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Day: August 11, 2017

Why is Greek music being exported so successfully to outside markets like the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East?

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Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

It’s kinda guess work, but this is my thinking on the topic. Musics of adjoining regions have a family resemblance. German music and Greek music don’t have a lot in common. But German music has things in common with Czech music, which has things in common with Hungarian, which has things in common with Romanian, […]

Why didn’t the Greeks convert to Catholicism under the Latin Empire?

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Posted in categories: History, Mediaeval Greek

InB4 Dimitris Almyrantis The good news for you, OP, is that not only have I read up a fair bit on conversions of Greeks to Catholicism or Islam, I’ve even published academically on the subject. The bad news is, I’m familiar with a number of circumstances where Greeks did or didn’t convert, but 13th century […]

What should I do and not do when visiting and praying at the Greek Acropolis?

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Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Culture

Do bring a drink with you. Don’t expect to find cheap drinks in the vicinity. On my latest visit to the Sacred Rock, I said to a vendor at the foot of the hill: —As our ancient ancestors used to say: I’ll have a coke please. The vendor replied. —As our ancient ancestors used to […]

What did short monophthongal epsilon and omicron sound like in 5th Century BC Attic Greek?

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Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

One extrapolation is Modern Greek, which (as Rich Alderson’s answer says) has them as short mid-high tense: [e̞ o̞]. Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca is the authoritative work in English on Ancient Greek pronunciation and the evidence we have for it, and it treats short mid-high tense as the default assumption. It rejects the notion that […]

What are some English/British given names that can survive intact against (cypriot-) Greek vernacular?

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Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Approach 1. You need a name that can straightforwardly inflect in Greek, or that looks like something that straightforwardly inflects. That means a male name ending in -os, -is, -as, or a female name ending in -a, -i, -o. Not a lot of English names do, but you’d be surprised. My uncle Andreas (Andrew) is […]

How much of casually spoken Cypriot Greek conversations can a Greek from Greece understand?

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Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Mutual intelligibility is very, very hard to quantify. There is an exceedingly crude measure, Lexicostatistics, that gets used in underdocumented languages, and that noone would dare used among familiar European languages. For what it’s worth (and it’s not that much), if two lects (= dialect or language, being agnostic about it) diverge in 20 out […]

Are the Trojans in the Homeric Epics portrayed to speak Greek differently than the Achaeans?

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Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

There’s no dialectal difference, although I wouldn’t expect one from an epic poem: Homer is not Aristophanes. Of course, the Iliad is not a documentary, and while the poem concedes that the Trojans’ allies did not speak Greek, it’s doubtful that the actual Trojans of 1200 BC spoke Greek either. Trojan language – Wikipedia mentions […]