Subscribe to Blog via Email
Archive:
Month: March 2010
Soviet Orthography of Greek
I’m working on a post on the Greek language politics of the USSR, which glancingly mentioned the spelling reform that took place there in 1925. Because it’s a topic that deserves to be presented separately, I’ll put it in a separate blog post. The material isn’t mine, it’s from the blogger Πόντος και Αριστερά (Pontus […]
GTAGE: Screw you and your car jack!
Language and slang.gr advisory Greeks on email have inevitably received at least twice joke emails that feature Greek phrases literally translated into English, to hilarious effect. (For moderate to small values of “hilarious”.) The humour lies in the fact that the Greek phrases are idioms, which cannot be translated literally, or that English and Greek […]
κερητίζειν: Ancient Greek Field Hockey?
A brief note for the Classicists still reading, despite the deluge of very very Late Greek here—to point to a post at Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, jointly researched with commenter π2, on whether the infrequent verb κερητίζειν refers to an Ancient Greek sport similar to field hockey. This has been claimed by the archaeologist Georgios Oikonomos […]
Maximus of Gallipoli: linguistic commentary
I posted an excerpt of the 1638 New Testament translation by Maximus of Gallipoli last week. I’ve been rather busy and will continue to for at least a fortnight, and the promised linguistic commentary on the text has held me up from writing other stuff. Well then, here it is. It’s a lot of information, […]
RIP: Tassos Karanastassis
Tassos A. Karanastassis (Τάσος Καραναστάσης), lecturer at the University of Thessalonica seconded to the Centre for Byzantine Studies, passed away last week, entirely too young. He finished up at the Centre for Byzantine Studies; but for much of his career, from 1980 to 2003, Tassos worked at the Dictionary of Mediaeval Greek Vernacular Literature. The […]
Maximus of Gallipoli, Geneva, 1638: Mark 13:1-22
I’ve been off for a week, and things on this blog have been a little salty-languaged of late (and will get so again: there’s a nice list of slang.gr idioms I’m planning on walking through). To offer some respite from all that, I’m posting an excerpt from the translation of the New Testament into Modern […]
What is the longest word of Online Modern Greek?
I’ve been surveying the longest words of Modern Greek, thanks to a thread at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog. But that’s not the only place long words of Modern Greek can be reported from. I’ve made mention previously of Hellas-L mailing list, which is available publicly as Usenet group bit.listserv.hellas. I dropped off the list […]
What is the longest word of Modern Greek?
When I posted about the longest words of Greek, I didn’t include Modern Greek, because I don’t have ready access to the resources that would give me an answer. A blessing on his house (not for the first time): Nikos Sarantakos put up a post asking for suggestions from his readers. Given how arbitrary word […]
What is the longest word of Sanskrit?
In the post on the longest words of Greek, I mentioned the fact that Sanskrit, as reported in the Guinness Book of Records, has produced a word over twice as long as Aristophanes’ monsterpiece. If any non-agglutinative language was going to best Greek in that regard, it would of course be Sanskrit: a language of […]
γαμο- as prefix, Inflection within compounds, and slang.gr linklove
(Language advisory yet again. Since, on the one hand I will be linking to slang.gr a lot, and on the other I’m guessing some of my readership would rather not see this kind of language, I’m open to suggestions on a more succinct rating system. Extra alert: there’s a reference to blasphemy in this post […]