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How many Greek dialects are there in the Balkans?
A2Q (as opposed to A2A) by Peter J. Wright.
Are we including Greece in the Balkans for the purposes of this question? If so, the breakdown of dialects is pretty arbitrary, but the dialect groupings from Newton, which I accept, are:
- Peloponnesian–Ionian
- Northern
- Old Athenian (including Maniot and Kymiot)
- Cretan (including Cycladean)
- South-Eastern (including Cypriot)
- Tsakonian
If we’re excluding Greece, we’re asking where Greek was traditionally, natively spoken in the home of people, north of Greece.
I’m making that distinction, because of the recurring claims of the Lost Greeks of Monastir and further north in FYRO Macedonia. As far as I can tell, those “Lost Greeks” were ethnic Aromanians, who identified themselves as Greek at one stage, and who changed identification later. They did in fact speak Greek, but as far as I know, they spoke it as a second language.
I’m happy to be contradicted, but I’d like a dialect sample that looks recognisably northern.
Other than that:
- Northern Epirus/Southern Albania: a not-quite northern dialect, but it has been situated in the area around Sarandë, Himarë and Gjirokastër (Agii Saranda, Himara, Argyrokastro) for a very long time. Still in situ.
- Eastern Rumelia/Southern Bulgaria, as a minority, including the towns of Plovdiv, Melnik, and Burgaz (Phillipoupolis, Meleniko, Pyrgos). Mostly relocated to Greece, but some Greek-speakers have remained in place. Northern dialect.
- East Thrace/European Turkey, as a minority, including the towns of Edirne, Tekirdağ, Kırklareli, and Istanbul (Adrianople, Rhaedestus, Saranda Ekklisies, Constantinople). Relocated to Greece, apart from a small remaining population in Istanbul. Northern dialect, apart from Constantinople, which spoke a Northern dialect but without Northern vocalism.
- The Sarakatsani, a traditionally nomadic transhumant population, moving through FYRO Macedonia, Southern Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece. Northern dialect. Still in situ.
Does one accentuate French capital letters?
From this forum: France Forum
- Canadian French routinely accents capital letters, and Microsoft Word obliges them.
- The Academie Française says you should accent capital letters.
- France French usually nowadays don’t accent capital letters.
Which means the Quebecois, once again, are being more royalist than the king…
Do the isolated pockets of Greeks in Russia have a dialect very different from Standard Greek?
A2Q (as opposed to A2A) by Peter J. Wright.
There are two Greek dialects spoken in the former Soviet Union.
The larger population speaks Pontic Greek, spoken in southern Russia, southern Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia. The population is descended from Pontic Greek speakers from their original homeland, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, who moved to Christian Russia from the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Despite what the linked Wikipedia article hints at, I don’t know of any linguist that speaks of their dialect as anything but Pontic. Those in Tsalka are Turkophone.
Pontic Greek is not really mutually intelligible with Standard Modern Greek, although you can pick it up as a Standard Greek speaker relatively easily.
The smaller population speaks Mariupol Greek, in the villages around Mariupol in Eastern Ukraine. The population originally lived in the southern Crimea, and moved to Mariupol in 1778—again, moving from a Muslim realm to Christian Russia. A substantial number of Christians, who moved to Mariupol itself, spoke a variant of Crimean Tatar known as Urum, and the Greek dialect is substantially influenced by Tatar. The dialect itself is distinct from Pontic (although some of the villages surrounding Mariupol, like Makedonovka and Anadol’, are in fact Pontic-speaking); it is somewhat less divergent from Standard Greek, but if it’s mutually intelligible with Standard Greek, it’s only barely.
Did the ancient Greeks have to or were commanded to love their gods?
I humbly thank Amy Dakin for her A2A, but I am a dunce as to Ancient Greek religion. I’ll note one odd thing though.
I’m not sure of this one thing, and I’m happy to be shown to be wrong.
In a few questions, I tackled the question of “what’s with the meaning of agape”, by going to the Diccionario Griego–Español as Ground Zero for the latest definitions not overly coloured by Christian theology. See Nick Nicholas’ answer to In the New Testament, what different semantic shades can the verb agapao (“love”) take?
Now, I noticed an odd thing with agape. It could be directed to pagan deities or the Christian deity; but as a noun, it is not attested before the Koine; and in particular, it is addressed towards “Oriental” or Egyptian deities, rather than native Greek or Roman deities. The verb agapaō is also plentifully applied to God in the Septuagint.
And in fact, the nominalisation agape itself is no earlier than the Septuagint.
Now, this could be coincidence, and I’m happy to be corrected; but I don’t see clear evidence that the Ancients used either agapaō or phileō (or philia) to refer to their attitude toward the Gods. On the contrary, I see Aristotle, Topica 105a, pose the question “whether or not one should honour (τιμᾶν) the gods and love (ἀγαπᾶν) one’s parents”.
My suspicion, then, based on superficial knowledge, is that the Greek gods inspired awe or reverence, but not love; that feeling love towards a god was a Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian thing.
Which variant of Greek is being used in Alexandros Pallis’ translation of the Iliad?
Original wording: Which dialect (hesitate to call it that) of Greek is being used in this translation of the Iliad?
