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Month: June 2016
In which countries are Greeks not well liked?
Καλώς ήρθες, Αφροδισία! Not many countries now. If you dig into other questions, such as the perennial favourite What do the Balkan nations think of each other? What are the stereotypes? or What do Albanians think of Greeks?, you’ll see there’s some animus in (FYRO) Macedonia and Albania, and a lot less than there used […]
What does Hortalotarsus mean in Latin or Greek?
No explanation offered in the original paper On Hortalotarsus skirtopodus, a new saurischian fossil from Barkly East, Cape Colony, though the author does indicate it was all about the distinctive Tarsus (skeleton) (back of the foot). Nothing in Massospondylus, the accepted family name for the dinosaur. The Spanish Wikipedia on Hortalotarsus offers “tarsus of a […]
What are the earliest documented texts in Albanian?
This came out of an exchange I had with Kelvin Zifla, over at Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why do I experience a profound feeling when I read and understand old writings of my mother language? It involves correcting Wikipedia, though I’m not bothering to just yet. There are three definite oldest attested texts in Albanian. […]
Which area of modern Greece, proceeded in preparation for statehood (independance), that was cancelled, in later stages?
Crete was autonomous, though the Cretans always intended union with Greece as far as I can tell. Samos was autonomous as well, though I have no reason to think they intended statehood. There was a very short lived Provisional Government of Western Thrace, set up in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, to try and […]
If atom is Ancient Greek for uncuttable, what is Ancient Greek for divisible?
Democritus was going with the notion that, if you kept cutting a substance in half (as Dimitra Triantafyllidou explains the verb), an atom is where you got to when you couldn’t split it any more. tmētos and a-tomos are both adjectives derived from different variants of temnō “cut, split”. There is no adjective *tomos “cuttable” […]
How do you translate the word ‘dreamer’ in Greek?
This couldn’t be another Google Translate question from… …. yes! Anon! Strikes again! ονειροπόλος. Which actually originally meant interpreter of dreams. The Triantafyllides dictionary Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής says the meaning switch is via French rêvasseur—which implies, at least, that this Homeric word was reimported into Modern Greek, incorrectly, to fill a gap identified by […]
Why does the Greek alphabet have the letters Xi (ξ) and Psi (ψ)?
So… what did I find when I was looking at the history of the Greek alphabets, in Jeffrey’s monograph? http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… The second problem is that not all the sibilants were present in all the dialects. Most Greek scripts initially avoided xi, and wrote /ks/ as ΧΣ; Jeffery (1990:32) suspects the Ionians held on to it […]
Why does the Greek language sound like Spanish?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MxbBaVK1KKk Originally Answered: Why do Spanish and Greek sound so similar? OP is right, and Joseph Boyle gets it, while Yiannis Tsiolis and Eve Vavilis are in fact being misled by already knowing Greek. (Ditto Laura Hale for already knowing Spanish, porque tiene una mujer española). The question can’t be answered by someone who already […]
What are the benefits of learning Modern Greek?
My superiors in every way, Michael Masiello and Robert Todd, have given you the high-minded reasons to, and I commend them. But whenever someone offers to convert to Judaism, it is a Jew’s duty to try and talk them out of it three times. And in that spirit, I assume that, by asking for benefits, […]
Why do I experience a profound feeling when I read and understand old writings of my mother language?
Oh. This is a fascinating question, Kelvin. And Faleminderit to you, shoku! I don’t get that feeling with Ancient Greek. I don’t get that feeling with Old, Middle, or Early Modern English. I do get a slight feeling of something with Early Modern Greek. Allow me to speculate. A lot of it is missing what […]