Author: Nick Nicholas

Website:
http://www.opoudjis.net
About this author:
Data analyst, Greek linguist

Is the word Synagogue Greek and the word Havra Spanish?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-07 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Thanks to all respondents. As Dimitris said, χάβρα is the colloquial Greek word for synagogue, typically derogatory (unsurprisingly 🙁 ). It is used in two expressions I know of: (Antisemitism alert, with apologies to respondents) 1. As Dimitris also said, χάβρα Ιουδαίων, “a synagogue of the Judaeans”, meaning “confusion, free for all”. Pretty rich, you’d […]

What religion are Greek people?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-05 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

Religion in Greece Which leads to the uncomfortable question, who counts as Greek people. Well, if we leave out migrants from the past couple of generations, and talk about religions of long standing in Greece (using counts from the Wikipedia article linked, which also skip immigrants). The overwhelming majority is Greek Orthodox. 88% of 11 […]

Why does Grecani language not exist in Sicily (Magna Grecia)?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-03 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: History, Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

We know from Salvatore Cusa’s collection of church deeds from Sicily that Greek remained in use in official contexts until at least the 1300s—with the “correctness” of the Greek gradually degrading. We know that the use of Greek in Calabria and Salento steadily declined, with much wider areas using Greek in the 16th century. If […]

What is the relationship between syntagmatic and paradigmatic?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-03 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

They are the two relationships between linguistic elements that define how language works, according to structuralism. They are complementary. The syntagmatic relationship is how linguistic elements can be sequenced. It’s syntax. And morphology. And phonotactics. The paradigmatic relationship is which linguistic elements behave in the same way in syntagmatic relationships. It’s lexicon. And phonetics. And […]

Are there any true Spartans in Greece today?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-03 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: History, Modern Greek

There are two subgroups of Greeks in the general neighbourhood of Sparta, which were isolated from the Greek mainstream for a while, and who speak more archaic variants of Greek. You’ll hear people call them the descendants of Spartans. I don’t think it’s a meaningful thing to say; there’s been a lot of DNA traffic […]

What is one random thing you like about Albania?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-02 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek, Other Languages

The way familiar words (Greek or Turkish) look in Albanian. xham. suxhuk. trëndafill. And the word you just gave me: sufllaqe. Answered 2016-07-02 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-one-random-thing-you-like-about-Albania/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]

Does an equivalent of cursive exist in other alphabets?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-02 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Writing Systems

Greek: there was a cursive modelled after Western cursive in the 19th/20th century. It fell out of use long before computers (I was never taught it in school); I have seen it in letters from the 50s. The main differences to what you might expect: kappa looking like a <u>; pi as an omega with […]

Why do some Australians have accents similar to the English while others sound more like Crocodile Dundee?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-01 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

I’m sure I’ve already answered this more fully elsewhere on Quora, but: The distinction in Australian accents has historically been much more about class than region; the three distinctions identified 50 years ago were Cultivated Australian, General Australian, and Broad Australian. Cultivated Australian was pretty much the same as British Received Pronunciation, except that its […]

What is the variation in the Greek pronunciation of ντ, μπ, γκ?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-01 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

In brief: The prenasalised pronunciation is older, as the spelling shows. There are dialects that prenasalise and ones that lose the preceding nasal. E.g. Cyprus for the former, Crete for the latter. Within Standard Modern Greek, prenasalisation has been associated with Puristic Greek, and un-prenasalised stops are becoming more common in casual speech; there are […]

What does ‘Ζωή μου, σᾶς ἀγαπῶ.’ mean?

By: | Post date: 2016-07-01 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

I’ve actually been puzzled by this myself. I mean, I know the answer, obviously. It’s a politeness plural, patterned after French Vous (and Early Modern English you). And it’s been mainstream in Greek since the 19th century, although Greeks in practice avoid out when they can—because to them it’s much more about distance than respect. […]

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