You do well, my synonomatos [fellow Nick], to hesitate: “dialect” is not quite the right thing to call it.
This is the 1904 translation of the Iliad by Alexandros Pallis. A Liverpudlian Greek like our very own Kelley Spartiatis.
What would you call it? If you’re talking to Greeks, Psycharist Demotic. You could call it Longhair Demotic or Extreme Demotic; but then I’d have to slap you.
If you’re not talking to Greeks, Early Demotic. Where Demotic Greek is not the vernacular of Modern Greece per se, but the codification of vernacular Greek as a standard language.
When people were initially writing in the vernacular in the 19th century, they were just writing in their dialect; you can say that of the Ionian island writers such as Solomos and Polylas.
The first generation of demoticists, advocates for the vernacular as the basis for the standard language of Greece, were led by Ioannis Psycharis. The language he advocated for was purist, in that he rejected morphological and phonetic compromises with the archaic norm Katharevousa. And in that first iteration of a written normalised vernacular (dismissed by the establishment as “longhair”, the same way the later hippies were), Psycharis and his followers took the opportunity to do some orthographical simplification, making spelling more phonetic. Which is what you’re seeing in the translation.
I wouldn’t sneer. The spelling of the vernacular took a while to settle down; and there has been a resurgence of phonetic simplification in the last few decades. I was taught τραίνο and αυγό, for example. I’m pretty sure you were taught τρένο and αβγό. And Nick Nicholas’ answer to How is “o po po” written in Greek?
The next generation’s version of Demotic, led by Triantafyllidis and Tzartzanos, is the version that prevailed (more or less). It made a lot more concessions to Katharevousa, and Psycharis dismissed it with his magnificently Demotic word for “half-way”, μεσοβέζικη. But Psycharis was in Paris and Pallis was in Liverpool; Triantafyllidis and Tzartzanos were in Greece, writing the school textbooks, and they had a much better sense of what was feasible within Greece.
While standard demotic did not go the way Psycharis had hoped, literary Demotic stayed closer to the rural ideal for another generation; it was only after WWII that literature made itself comfortable in what was an urban language. So if you read Greek literature from 1900 through 1950, Pallis’ translation should not sound utterly alien, though it will sound like it has the folksy dial up to 11.
Hence the second declension modernisation of Apollo and Agamemnon as Απόλλος and Αγαμέμνος, the phonetic spelling of the genitive of Leto as Λητός, the now dialectal (and metrically convenient) plural genitive οπλαρχηγώνε, the phonetic spelling of “two” as διο and “that” as αφτός.
There’s a little bit of awkwardness in the versification, but I like it.
If is correct,what a Quoran wrote,that Ottomans saved Orthodox from Catholics,its not better to add,that they saved also antiquities of Greece,from the same people?
Well, let’s put it this way: I don’t know of many instances when the Ottomans destroyed Greek antiquities. I do know of instances when Catholics did. Including the bombing of the Parthenon by the Venetians, and that nutter French monk who went and leveled Sparta: Greek treasures destroyed and stolen by Michele Fourmont; Michel Fourmont.
Destruction of cultural heritage. Not just a Wahhabi thing.
I know nouns and verbs can have declension and conjugation, but is there something similar for adjectives and adverbs, in varying languages?
In languages where adjectives are inflected for case, number or gender, they are indeed considered to be declined. Note that the distinction between nouns and adjectives is not particularly old: it’s 18th century.
In the traditional grammar I know, adverbs are considered indeclinable by definition. They don’t have number, case, or person. So they are not considered to have declension.
In reality, adverbs certainly have morphemes indicating degree, and in many languages they can have case or number morphemes. (In ancient Greek, those are locatives: they are syntactically adverbs, but historically they are nouns with unproductive affixes.) But there has been no tradition in the West of running through all the morphological variants of an adverb, the way they do for nouns.
How do I join Latin and Greek base words to form a new word for a lover of jewelry?
As others have said: mixing Latin and Greek is no longer a problem; mixing English and Greek is not that much of a problem, as you can see in Category:English words suffixed with -phile
I admit: I find brandophile, a lover of brands, and foodophile, horrible (foodophile? really?). And computerphile is way too close to computer file. But I don’t have a serious objection to chocophile.
I turn my nose up at dogophile too; but is cynophile really better?
Latin–Greek hybrids though? Like paganophile or raptophile? No problem.
So, gemmophile. I disagree with Alberto Yagos: where would the –is in gemmisphile come from? And even if most of us don’t pronounce the double -mm- in gemmophile, it is there.
If you do want to go full Greek… well, make sure you do: raptophile is a pleasant word for an unpleasant condition (getting your rocks off from rape), but the fully Greek biastophile is unpleasant all round. (And wrong: it’s getting your rocks off from rapists. It should have been biasmophile.)
OK, enough preamble.
