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Day: June 6, 2017

What obstacles will I run into transitioning from Attic to Koine Greek?

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Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

Like Michael Masiello said, no real obstacles: things are simpler. There will be fewer Attic futures and Attic second declensions. In fact, they were historically called Attic not because they were alien to Doric (Doric loved the “Attic” future), but because they were alien to Koine. So λαός, σκανδαλίσω, not λεώς, σκανδαλιῶ. Some Latin loan […]

Is it possible to shorten the ordinal numbers in modern Greek?

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Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Writing Systems

The traditional way of doing that is to use a Greek numeral; you could use them indiscriminately for ordinals, cardinals, and in antiquity even multiplicatives. So World War II, Henry VIII: Βʹ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Ηʹ, which are in fact read out loud as Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Όγδοος, with ordinals and not […]

Do Greeks have more in common with the Turks than they do with the French or Germans?

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Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

For much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Greek identity was a tug of war between a Romaic and a Hellenic construct, between an identification with Ancient Greece via Western Europe (or vice versa), and the folk culture informed by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. The Hellenes have won, but that victory is fairly recent. […]

Are there any features, besides vocabulary, of human languages that only appeared relatively recently?

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Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Written registers are a reasonably recent thing in human language, so the peculiarities of written language would qualify as innovations. The catch is, the characteristics of written language I can think of are matters of degree, rather than categorical differences from spoken language. But they include things like syntactic complexity, anaphora referring back a long […]

Are speakers of non-standard languages discouraged from using the web?

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Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

The bulk of material on the Web, like the bulk of written material in general, is in standardised forms of languages. If you know the standardised form of your language, or the official language of your country, you can access the Web as well. And if you’ve gone to school at all, then you know […]

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