Sure. Modern Greek: Πήγε για μαλλί και βγήκε κουρεμένος: He went in to get wool, and came out shorn. Answered 2016-01-07 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Does-the-expression-bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew-translate-to-other-languages/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
I don’t have the answer, but this will help narrow it down: This is not a proverb as such, but is a quotation from a speech by the orator Isocrates. Nicocles, section 9: οὐδὲν τῶν φρονίμως πραττομένων εὑρήσομεν ἀλόγως γιγνόμενον The emphasis out of context is not quite as obvious, because the same word logos […]
No substitute for rote, I’m afraid. But there are patterns and regularities, and you’ll need to make them your friend: If anything looks like a preverb (prepositional prefix), strip it off. It’s usually a safe bet that it is in fact a preverb. The endings do have patterns (the final vowels/consonants, the thematic vowels, the […]
The world is full of joke phobias, and bad Greek renderings of joke phobias at that. There is a special place in hell for the mangling of Greek that is Coulrophobia. If there’s a real phobia associated, it’d be symmetriphobia, fear of matching things in general (though I’m not clear from googling as to whether […]
Because that’s the Modern Greek word for grandmother. 🙂 The Triantafyllidis dictionary gives a shrug for the etymology: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής λ. νηπιακή: γιάγια και μετακ. τόνου για προσαρμ. στα άλλα ανισοσύλλαβα ουσ. Baby talk: yáya and accent shift to adapt to other imparisyllabic nouns Babiniotis’ dictionary gives the same shrug. The motivation is […]
To elaborate on the other answers, malakas does indeed mean “masturbator”, but note that it does not have the same connotation as either American jerk < jerk off or Commonwealth wanker. A jerk and a wanker are both obnoxious, presumably because masturbation is narcissistic. A malakas is a fool, a dupe. (Cartoons will often feature […]
Thank you to Achilleas Vortselas for doing most of the work. The proximate source is possibly the album of Rotting Christ, as he explains. But as the Wikipedia page about the album, Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού, says, the phrase occurs on Jim Morrison’s tombstone: Jim Morrison . (The OP knew this too, if I can […]
Sure, I did. But I’m a linguist, so I don’t count. 🙂 Not that agglutinative/flexional is the same thing as analytic/synthetic, but Esperanto did spoil me for language learning in my teens, and I have read a Turkish grammar just for aesthetic enjoyment. And the most joy in the historical grammar of Greek is tracing […]
There are, not so much rules, but tendencies for why letters are pronounced so crazy-different in different dialects of English, and so differently from Early Middle English. Unfortunately you need to go through a lot of historical phonology to make sense of it. Fortunately Wikipedia has a decent summary of both the historical phonology, and […]
As Toby Williams said, significant in pre-Classical Greece—after all, the Mycenaeans got their writing system from the Minoans, and there are echoes of the old Cretan dominance in the myths around Crete. In Classical times, not much at all. A couple of philosophers (including Epimenides and his paradox), but Crete was a backwater. That continued […]