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In Koine Greek, how are verbs conjugated based on their tense (if there is any pattern at all)?
Not quite clear what your question is. Assuming I’ve understood it:
Koine Greek, like other languages, has a notion of principal parts. There are six tenses you need to know for a verb; once you know them, you can derive the remainder. The six tenses are all indicatives: present; future; aorist active; perfect active; aorist passive; perfect passive.
There are in fact regular classes of verb, derived from the verb root; but there’s a lot of morphophonology happening at the interface of the root and the tense suffix, so you need to be familiar with what the possible tense stems are.
To grapple with the possibilities, read this: How can I learn to individuate ancient Greek verbs? It’s written for Attic, but Koine is not substantially simpler than Attic.
Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?
In this episode of Quora Jeopardy!, I find that the source OP is drawing on (Dimitris Sotiropoulos’ answer to Who is the other Hades and which are their family ties?, see comments) does not necessarily lead to the conclusion he is positing.
The answer is drawn from the first successful Google hit I got on OP’s source material: Mantziou, Mary. 1990. Euripides fr. 912 [math]N^2[/math] (inc. fab.) Dodone (Philologia) 19: 209–224. http://olympias.lib.uoi.gr/jspui…
The source text is an Orphic Hymn attributed to Euripides, and cited in two sources: Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata V 70,2, and Satyrus the Peripatetic’s Life of Euripides, fr. 37 col iii.
Let me cite Clement’s version from the Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Stromata (Clement of Alexandria)
In the most wonderful harmony with these words, Euripides, the philosopher of the drama, is found in the following words—making allusion, I know not how, at once to the Father and the Son:—
To you, the Lord of all, I bring
Cakes and libations too, O Zeus,
Or Hades would you choose be called;
[Ζεὺς εἴθ’ ᾍδης ὀνομαζόμενος στέργεις]
Do accept my offering of all fruits,
Rare, full, poured forth.For a whole burnt-offering and rare sacrifice for us is Christ. And that unwittingly he mentions the Saviour, he will make plain, as he adds:—
For you who, ‘midst the heavenly gods,
Jove’s sceptre sway’st, dost also share
The rule of those underground with Hades.
[χθονίων θ’ ᾍδῃ μετέχεις ἀρχῆς]Then he says expressly:—
Send light to human souls that fain would know
Whence conflicts spring, and what the root of ills,
And of the blessed gods to whom due rites
Of sacrifice we needs must pay, that so
We may from troubles find repose.
[I’ve corrected the translation “underground with Hades”]
The poem is addressed to a god who can choose to be called either Zeus or Hades, and who both holds Zeus’ sceptre, and rules over the chthonic souls.
Clement’s conclusion is that the Orphic hymns anticipate Christian theology, with God the Father as Zeus, God the Son as Hades, and the two being conflated as the one Substance. Satyrus thought this reflected Anaxagoras’ cosmology instead. Other historians of religion have thought the Zeus/Hades blend is Plutus, or Zagreus, or Dionysus or some other Other God, whether Orphic or Chthonic. Mantziou herself (too clever by half) thinks that since this is a necromancy, the Other God is the other god involved in necromancies, Hermes.
What is your hometown’s dark secret?
I have several hometowns, but the hometown I’ll pick is Sitia, Lasithi prefecture, Crete. Small, no account place, placid, few tourists.
I’ve made several discoveries about my hometown that came as a surprise to me. They had not exactly been publicised, and they’re embarrassing, so I guess they’re dark secrets. They get progressively darker.
1. Sitia is watched over by the Kazarma fortress, which the Venetians left behind. So you’d assume that Sitia remained a going concern for centuries.
In fact, when you spend more time in Sitia (and more importantly, when you then visit the other three, much bigger main towns of Crete, Iraklio, Hania and Rethymno), you notice that there’s one Venetian building, and no Ottoman buildings. There’s a reason for that: when the Venetians lost the town, there was no Sitia left. The town was abandoned in 1651 (destroyed by the Venetians themselves, Greek Wikipedia tells me), and rebuilt two centuries later, in 1870. By Muslims. Who called it Avinye.
2. There is a couplet that does the rounds of Crete, on the three main towns of Crete.
Οι Χανιώτες για τ’ άρματα,
οι Ρεθυμνιώτες για τα γράμματα,
οι Καστρινοί για το ποτήρι
People from Hania are for weapons, people from Rethymno for learning,
people from Kastro [Iraklio] are for drinking
Now, Sitia may well be a lot smaller than Rethymno, let alone Hania and Iraklio, but it is missing from the couplet. Which is also curiously missing its second rhyme.
