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Day: February 7, 2017
What English words of Greek origin don’t sound like they come from Greek?
Glamour, as a Scots mutation of Grammar, from the same Education = Witchcraft equation that gave us Grimoire. Diocese. I had no idea until a month ago that this is just dioikēsis “administration”. For more palatalisation catching me unawares: cemetery from koimētērion. Dram, and for that matter Dirham, as derivatives of drachma. Answered 2017-02-07 [Originally […]
In the globalized digital world, how meaningful is the criteria of geographic proximity to define a sprachbund?
… A very good question, Clarissa! On the one hand, not much, because English is in every household, though the telly and the interwebs. Now, where to find evidence for this? Journalistic Greek is awash with ill-fitting calques from English, and syntactic loans and semantic field readjustments too, because the journalists spend their time reading […]
How are Greek Australians perceived in Australia?
I should know the answer to this, being one of them. But it’s actually reasonably hard to introspect this, especially as the novelty of Greek Australians has long since worn off. I’m going to offer some stereotypes, but as I often do with this kind of question, I’m hoping for someone to step in with […]