Yes. Not by the magic of the fact that it is in writing, but by the fact that it has helped immensely in establishing and propagating conservative versions of the language, based on written records, as the most prestigious versions, which are learned in education and emulated in formal registers. Given the time depth of […]
Ah, I see this is the question where all the cool people hang out! Νικόλαος Στεφάνῳ, Δημήτρᾳ, Μιχαήλ, Ἰωακείμ, Βενιαμείν, Ῥοβέρτῳ τε ἐρωτήσαντι, εὗ πράττειν. Related question, with rationales: What are the pros and cons of the Erasmian pronunciation? When I am on my own, I actually mutter Ancient Greek aloud to myself, to try […]
Originally Answered: Why do Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian etc. have masculine and feminine gender for inanimate objects? The history of Indo-European gender, like the history of any language feature, is messy. The mainstream theory is that the feminine, in fact, was originally not animate at all, but came from the abstract and collective suffix […]
Everyone here has spoken well on the topic. Greeks have a keen sense of Other, and skin colour can factor into that. As Dimitra Triantafyllidou says, we have a history of dismissing Gypsies (like much of Europe); and there’s a lot of anti-Pakistani feeling in downtown Athens. But then again, there was a lot of […]
Sofia Mouratidis gave names in current Greek. For jollies, I’m going to give names in Byzantine Greek, which are often quite different: the modern names are mostly from Latin, while the older names were usually from Italian. France: Frandza (now Gallia) Germany: Alamania (now Germania) Austria: Aoustria or Osterigon (now Afstria—which is a spelling pronunciation […]
Partly, source morphology. Partly, mediation via Latin. Partly, particularity of English. Remember first that Classical names in English came in via Latin most of the time. Hence Plato rather than Platon, and Hercules for Heracles. Second, not all final -ns are the same. So there’s no contradiction about Latin keeping the final -n in Xenophon […]
Zavara Katra Nemia, Greek, 1968. The songwriter Yannis Markopoulos was routinely subject to censorship during the Greek Junta, as a left winger. So he wrote a song with nonsense lyrics and lots of 5/8 and 11/8 metre, which got past the censors. And everyone assumed it was against the dictatorship anyway. Zavara katra nemia Zavara […]
Indivisible; literally, uncut. From the verb temnō, to cut; cf. tomē, a cut. Answered 2016-05-14 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-the-Greek-word-atomos/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Thx4A2A, Anon. As my fellows have asked, we’ll need more detail on what you’re asking. I’m going to stab at a related question, which is the legacy of Hellenistic culture. In fact, that might be a good approach to vague questions like this, my fellow respondents: we grab a bit each of the possible answers […]
A novel with mass readership, not in Greek, where you don’t want to alienate readers unnecessarily, and you care to give readers some notion of what it sounds like? Use transliteration rather than original script. Same as if you were putting Hindi (or whatever your language happens to be) into a non-Hindi (or whatever) novel. […]