No surprise that I never heard how the couplet ends while living in Sitia. As recorded by a 19th century folklorist (Γιατί τους Κρητικούς τους λένε Μανόληδες;), it ends with
οι Λασιώτες όλοι χοίροι or Στειακοί καθάριοι χοίροι
Those from Lasithi are all swine/
Those from Sitia are pure swine
And what do you know. It rhymes after all.
3. Remember how I said Sitia was reestablished by Muslims in 1870?
There’s not a lot of mentions in Sitia in the Australian press, searchable at the magnificent Newspapers Home – Trove site from the National Library of Australia (where any random can correct the OCR).
There is however this.
LONDON, 10th March.
The European consuls at Heraklion have confirmed the report received recently that the Christian insurgents had massacred 400 Moslems at Sitia. Several children of Mahometan families were slashed and wounded by the Christians, and in one case the ears of a child were cut off.
No. Somehow, I never heard of that incident while living in Sitia.
(See Cretan State for the 1897 insurrection, which led to Crete being granted autonomy.)
Not counting click languages, what is the oddest sounding language to speakers of English?
The weirdest sounds cross-linguistically would have to be those with a different airstream mechanism to the normal, pulmonic egressive mechanism.
The normal pulmonic egressive mechanism is simply making the sounds while breathing out of your lungs.
The lingual ingressive mechanism involves making sounds while sucking in air around your tongue. Those are, of course, clicks.
The two other mechanisms are:
- Glottalic ingressive: gulping down around your throat. Those are Implosive consonants. Found in Africa and Southeast Asia.
- Glottalic egressive: popping air out from around your throat. Those are Ejective consonants. Found in the Caucasus, the Americas, and some parts of Africa.
Is there a place in the world where we have differences between women and men in accent or even in vocabulary?
There’s lots of gendering in language, and people who have studied sociolinguistics more intently than me will be able to offer better examples.
I actually don’t know of instances in Crete that OP has in mind. I do know that in Tsakonia in the 19th century, the palatalised allophone of /r/ appeared to be [r̝], the “Czech r”, for men but not for women.
When there’s a conflict between dialect and the standard language, the tendency for gendered dialect variation can go one of two ways:
- If there is little exposure to the standard language within the community, and you’re in a patriarchal society, then men will have more exposure to the standard language than women, because women are stuck at home, and never hear the standard language spoken at all, while men are out and about, and do hear it. That’s a 19th century Europe thing. In fact, extrapolated to minority languages, you’d get situations where only the menfolk were exposed to the official language of the country—which was confined to the public sphere. Women were excluded from the public sphere, so they did not have access to the official language.
- If there is a lot more exposure to the standard language, and we’re in the 20th century (so women are not stuck at home, and get exposed to radio and TV even if they are), then women will move closer to the standard language, as they tend to be socialised to be more aware of social status and norms of genteelness. Men OTOH will move away from the standard language, because they will have more of their identity invested in notions of localism and parochialism, rather than status. (Yes, yes, generalisations, but that’s what sociolinguists have observed in the UK and US.)
Does word villa, meaning house, have the same meaning in all European languages or are there some exceptions?
Yes, yes, OP, in Cypriot Greek, βίλλα, as a variant of βίλλος, does mean “dick”. Hence, per βίλλα – cySlang (the Cypriot counterpart to urbandictionary) and βίλλα, βίλα – SLANG.gr (the Greek counterpart to urbandictionary), the fans of Marcos Baghdatis would shout:
Του Μάρκου η βίλα γκαστρώνει και καμήλα!
Marcos’ dick will impregnate even a camel!
Hey, don’t blame me for the rhymes of Cypriot Greek.
And so the joke goes around that when the newly arrived Greece Greek tells the Cypriots how much she admires their villas, the embarrassed locals say “we… prefer to use the word επαύλεις here”.
Does Greek have an equivalent of “ch” as in “chicken”?
Standard Greek does not. <ch> gets transliterated as /ts/. For example, when I was in Goody’s (the Greek competitor to McDonald’s) and ordered a cheeseburger, my order was relayed as ena tsiz! . You’ll see many Turkish loanwords with /ts/ in them: every single one corresponds to a Turkish <ç>.
On the other hand, many Greek dialects do have a [tʃ] sound, as a palatalised /k/ (which is how the sound originated in English). Confronted with the street name McCutcheon, for example, my mother wrote it down in Greek as <Makakion>. Which, in Cretan dialect, would be pronounced [makatʃon].
