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Month: July 2017
What are the most important new discoveries that have been made about the ancient world in the 21st Century?
In Greek philology, the biggest finds this century have been: The previously unreadable texts in the Archimedes Palimpsest, that have become readable through a synchrotron, including a couple of new texts by Archimedes, a new speech by Hyperides, and a new commentary on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Transcribed and released in 2008, though only […]
How do Greeks feel about the fall of Constantinople?
I’m somewhat confused by several answers talking about the present day status of Istanbul, or Golden Dawn’s vision of retaking the City. Greeks may continue to refer to Istanbul as Constantinople (except for the Rum that actual live there), but most of them do know the difference between the Byzantine city of yore and the […]
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 […]
Why are so many people today using the word “fuck,” like it’s a common everyday word, and not sparingly, like the vulgar, profane word that it is?
Quite apart from the changing nature what is considered taboo in the English-speaking world, fuck has undergone weakening though overuse, and has lost its potency. It is simply not as profane as it used to be. This inflation of profanity is a linguistic commonplace: 150 years ago, the profanity to avoid in polite company was […]
Which books on Greek and Roman mythology list the most number of mythological characters?
As I am nowadays saying openly, I worked at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for 17 years, 13 which I spent working on word recognition. As a result, I got to know pretty well where all the obscure names were in Greek literature. In the classical Canon, hands down, the Bibliotheca (Pseudo-Apollodorus). Among online resources, THEOI […]
What do sophisticated, neutral, and unsophisticated typefaces from different writing systems look like?
This is not the most sophisticated of answers; but one bugbear of all type designers outside of the Latin script (and Cyrillic, thanks to Peter the Great) is recent font kiddies slavishly copying the design of Latin fonts. Particularly serifs. Type designers in other scripts hate serifs. Serifs are a Latin thing; Peter the Great […]