To give a pragmatics answer to why you would use either a conditional model or a present model in questions, to begin with: In many cultures, and English is one, indirect requests are considered more polite than direct requests. An indirect request implies a direct request, but it gives the listener the (fictional) option of […]
The outlier dialects, Tsakonian, Pontic, Cappadocian, Mariupolitan: not mutually intelligible, with Tsakonian clearly the furthest away. In terms of the Swadesh list (100 words), Tsakonian has 70% in common with Standard Greek. Cretan and Cypriot both have 89% words in the Swadesh-100. With dialect attrition, there are versions of Cypriot and Cretan that Athenians can […]
Because /j/ (English y) is a palatal phoneme, and palatals are historically unstable. (See for example Nick Nicholas’ answer to Linguistics: In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?) Rob Kerr’s answer is correct in principle, but the variation between German, English, French, […]
Kudos to Achilleas for his comprehensive answer, and for pointing out something unfamiliar to the contemporary Anglosphere: plenty of musical traditions, like Greece, don’t require singers to be songwriters for them to have credibility. In fact, not only songwriters, but lyricists distinct from songwriters have a high profile—something I find cool, but which went out […]
A major characteristic of Cavafy which does *not* come across in the most popular translation (Sherrard & Keeley’s) is the linguistic eclectisism, which adds to the overall feeling of restraint and detachment. Especially when everyone else writing in Greek at the time was idolising the Volkisch ideal of Demotic, his playful alternation of contemporary slang […]
Crete and Greek Macedonia in 1923, by the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Done by expulsions of the kind currently frowned upon (Ethnic cleansing), but which happened quite a bit after both WWI and WWII. On the Greek side, at least, the process appears to have been relatively orderly. Well, as orderly as that […]
Greek linguists at the time mostly did German, and some did French. Of the main antagonists, Psichari only wrote in French—but then again, he lived in France. Hatzidakis mostly wrote in German, though he could write in French if he had to. When I was studying in Greece, I heard distant echoes of a “German […]
Cutting to the chase: The default answer is that English words are spelled differently because they used to be pronounced differently, just before English spelling was fixed in aspic with the invention of printing (inconveniently timed to partway through the Great English Vowel Shift). In Late Middle English, there was [ðeːɹ], which is not a […]
Greece Greeks about Greek Cypriots: * They talk funny.* They drive on the wrong side of the road.* They forget to mention them a lot of the time. (I’ve done that myself in a Quora answer.) See America–Canada, Australia–N.Z., etc. Greek Cypriots about Greece Greeks: * They talk like penpushers. (Because they speak standard Greek. […]
This graphic from Varieties of Modern Greek has been used around here before: The main difference is phonological. It’s one difference, but it’s a doozy (purple line): unstressed /e, o/ are raised to /i, u/, and unstressed /i, u/ are deleted. That makes Northern Greek sound at best silly to Southern Greeks (though their attempts […]