Oh. This is a fascinating question, Kelvin. And Faleminderit to you, shoku! I don’t get that feeling with Ancient Greek. I don’t get that feeling with Old, Middle, or Early Modern English. I do get a slight feeling of something with Early Modern Greek. Allow me to speculate. A lot of it is missing what […]
Now, this is Dimitris Almyrantis asking, so he deserves some politics in his answer! “Acknowledged”? Well put, because mutual intelligibility is often more about identity politics than about communication. As in the cause célèbre of the PM of Macedonia bringing along an interpreter to his meeting with the PM of Bulgaria. Greeks acknowledge idioms where […]
I normally pass on answering these readily Googleable questions, unless I can say something linguistically interesting about them. It’s your lucky day, Anon. Two main ways of rendering “welcome” in Modern Greek. 1. Καλώς ήρθες (singular), καλώς ήρθατε (plural): kalos irθes, kalos irθate. Literally, “well you came”; so it corresponds exactly to English welcome. More […]
In brief, yes. First, we need to define “near Albania”. Let’s start with this map from Languages of Greece I’m going to ignore Arvanitika in Central Greece, because that’s nowhere near Albania. I’m going to ignore the Albanian enclaves near Florina, because they were traditionally surrounded by Macedonian Slavonic, rather than Greek. I’m going to […]
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-beautiful-Hebrew-typeface Originally Answered: What is your favourite Greek font, and why? GFS Complutum: Εταιρεία Ελληνικών Τυπογραφικών Στοιχείων There is a Romantic history to Greek typography. The first fifty years of printing started inauspiciously, with poor, crude carved out Greek letters. But they got steadily better, until their apogee in the Complutensian Polyglot Bible of the […]
I think what you mean, OP, is: are Graeco-Latin stems the only stems from which compound words can be formed in English. The answer is of course no: there are plenty of compounds in English based on indigenous Germanic words, and there were all the way back to Old English. Statecraft. Breastfeed. Windmill. There was […]
I wish I knew. This is what I get from the Googles. Francophone Balkans? ‘Outsider’ Membership in La Francophonie and Other Language-Based International Organisations speculates that it’s because French is such a prominent foreign language in Greek education. Which explains why Romania is in the Francophonie. And French was indeed the default foreign language in […]
Latin: Opportunity. My uncle’s and aunt’s old Latin textbooks were in my grandfather’s storehouse, and I discovered them when I was 10 (1981). Thinking back, that’s where my love of language started. I read through the grammar, and then went to work translating Cornelius Nepos. I loved the intricacies of the grammar, I guess, but […]
Slight. As with Are να and ας translated identically when used with a first person plural verb in Modern Greek?, it’s mostly a nuance thing: ας φύγουμε: “let’s leave, how about we leave”: pretty weak sauce, gentle prodding πρέπει να φύγουμε: “we must leave”, strong implication that this is an external imposition να φύγουμε: “we […]
Not quite. In the existential sense that you’re using, είναι ένας άνθρωπος means “it is a man”, and υπάρχει ένας άνθρωπος means “there exists a man”. The latter sounds as formal and logical in Greek as it does in English, though I think it is more widely used than English as an interrogative or negative. […]