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Month: April 2016
Cretic Critique I: Game of Thrones
SPOILERS, SEASONS 1–4. This was the Greek YouTube sensation of 2015: Κρητική Κριτική. Two guys recounting current US TV series in Cretan dialect. The conceit is that a Cretan villager is summarising TV shows he watches for his nephew on the phone—but he doesn’t quite get all the subtleties of what’s going on. The Cretic […]
Why is profanity often based on bodily functions or God?
The point of profanity is to break social taboos to demonstrate intensity of emotion. Social taboos are real, so profanity has the desired effect of shock by messing with those taboos. Most societies have strong taboos around religion. Most societies have taboos about excretion, and a lot of societies have taboos about sex. The West […]
How does it feel for a Greek born outside of Greece visiting Greece in the big cities, in the villages or in the islands of Greece in 2015/2016?
Hey, I qualify for that answer. January 2015, on my honeymoon. Was last in Greece 2008. Kinda sullen. My home town (Sitia, Eastern Crete): visibly a lot of shuttered shops. Noone in my extended family gave a crap about politics any more. Still a healthy nightlife and buzz in Salonica; in fact I had a […]
Does the Greek word for obey in Ephesians 6:1 and Colossians 3:20 mean obey without question or is there room for discussion?
Ephesians 6:1: Τὰ τέκνα, ὑπακούετε τοῖς γονεῦσιν ὑμῶν ἐν κυρίῳ, τοῦτο γάρ ἐστιν δίκαιον Colossians 3:20: Τὰ τέκνα, ὑπακούετε τοῖς γονεῦσιν κατὰ πάντα, τοῦτο γὰρ εὐάρεστόν ἐστιν ἐν κυρίῳ Naive answer: certainly in Modern Greek, υπακούω is straight out “obey”. Etymologically it means “under-listen”; and the first gloss given in Liddell–Scott is “hearken, give ear”: […]
How was Biblical Greek pronounced?
What they all said. In the modern-day context it doesn’t matter all that much; in terms of historical reconstruction, you’re trying to pin down jelly, since the pronunciation was in flux during the period, though it seems to have been closer to Modern than Attic (though far from identical). The reconstructions in Greek: A History […]
How do you cheer or say “Hooray!” in your language?
Greek. Ζήτω! Zito! Now, have I ever written a Quora post on how you say something in Greek, without a detailed disquisition on etymology and alternate expressions? I won’t this time either. Zito! is a third person imperative of zo, “to live”: so “may he live!” The third person imperative would certainly have died out […]
What is Yahweh’s name (Hebrew) translated into Ancient Greek?
There was a taboo on saying YHWH out loud in Hebrew, and that extended to other languages; so yes, the Septuagint rendered YHWH as Kyrios, the Lord, just as Jehovah (when Christians rediscovered YHWH) comes from YHWH with the vowels of Adonai. Now, Jehovah has come into Modern Greek as Ιεχωβάς, /iexovas/. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for […]
For what reason is the Czech ř hard to pronounce for most foreigners?
It’s a genuinely difficult phoneme to articulate. Back in the 80s, when the Guinness Book of Records was more than a picture book, it was listed as the most difficult to acquire—kids are supposed not to pick it up until they’re 7, and our own Zeibura S. Kathau says they have cram schools for it. […]
Why do many European languages use the same word for “morning” and “tomorrow”?
Brian Collins says “Probably because the protolanguage did not distinguish between those forms.” Actually, Brian has sketched the answer in his response, but the foregoing isn’t quite it. Indo-European languages often use notions of “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early” interchangably. The Ancient Greek for “tomorrow”, aurion, is cognate to the Lithuanian aušrà “dawn”; and the Ancient […]
What are the differences between cypriot accent and greece accent?
I’m not going to do this question justice. Phonological differences in the dialect that carry across to the accent: Lots of /n/s that have dropped off in standard Greek, and longer [n]s than in standard Greek. So it sounds nasal: not French, nasal vowel nasal, but lots of nnnns nasal. The Greek counterpart of the […]