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Month: September 2016

In Koine Greek, what is the difference between the perfect tense and the aorist tense?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-30 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

Ancient Greek has four past tenses; Modern Greek has two, and an auxiliary formation for the other two. The tenses differ in aspect. The imperfect emphasises that the past action was ongoing or continuous. The perfect emphasises that the past action is now complete. The main reason for doing that is, as Konstantinos Konstantinides points […]

What does the Greek word παράκλητος (paráklitos) mean? What was the original Aramaic/Hebrew word?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-29 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

I’ll add to the other answers there’s a subtle nuance in paráklētos. A nuance so subtle, you’ll most often see it discussed in explanations of paráklētos, and the evidence for the distinction can be shaky. Paráklētos follows the pattern of preposition + verbal adjective; it literally means “by-called” (hence, helper or advocate, some you call […]

Can modern day Greeks understand and read ancient scriptures in ancient ruins (Like this one?)

By: | Post date: 2016-09-29 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Modern Greek

Variant of what the others have said. Ruins featuring Roman era Koine? There’ll be some faux amis, but the alphabet shape is recognisable, the grammar and vocabulary you can cope with if you’re educated. Ruins from 500 BC? The alphabet shapes vary from city to city; the ancient dialects can be very different from Attic. […]

What is the etymology of Gylippus? It has to do with horses, but what else?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-28 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

Γύλιππος (Gýllipos) in Gerhard Köbler’s site is all I get, and all it says is “origin unclear”. It does indeed look like a compound of gyl– and hippos “horse”. There is no gyl– word in attested Greek. There are the diminutives gyl-arion and gyl-iskos referring to kinds of fish; and there is the noun gylios, […]

Why does “Chinaman” carry a negative, denigrating connotation, while “Englishman” does not?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Thanks to posters, and in particular those I agree with 🙂 — Lee Ballentine, Sng Kok Joon Leonard. Some answers brought up how the word was coined, so I went to the Oxford English Dictionary. As it turns out, the entry for Chinaman has not been updated yet, and Google Books was if anything more […]

What was the profession of 1st Greeks who arrived in Australia and became famous for that?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, History, Modern Greek

You’ve read something somewhere, OP, I can tell, but I’m at a loss about where. The answer, pace Romain Bouchard, is not in Wikipedia, but I don’t remember it. Let me try and reconstruct it. The big Greek migration wave into Australia was in the 1950s–70s. The stereotype was milk bar owner (= grocery story) […]

Does your language misuse grammatical case or gender to make a rhetorical point?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

I’m glad you asked, OP. Language is a system, as the structuralists of yore argued. And if there is a paradigm of cases, then people will exploit choices in the paradigm to communicate different kinds of meaning. Even when those choices should be grammatically incorrect. The example I have in mind is from Modern Greek. […]

Could Google Translate maintain a central codex “language” therefore bypassing artifacts that come from English-as-central-language issue?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Google Translate, like many machine translation projects, does not maintain [math]n^2[/math] language pairs when adding languages to its bank; it appears to maintain just n:English mappings—so that a translation from, say, Greek to Persian is pretty clearly via English as an interlanguage. That is a clear scalability issue, if you’re going to maintain the number […]

Why did the Byzantine record the name of Osman Ghazi as Otoman?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

Here’s some data, from Gyula Moravcsik’s Byzantinoturcica, a dictionary of all Turkic names and words that ended up in Byzantine Greek. The names are in roughly chronological order. Osman is named as: Atman (George Pachymeres, Nicephorus Gregoras) Atouman Atoumanos Atoumanes (Notitiae Chronicae, Chronicon Turcorum) Otmanos Otmanes (Hierax, Chronica Minora) Otoumanos (Chalcocondyles) Othmanos Othman Otthmanos Otthmanes […]

What’s the Latin translation of “Fun or money? (I’ll work for one or the other; optimally, both)”?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Latin, Linguistics

Pro ludo aut pro lucro? Pro alterutro laboro; pro utroque malim. Alberto Yagos? Answered 2016-09-26 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Whats-the-Latin-translation-of-Fun-or-money-Ill-work-for-one-or-the-other-optimally-both-”/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]