Author: Nick Nicholas

Website:
http://www.opoudjis.net
About this author:
Data analyst, Greek linguist

What do the Greeks think of the Pontic Greeks who converted to Islam?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-29 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

Greeks in recent years have established contact with the Pontic-speaking Muslims of the Of Valley, who remained in Turkey after 1923. (Their autonym for the language, unsurprisingly, is Romeyka.) They are renowned as devout Muslims, prominent in Islamic learning. (One might ruefully speculate that they feel they have something to prove.) Any promotion of the […]

How do I say “I am proud to be a Sufi Muslim” in Koine Greek?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-29 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

I trust, OP, you appreciate the… clashiness of your request. Even if Rumi actually did write some verses in Greek. I guess, καυχῶμαι μουσουλμάνος σουφιστὴς ὤν. You won’t find “Mussulman” in any Koine texts, but you certainly find the adjective in the 12th century. You won’t find “Sufi” in Byzantine Greek either, and Ottoman Greeks […]

Why did Benjamin of Tudela write that the Vlachs in Greece were treating travellers of Jewish origin better? Why did the Vlachs tell him, “that’s because we are cousins”?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-28 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: History, Mediaeval Greek

Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller from Spain, visited Greece around 1170, when the Jews of Greece were all Romaniotes (Greek-speaking). Benjamin’s fellow Sephardic Jews only moved to Greece when they were expelled from Spain, three hundred years later. So whatever was going on, it was not because of any linguistic kinship between the Vlachs’ […]

How is the letter Y (ypsilon) pronounced in modern Greek and how was it pronounced in ancient times?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-28 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek, Modern Greek

Our guesses for Ancient Greek are that it was /u/ in most ancient dialects of Greek, and /y/ (German ü) in Attic. Upsilon was the last letter to change pronunciation in Modern Greek, to /i/. <oi> had also come to be pronounced as /y/ in late Antiquity (they are routinely confused, only with each other, […]

Why is “damn” considered a dirty word while “condemn” is not?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Because, for better or worse, damn is what God does, and condemn is what a judge does. So damn picked up the religious and then blasphemous connotations which condemn never had, which made it much more eligible as a profanity. Profanity is all about the current taboos in society. Answered 2017-05-27 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Why-is-damn-considered-a-dirty-word-while-condemn-is-not/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]

Why do Greek textbooks and paradigm references disagree on pluperfect endings, and how do I determine which are more standard for Attic vs Hellenistic?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=%E1%BC%90%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%BB%CF%8D%CE%BA%CE%B5%CE%B9%CE%BC%CE%B5%CE%BD&amp;amp;la=greek If you want to go digging about this kind of thing, go digging in a German grammar. Dig in something that spends 300 pages on the different variants of verb ending. Kühner–Blass, §213.5. The original Pluperfect Active endings in the singular were -ea, -eas, -ee(n), which contract in Attic regularly to –ē, -ēs, -ein. […]

Who could show me an example of the ending -κειμεν?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek

Well, this is a “late” (i.e. Koine) variant of the 1pl pluperfect active ending -κεμεν, as in “we had untied, ἐλελύ-κεμεν”. So you won’t likely get a Classical form. The earliest instance I find is in Aristotle, Metaphysica 1041a: καίτοι κἂν εἰ μὴ ἑωράκειμεν τὰ ἄστρα, οὐδὲν ἂν ἧττον, οἶμαι, ἦσαν οὐσίαι ἀΐδιοι παρ’ ἃς […]

When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: History, Mediaeval Greek, Other Languages

I’ve put off answering this question for ages, and I’ve finally looked at the classic work on the topic, Vryonis: Decline of Medieval Hellinism in Asia Minor Here’s the quick summary. The Turks came from parts East, in several waves: first the Seljuk Empire, then the various emirates that ended up being incorporated into the […]

The word Ἀρσένιος (Arsenios) is latinized to Arsenius. Does the word θηλυκός (thēlykós) have a latinized form other than femina?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

Bit of a misunderstanding here. The proper name Arsenius, Greek Arsenios (as in Arsenio Hall) is derived from the Greek word for ‘man’, arsen. But it was not the normal word for “masculine”, and LSJ records arsenios meaning “masculine” only once in a third century AD papyrus. The normal word for masculine was arsenikos (seemingly […]

Is it true that most linguists assert Basque has not substantially changed?

By: | Post date: 2017-05-27 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

Not to my knowledge. The late Larry Trask, preeminent vasconist of his time, spent a lot of leisure time refuting inane claims about Basque being related to every language on earth, and part of his armoury as a historical linguist was that such inane efforts made use of modern Basque dictionaries, whereas​ both what we […]

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