I’m not sure. Really, I’m not sure. I say that, because the following is speculation that your friend might not welcome. Vavasis Βαβάσης does not have an obvious Greek etymology to me. It may have one, but I can’t discern it. My first guess was that it is a hellenisation of Babasis Μπαμπάσης, which turns […]
Dimitris Sotiropoulos reports in his answer that in some areas of Central Greece, this means “I will go to bed”. The normal meaning of the verb in modern Greek is “to look”, but the current accepted etymology of the verb is indeed from an ancient Greek verb for “to lie down”. This was not always […]
My answer to this is a historical anecdote, but the quite informative answers here do talk about what happened in the 1990s, as well as what’s happening now. The reports now are that Albanians are on the top of the totem pole of immigrant privilege. They are of course still below Western Europeans, who are […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4SzkI4H2U8 Having listened to 6 mins of Sheikh Imran N. Hosein’s lecture, and done some Googling: There is a Hadith that predicts that, in the end times, the “Rum” and Islam will form a truce to fight a common enemy, before they fight each other in Armageddon. To cite the hadith: Conquest of Constantinople You […]
Given the amount of Greek songs that I’ve written about over at Hellenica, of course Greece has produced amazing music. The notion that it hasn’t, which Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer gives, is to me as strange as the question itself seems to be to him. Of course, there’s a catch with the presumption behind this question. […]
I’ve name-checked the Mass of the Beardless Man (Spanos) in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is the dirtiest work of Modern Greek literature? I have been asked to provide a sample, and herewith I oblige. Spanos was written around 1500, in Northern Greece or Constantinople; I’ve noted the speculation by Tassos Karanastassis, that it was […]
Well have both Yiannis Papadopoulos’ answer and Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer put it. Upvote them. Some further supplemental detail, expressed linguisticiously: Salonica Standard Greek is pretty much Athens Standard Greek with a few shibboleths; it’s a situation comparable to Scottish Standard English (such as you’ll hear in Edinburgh)—you’ll hear wee a lot more, and you’ll hear […]
I know of three contenders; and having rebrowsed through one, I’m eliminating it from contention. I am, by the way, extending the definition back to 1000 AD. The contender I have not read (yet) is the only contender from the past century: The Great Eastern, by Greek surrealist Andreas Embirikos. It’s an encyclopaedia of all […]
Yeah. I read his popularisations too back in the day, and they were good. But I’m struggling to think of what he contributed to the discipline. Wikipedia: Mario Pei. He was an old school philologist, I see. And I have all the respect in the world for that. But I suspect that, if you’re not […]
Now, the notion that karpouzi ‘watermelon’ would derive from karpos ‘fruit’ is so preposterous, the only mentions of it you’ll see online are in a comment on a Greek blog article on karpouzi ( Το ελληνικό πεπόνι με τα πολλά ονόματα : “Is it out of the question that karpouzi should be a Rückwanderer? Just […]