Kazantzakis also did something like that in a letter home to his parents from Italy; but I don’t remember what his word was.
Do you collect dictionaries? What is the favorite volume in your collection?
I have in my time collected dictionaries, though often it was for utilitarian purposes, so photocopies rather than books.
The one I think of with the most affection is John Sampson (linguist): The dialect of the Gypsies of Wales. It’s uncompromisingly scholarly, from a time when the Roma were considered beneath the notice of decent society. And Sampson himself was a pretty amazing character.
Is it just me, Kelley Spartiatis, or is everyone from Liverpool amazing? 🙂
Why is the word “cat” almost the same in all languages?
The word cat is the same in a lot of languages, for the same reason that Coca-Cola is the same in even more languages. Because most cats were domesticated, and originated, in one place: Egypt.
Not all cats: there was a separate domestication, Wikipedia tells me (Cat), in China. And extremely early domestication in Cyprus as well. (It’s one of those cruel ironies of fate that the site for the 7500 BC cat find in Cyprus is Shillourokambos. “Dog Tail Plain.”)
But the main site from which the languages you have in mind got their word—and their speakers got their cats—was Egypt: we think it’s from the Late Egyptian (1300–700 BC) čaute, ‘female wildcat’. That gave us, inter alia,
- Latin cattus, and all its Romance, Germanic, and Slavonic progeny. Which includes Byzantine Greek kata, from cattus, and Modern Greek ɣata, from Italian gatto .
- Egyptian Arabic keta قطة , as reported by Ahmed Ouda, and Tunisian Arabic قطّوس qaṭṭus, as reported by Wiktionary: cattus – Wiktionary
It didn’t give us Latin feles (which may be cognate with the Welsh for marten, just as the Katharevousa Greek γαλῆ is actually the ancient Greek for ferret). But at some time like 300 AD, the colloquial Roman word borrowed from Egypt started following the cat, and kept on following it throughout Europe.
I reserve especial ire in this answer for people who do not allow comments on their answers, and then write answers needing correction.
What is the pragmatics wastebasket?
To my embarrassment, I did not know what the pragmatics wastebasket was, so I did some googling.
- Pragmatics (textbook account)
- Out of the Pragmatic Wastebasket (Bar-Hillel’s note)
- Pragmatics waste-basket
The history of linguistics is a succession of scholars saying: X is what we will pay attention to, and Y is crap we can’t be bothered dealing with, because it’s too messy.
- 500 BC: morphology is all we deal with in grammar
- 100 AD: morphology, (rudimentary) syntax, and rhetoric is all we deal with in grammar, and why you would speak at all is philosophy, not grammar.
- 1850: language change is all we deal with, and what language has ended up as is boring
- 1920: the language system (langue) is what we deal with, and what comes out of people’s mouths (parole) is boring
- 1960: syntax is what we deal with, and semantics is the philosophers’ problem, not ours
- 1970: syntax and semantics is what we deal with, and pragmatics is a philosopher’s invention, not ours.
Now something changed in the 1960s into 1970s.
Sociologists started looking at what came out of people’s mouths, and not just their underlying model of language. That gave rise to sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.
Philosophers of language started looking at why people said things in the contexts they did. That gave rise to pragmatics.
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was as formal a linguist as formal linguists could be. Machine translation people like to burn effigies of him, because Bar-Hillel wrote a report to the US military in the late ’60s, that the effort to date on machine translation was never going to pay off, thereby stopping all research in machine translation for the next 20 years. (He was right, btw: machine translation in practice has nothing to do with formal grammars, which was the route machine translation had been taking. But Chomsky got plenty of NATO funding out of machine translation, before Bar-Hillel’s report.)
Bar-Hillel did something very cool in 1971; especially cool for a formal linguist.
He wrote a little note in Linguistic Inquiry (the home journal of Evil Chomskian Formalists), saying something like this:
“We’ve been treating pragmatics as a waste-basket of random crap that we don’t bother to account for in language. Every so often, someone goes through the waste-basket of random crap, and picks out something they think they can account for in their new shiny formal syntactic–semantic theory.
Instead of treating pragmatics as a waste-basket, and cherrypicking it for bits to account for formally, why don’t we instead start taking pragmatics seriously, and account for the stuff in the “waste-basket” on its own terms?”
The pragmatics waste-basket is what linguists have since been getting away from. Instead of treating it as random crap, shoved into Generative Semantics if it will fit (which is what the fashion was in the late 1960s), pragmatics started being treated seriously as its own discipline, with its own way of explaining phenomena. Just as sociolinguistics and discourse analysis did.