feel yearning [μερακιώνω]*
I remember my homeland and I pine away
Sometimes poverty, sometimes riches
I play the oud with skill [μεράκι]*, at the Café Aman
Ah yavrım aman [Ah my young one, alas]
Ah yadim aman [Ah my remembrance, alas]
*Nick Nicholas’ answer to What do the Turkish loanwords merak and meraklı mean in your language?
What are some unexpected or unknown benefits from learning Esperanto?
If you immerse yourself in early Esperanto literature (before World War II), you end up learning a lot about Mitteleuropa high culture—and indirectly, a fair bit of German. There’s a lot of Heine, and a lot of emulating of Heine. Esperanto poetry is also a whole lot more formalist than English-language poetry (another Mitteleuropa thing), so you learn early that a Shakespearean sonnet is not a proper sonnet.
Does Old English have enough vocabulary for writing a diary?
Yes, but you will need some word coining for modern references to actually come across as Old English. (If you’re going to be dropping in unassimilated modern words all the time, you might as well be writing modern English. You won’t have the look and feel of Old English.)
Strongly recommend you look at the great work being done in the Old English Wikipedia, and contribute there to get practice.
Do languages evolve from conversations, scripts or a combination of scripts and spoken words?
If by scripts you mean “written texts” (and if you do, it’s a misleading way of saying it), languages evolve mostly through the spoken word. However, peculiarities of written registers can influence how people speak—for example, the reemergence of /t/ in often, or the influence of Classical Arabic on the spoken Arabic variants.
Written language can exercise a conservative effect on how the language evolves overall. That is exemplified most clearly in Icelandic, but there’s a good argument to be made that it applies to American English and British English remaining more or less mutually intelligible.
Which English words and expressions have a different meaning in Indian English? For example, the word propose is used in India in a way that never existed elsewhere.
Fellow Quorans of India, there’s a surprising omission in this list, which I’ve seen repeatedly on Quora, and indeed on Ravi Indra’s answer to this question: https://www.quora.com/Which-Engl…
In India Z alphabet is pronounced as (Zed) but for others it is (zee)
Alphabet is used in the subcontinent, where the rest of the English-speaking world uses letter (of the alphabet).
Are all English periphrastic constructions (e.g. the present perfect) instances of grammaticalization?
Yes to what Clarissa Lohr said, and no to what Darius Vukasinovic said. (You still at Monash, Darius? I live in Oakleigh.)
An auxiliary verb is by definition a grammaticalisation, since it is no longer a content word. I have spoken does not have much to do with possession, I will speak does not have much to do with desire, and I shall speak does not have much to do with obligation, and I am speaking does not have much to do with existence or equivalence.
I said “have much to do”, not “is unrelated to”: the past meanings do colour the present grammatical meanings. But you can use I will speak in contexts when you don’t particularly want to speak at all. In fact, there’s a nice passage in the Memoirs of Sylvester Syropoulos, which illustrates the corresponding change in Greek quite well: the Emperor says to the Patriarch “you want to speak in favour of Church Union”, when it’s clear the Patriarch wants no such thing. That’s Greek “want to” grammaticalising into “will”, exactly as was happening at roughly the same time with English will.
Of the auxiliaries of English, to be is more contentious, because there was not a lot of content there in the verb to being with. But there is clearly a difference in syntactic scope between I am a walrus, I am red, and I am speaking. That too is consistent with grammaticalisation.