Brian is of course correct that naming simply isn’t as stable as, say, the Swadesh-100 list of core vocabulary, or for that matter syntax (VSO, SOV, SVO). Things change much more quickly now than they used to, so you could object to Brian’s example. In English, the most popular names change radically every couple of […]
At first, I thought “oh come on!” Then I thought “hey, I should check.” Now I think “probably not, but it was worth checking”. medical comes ultimately from Latin mederi “to heal, give medical attention to, cure”: Online Etymology Dictionary. In turn, this ultimately derives from the Indo-European stem *med– (Pokorny’s dictionary), “to measure; to […]
Modern Greek has borrowed duzina from Venetian, so that does get used. What is more idiomatic is the suffix –arja added on to tens-words, meaning “approximately”. So ðekarja “around ten”, triantarja “around thirty, thirty-odd”, eksindarja “around sixty, sixty-odd”. [EDIT: correction to hundreds] Also ðjakosarja “two hundred-odd”, triakosarja “three hundred odd”, up to enjakosarja “nine hundred-odd”; […]
Rather than make up an answer, I googled and am posting from the first blog I found: Πότε δεν χρησιμοποιούμε το οριστικό άρθρο the Proper names in Modern Greek always take a definite article. It’s quite rare in English: rivers, families, plural countries. Nouns with generic reference take a definite article in Modern Greek and […]
A follower of one of the Eastern Catholic Churches. These churches are doctrinally Roman Catholic, but their ritual practice is a continuation of Eastern Christian practice (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and the Church of the East). Byzantine Catholic in particular refers to a follower of a church that is doctrinally Catholic, but whose ritual is […]
Self-evidently yes. The population exchanges of 1923 dictated that all Muslims in Greece move to Turkey, with the exception of Thrace, and that all Greek Orthodox in Turkey move to Greece, with the exception of Istanbul, Imbros and Tenedos. In 1923, Crete was part of Greece—though the Muslims of Crete were already fleeing the island […]
Brian is of course right, but I think he’s explained it a bit too quickly. Armed only with Old English grammar and Middle English from Wikipedia, behold the past tenses of verbs in action. I’m only going to pay attention to weak verbs, because that’s the pattern that has prevailed. Old English: Present ic hǣl-e […]
Good question. The English phrase expresses acknowledgement of the interlocutor’s surprise at something the speaker has just said. The Greek idiomatic equivalent, I’d say, is Είδες; “See?” Updated 2016-07-18 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-Modern-Greek-equivalent-of-the-English-phrase-I-know-right/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Ω πω πω. You will also see ωπωπω, and πω πω πω and πωπωπω are more frequent. They’re interjections, so their spacing has not been normalised. The initial ω is so spelled by analogy with ancient Greek ὦ “O!”, though it’s not strictly speaking the same thing. No idea why πω has an omega, maybe […]
As a pronoun, το is the clitic accusative neuter third person pronoun, and it corresponds to “that” or “it”. So, ξέρω “I know”; το ξέρω “I know that”. Which means that, in the first instance, το is not modifying the meaning of a verb; it is completing it by providing an explicit object. You could […]