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Day: July 18, 2017
Why is the “-ic” suffix used much less compared to “-an”,“-ese”,“-ish” suffixes?
For starters, in the West, Greek affixes were used in scholarship, where it was felt they were more nuanced than what Latin had to offer. Suffixes to express ethnicity were felt to be a less rarefied domain, and English and Latin between them had it covered. For seconds, Greek differentiated between suffixes denoting ethnicity, and […]
What are the best Greek Rebetika songs?
Hm. I’m bypassing the obvious answer, Frangosyriani, because that’s a song that in a sense ended the Classic Rebetika period, and marked the start of the taming of the tradition that brought about laika music. Songs that I have a lot of time for myself include: Πέντε Χρόνια Δικασμένος (1934). Music & Lyrics: Vangelis Papazoglou. […]
It’s really amazing how Greek-speaking Muslims in Turkey and Turkish-speaking Christians in Greece got assimilated. How long did it take?
tl;dr: Pre-modern communities took centuries to assimilate, either linguistically or religiously; some didn’t assimilate at all. Modern communities, under the pressure of state nationalism, assimilate within a generation. We don’t have good data on language in Turkey. We know that the religious assimilation of the existing population there seems to have taken something like three […]
Is it true that most of the Greeks in Anatolia and Thrace converted to Islam and became Turks during the Seljuk and Ottoman years?
The received wisdom in academia is yes, although several users here (Dimitris Almyrantis and Dimitra Triantafyllidou) have questioned how feasible this is. The argument made by Speros Vryonis Jr, and summarised in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?, is that any deurbanisation and mass migration happened […]
Does the village of Lapi, presumably in the Messinia province of Greece, still exist?
Ριζοχώρι – Μεσσηνία | Terrabook The village name was Lapi, which was believed to refer to the Lab tribe of Albanians (normally rendered in Greek as Liapis, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a folk etymology). As inevitably happened with most foreign-looking village names, the village was renamed to Rizochori in 1940. The […]