Ancient Greek verbs. Gotta love ’em. Well, actually, no. Don’t gotta love ’em. So. As Stephen Nelson continues to be thrown by the middle voice, I continue with the series “Ancient Greek Middle Voice: Booooo”, last installment being Nick Nicholas’ answer to Since the active and middle voices of the 2nd aorist forms of “to […]
To confirm what Alberto Yagos said: The best Princeton’s database of Byzantine translations has is Iamblichus’ Life of Pythagoras, or, Pythagoric life, which includes some sentences by Stobaeus. Here’s some bits translated online: The Gentle Exit ” Stobaeus Extracts Sentences and Precepts. By bits, I mean one paragraph. Here’s Roger Pearse, Patristic blogger, asking the […]
I have had conversations in Klingon, including with the guy who was trying to teach his kid to speak in Klingon. (The kid lost interest in it, and I have found a photo of the kid, 15 years later, jumping into a mosh pit. He’s turned out fine. 🙂 The vocabulary admittedly can be a […]
James Garry’s answer to Since the active and middle voices of the 2nd aorist forms of “to stand” are intransitive (ἵστημι – ἔστην vs ἐστάμην), are these forms synonymous? This is the answer to this question. And my thanks, James. What I’m writing here is an answer to a more general question: how much do […]
Originally Answered: How does Plato call Socrates? Of course, we don’t have transcripts by Plato of chats with Socrates, we have dialogues he made up. But Socrates is constantly addressed in Plato’s dialogues as “O Socrates” (ὦ Σώκρατες), with monotonous regularity—over 1200 times in the works of Plato. Socrates in turn addresses his trollees (er, […]
Modern Greek has nasal Sandhi. That means that following a word ending in /n/, any voiceless stop is voiced. (And in the case of /ks/ and /ps/, so is the following /s/.) The /n/ in turn assimilates in place of articulation to what follows. So: patera “father”, san patera [sam batera] “like a father” keo […]
Being a foreign word ending in a non-Greek ending, there is no plural. In Modern Greek, if a noun ends in something other than a vowel or sigma, it can’t be declined. (Nu is archaic; rho xi psi even more so.) So το βαμπίρ, τα βαμπίρ. I see that at least one person online has […]
As other answers have pointed out, the vrikolakas is an indigenous Greek creature rising from the grave, with its own mythology, which is only somewhat similar with that of the vampire. Andreas Karkavitsas‘ harrowing novella The Beggar (1897) depicts the associated superstitions in detail. When I was a kid, as far as I remember, the […]
Because Byzantines did not eat beef as often as Western Europeans did. See Karen Carr’s answer to What was the basic diet like in the Byzantine era (circa 530) under Emperor Justinian and Empress Theoradora? They occasionally ate lamb and mutton, chicken, and pork; rarely beef. Or the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. meat: The […]
In fact, though Rhyme – Wikipedia is very coy and tentative about stating it, there is good evidence that European rhyme originates in Arabic rhyme, via the Andalus; Arabic has used rhyme extensively since the sixth century. There is occasional rhyme in Classical Greek and Latin, but that is an effect, not a structuring principle. […]