You have waited a long time, Hansolophontes, for me to answer this A2A. I did not read any spoilers. I did not read any of the other answers (which may make this look silly this late). I finally watched Arrival last night. Very well made movie: great sense of atmosphere, and fear, and awe. I […]
Minority view here, and I’m astonished noone’s picked up on it. The Modern Greek state was established in 1829; and while Greeks like to think they won the Greek state with their sword, the Greek War of Independence had pretty much been quelled by 1827. It was the Great Powers’ intervention at the Battle of […]
Just to round off what others have said: yes, it is mostly a more vulgar counterpart of the Australian term bastard, and it almost always refers to men rather than women. (The reductionist misogynist use of cunt to refer to women is unknown here. I only discovered it a few years ago) Just like bastard, […]
I am delighted to be A2A’d this question. There has been long-running, nationalistically driven, and tedious argument about how old the Greek dialects spoken in Southern Italy are, with to and fro from Italian linguists and Greek linguists, and with the great Romanist Gerhard Rohlfs kinda weighing in on the Greek side. There is a […]
There’s one hiccup which I’m surprised other respondents have not brought up, Habib le toubib. There are two standard languages of Norway, and a mess of dialects in between. Norway used to be ruled by the Danish. The official language of Norway at the time it gained independence, Bokmål (“Book Language”), has been uncharitably described […]
Practical Roman alphabets do need to stick as close to ASCII as possible. Particularly before computerised typography, getting hold of letters outside the Latin-1 and Latin-2 repertoire (letters and standard diacritics) was painful, and you’d avoid it if you could. So if you had a choice between tʰiantɕʰi pu xao and Tianqi bu hao … […]
As OP clearly knows (by his “pre-Persian” restriction), the main Semitic name for Greeks, Yunan, derives from Persian contact with Ionian Greeks. We know that the Hittites used the term Achiyawa to refer to what we reasonably guess were the Achaeans; that’s contact dating from Mycenaean times. From Greek Contact with the Levant and Mesopotamia […]
Phonemes exist. That’s one of the key findings of 20th century linguistics. Where do they exist? In the Noosphere I guess; but they are mental constructs which underlie not only our articulation of language, but also our mental organisation and understanding of language. So unlike a lot that is in the noosphere, they do have […]
Vote #1 Christopher Kowalewski: That’s the working through of internal reconstruction that you only see the results of in the textbooks. Now, Chad Turner suggests I’d know the answer. God, *I* don’t know the answer. But Sihler does: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Or at least, Sihler knows as much of the answer […]
The notes of the Ancient Greek musical system were organised into tetrachords, groups of four notes. Two tetrachords made an octave. The central octave went: {Hypate, Parhypate, Lichanos, Mese}, {Paramese, Trite, Paranete, Nete} It gets rather more complicated than that; the paramese, for example, is an interstitial note, and the tetrachords keep going above and […]