I wish I was happier with the answer. Went through Smyth and Kühner–Blass. If the -της suffix is applied to a noun, and indicates someone associated with the noun, e.g. ναύ-ς ‘ship’ > ναύ-της ‘sailor’, the stress is penult. If the -της suffix is applied to a verb, and indicates the agent of a verb, […]
Any dictionary of Greek before 1970 is going to be biased towards Katharevousa, and that includes any Greek dictionary you find online (legally). That includes, for example, the 1868 Contopoulos English–Greek dictionary, Νέον λεξικόν ελληνόαγγλικόν. It includes the 15 volume Dimitrakos monsterpiece (not linked, since bootlegged). It also includes any number of Greek–Greek or Greek–French […]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho#Greek There’s a reason Konstantinos Konstantinides never heard of this practice: it had dropped out of use in Modern Greek early in the 20th century. As in fact had the initial rough breathing on rho. The ῤῥ orthography used to be regular in Western typography, but has long since fallen out of use; from memory, […]
Not accepting food and drink from a household you’re visiting. Insisting on paying your own share of the meal (if not taboo, certainly frowned upon: you have to at least pretend to offer to pay for everybody). Failing to use formulaic expressions (“Happy month!” “Happy business!” “May she live long for you!” “With health!” “Life […]
A lot of these are going to be Modern Greek. This included. Nikolaos Politis’ 1914 collection of Greek folk song was defining, not only for Greek folklore studies, but for the formation of Modern Greek identity. Generations learned how to be Greek from the songs published in the collection; and generations missed out on hearing […]
Nederlandia – Vicipaedia Country Name in Latin: Nederlandia or Batavia Name of inhabitants: Batavi or Nederlandenses The Dutch may well want to avoid Batavia these days, but Batavophile is less of a mouthful than Nederlandophile. Marginally more hits on Google too (438 vs 299). Hollandophile has 711 hits, which just shows how insensitive the world […]
This is the aorist imperative active, 2nd person singular, of γιγνώσκω ‘to know’ Alas, γιγνώσκω ‘to know’ is one of the many irregular verbs of Greek. The particular irregularity here is that while its present tense is thematic (a normal -ω verb), it forms its aorist stem γνω- according to the older, athematic paradigm (represented […]
Will you take a “Yes… and No”? 🙂 The Cladistics of biological species was inspired by the cladistics of languages; the cladistics of languages, in turn, was inspired by the cladistics of classical manuscripts. All three fields have similarities. In all three fields, the classical tree model of divergence is an oversimplification; in fact, in […]
Yes, Modern Greek has the noun ρόχαλο or ροχάλα. Etymologically, the word ultimately derives from the Ancient verb ῥέγχω ‘to snore; to snort’. In fact, the corresponding verb in Modern Greek, ροχαλίζω, only means ‘snore’ and not ‘hawk and spit’. ρόχαλο, ροχάλα are a back-formation from ροχαλίζω, just like donate in English is a back-formation […]
This phrase is a false friend. In Modern Greek, it sounds like “eternal hell”. In Modern Greek it would in fact be αιώνια κόλαση: the word order is slightly more fixed, adjectives before feminine nouns must have an -a and not an -o ending, and the third declension has been merged into the first. In […]