Greek. Ζήτω! Zito! Now, have I ever written a Quora post on how you say something in Greek, without a detailed disquisition on etymology and alternate expressions? I won’t this time either. Zito! is a third person imperative of zo, “to live”: so “may he live!” The third person imperative would certainly have died out […]
There was a taboo on saying YHWH out loud in Hebrew, and that extended to other languages; so yes, the Septuagint rendered YHWH as Kyrios, the Lord, just as Jehovah (when Christians rediscovered YHWH) comes from YHWH with the vowels of Adonai. Now, Jehovah has come into Modern Greek as Ιεχωβάς, /iexovas/. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for […]
It’s a genuinely difficult phoneme to articulate. Back in the 80s, when the Guinness Book of Records was more than a picture book, it was listed as the most difficult to acquire—kids are supposed not to pick it up until they’re 7, and our own Zeibura S. Kathau says they have cram schools for it. […]
Brian Collins says “Probably because the protolanguage did not distinguish between those forms.” Actually, Brian has sketched the answer in his response, but the foregoing isn’t quite it. Indo-European languages often use notions of “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early” interchangably. The Ancient Greek for “tomorrow”, aurion, is cognate to the Lithuanian aušrà “dawn”; and the Ancient […]
I’m not going to do this question justice. Phonological differences in the dialect that carry across to the accent: Lots of /n/s that have dropped off in standard Greek, and longer [n]s than in standard Greek. So it sounds nasal: not French, nasal vowel nasal, but lots of nnnns nasal. The Greek counterpart of the […]
I no longer follow Greek politics for the same reason I stopped following US politics: too depressing. I refer you however to the Greek version of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”, as I have illustrated here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean? I […]
https://youtu.be/iJZxmfhcSn0 Originally Answered: What does Turkish sound like to foreigners? Like French with a /ɯ/ in it. I was about to say “and without the annoying mumbling”; but, having been to Istanbul: Like French with a /ɯ/ in it. I do actually like the sound of it. (Although as a Greek I’m not allowed to […]
Allow me to write a more general answer. The phonotactics of a language, and the conventions of its spelling, can lead speakers to expect letters to be pronounced differently in different contexts—for example, at the start or at the end of a word. Truncation, in words like (re)frig(erator), takes a sound from the start or […]
Traditionally in Europe: religion. As a more general answer than religion, which covers the other answers here: culture. Scripts comes from a particular culture, and adherents of that culture adopt that script. If speakers of the same language belong to different cultures, they use different scripts. If there is a massive cultural shift in the […]
Modern Greek: like everyone else said, ηθοποιός. In Ancient Greek this meant “character-building”. The modern meaning came about because plays can be character building, I suppose, but I can’t find out when the meaning shift happened. Pretty sure it’s very recent. The word is from katharevousa. The old vernacular word is θεατρίνος, which is still […]