I don’t know (Ancient) Greek: I know how to look up Ancient Greek. And I assume that the Modern Greek word is wrong by default. kosmēma means jewellery now, but its original meaning is “decoration, adornment”, and it mainly referred to ornaments on dresses. Cosmematophile is also too close to cosmetics (stuff that you decorate yourself with).
kosmēma is derivted from kosmos, but the ambiguity of kosmos makes cosmophile a no-go. (Kosmos “order”, hence both “something that looks orderly, i.e. beautiful” and “order in the world = the world itself”.) And unsurprisingly, cosmophile has been used to mean cosmopolitan already.
A gemstone could be a lithos, but that is a stone in general. And lithophile is already used in chemistry: “stone-loving” metals are “elements which are commonly found as silicates and are supposed to have concentrated in the outermost zone when the earth was molten” (OED)
A gemstone could be a sphragis, though that is primarily a seal. Woodhouse’s reverse dictionary is not much better for jewellery or ornaments: Woodhouse’s English-Greek Dictionary Page Image; Woodhouse’s English-Greek Dictionary Page Image.
If you’re going the gemstone route, I’d actually go back to Latin, and do lapidophile. Lapis is ambiguous between stone and precious stone, like lithos is; but lapid– is slightly more associated with precious stones in English than litho– is: lapidary.
… or just gemmophile, which is at least not ambiguous. We already have gemmiferous and gemmosity.
Do ancient languages have an equivalent word to “cool”?
Do modern languages have an equivalent word to “cool”?
Cool is a peculiarly Modern American artefact, celebrating at first emotional detachment, and then the chic of youth, and being up to date with fashion and other trends. The Esperanto rendering of cool (Mark A. Mandel’s answer to What is the word for “cool” in your language?) is spectacularly uncool–it’s the acronym of “Modern Youth Style”; but it at least hints at the beginning of the meaning.
But like I say, even other modern languages struggle with coming up with equivalents to the word: it is very entrenched in a particular cultural context. Even the pre-1950s equivalents within English, enumerated in What was the word for cool before cool?, don’t sound quite the same.
So sure, Latin would have had a word for fashionable, or fashion-mongering, or maybe even chic. But are those words the same as cool?
What are some funny Greek swear words that are not offensive?
This question has been sitting lonely in my in-queue for a very very long time.
In order to address it, I have seen fit to google a couple of funny swear words, and I came across this delightful thread: melontikos ploiarxos . Someone on that education forum was graduating from a maritime college, and asking what he might do next. A respondent made fun of his choice of career. The torrent of invective that ensued was quite intense, but amusingly it was not scatological or blasphemous (the forum is in fact censored); so it likely fits the bill that OP was asking for.
I excerpt the invective:
A: Δεν σε πήραν χαμπάρη στην σχολή τι βλήμα είσαι: Noone in the school has cottoned on to how much of a missile [= idiot] you are
B: ΠΟΙΟ ΝΟΜΙΖΕΙΣ ΟΤΙ ΕΙΣΑΙ ΡΕ ΚΑΡΑΓΚΙΟΖΗ. ΛΕΓΕ ΡΕ ΧΛΕΜΠΟΝΙΑΡΗ: Who do you think you are, you Karagiozis [hero of shadow puppetry = clown]? Speak up, melon-face [= someone yellow as a melon = a consumptive].
ΓΙΑ ΠΟΙΟ ΛΟΓΟ ΤΟ ΚΑΝΕΙΣ ΜΩΡΗ ΞΕΦΤΥΛΙΣΜΕΝΗ ΓΑΛΟΤΣΑ ΤΟΥ ΚΕΡΑΤΑ: Why would you do that, you goddamned humiliated gumshoe of a cuckold [lit. horned man: generic intensifier]
C: ΚΑΤΑΛΛΑΒΕΣ ΡΕ ΜΠΑΓΛΑΜΑ ΓΙΑΤΙ ΣΤΗΝ ΕΙΠΕ Ο ΑΛΛΟΣ, ΕΝΑΣ ΒΟΘΡΟΣ ΕΙΣΑΙ ΚΑΙ ΤΙΠΟΤΕ ΑΛΛΟ ΤΕΝΕΚΕ Ε ΤΕΝΕΚΕ: Do you understand, you Bağlama [small stringed instrument = someone worthless] why the other guy yelled at you? You are nothing but a sewer. You tin can—you hear me? Tin can!
ΜΑΘΕ ΟΡΘΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ ΠΟΥ ΘΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΜΕΤΑΠΤΥΧΙΑΚΟ ΣΚΟΥΠΙΔΙ ΕΛΕΙΝΕ ΚΑΙ ΤΡΙΣΑΘΛΙΕ: Learn how to spell! And you want to do a postgrad degree! You piece of garbage, miserable, and thrice-wretched.
B: AKOY KARAGIOZI MIN MOY TO PEZEIS TORA ME DAFORETIKO ONOMA AJAKOLOYTEIS NA EISAI TRISATLIOS KARIOLIS: Listen, Karagiozis [clown], don’t start pretending now you have a different name [hypothesis: A = C], you continue to be a thrice-wretched wooden bed [euphemism for whore; from carriola, which in Italian now means wheelbarrow].
(Btw, the spelling of everyone on the thread is atrocious. Including C. And for that matter B, which is quite a feat considering his response was in Roman characters.)
Anarchist Graffiti: “Agennst Boorzhwa Awrthografee”