For all that Greek was spoken in areas of foreign domination, It was the prestige and government language in the East Roman Empire—Latin never had a serious chance of displacing it. It was the acknowledged and prestige language of the Rum millet under the Ottomans—Turkish never had a serious chance of displacing it, except in […]
Like the others said: no. Certainly not the more educated writing, like Paul or Luke. You’d know what was going on, more or less, but you would be liable to be confused, by the syntax or by the false friends. I’ve just gone through an exercise in Nick Nicholas’ answer to How much of a […]
All other things being equal, I’d be heading for a dialect that has had significant literary production (so you can find things to read in Arpitan), and a dialect that still survives to at least some extent (so you can at least theoretically find someone to talk to in it). I’m biased, as my bio […]
Philositos “fond of food, fond of eating” occurs in Plato’s Republic 475c. (It’s ambiguous with “fond of wheat”, which is how it is used in Xenophon.) The related noun philositia “fondness of food” turns up at least in Gregory of Nazianzen. Answered 2016-12-18 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-is-the-ancient-Greek-word-for-love-for-food/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Ancient Greek for scientific discovery, eh? Well, don’t go to Google Translate, man. That’s Modern Greek. Start here instead: English-Greek Dictionary “Discovery” gives us heuresis, aneuresis; mēnysis (disclosure), heurēma and exeurēma (invention, thing discovered). Mēnysis is “messaging”, so it’s not what you’re after. The others are all derived from the verb heuriskō “I find” (as […]
Brian Collins says: Those are the type of questions only a few people like Bob Dixon are willing to touch with a 17ft pole. Only Dixon, may his soul be blackened (or indeed blacklisted)? Surely not. Surely we haven’t run out of functionalists in Australia! Here’s a functionalist take, though it will have some holes […]
David Crystal’s recent book Making a Point has a rundown of the changes and a very clear framework for discussing them. I’m not going to do it justice, especially because I don’t remember every bit of it. But: There has been a tussle in the history of English punctuation from the invention of printing on, […]
Before the Greek War of Independence: the Orthodox Church was hostile to nationalism. Nationalism was this newfangled, godless French thing that set the people against their god-appointed ruler. The Patriarchate was particularly outspoken against it, and described it as a heresy. That’s nationalism. Yes, you can say the Orthodox church helped preserve a notion of […]
Cypriots refer to English pounds, for the simple reason that colloquial Greek refers to English rather than British exclusively. Note that your phrase uses the colloquial εγγλέζικη, rather than the formal αγγλική for “English”. The formation of the United Kingdom never made much of a popular impression on Greeks. In fact even in more formal […]
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0055 Nick, what are you doing responding to this question?! You’re a PhD in Greek linguistics, with 18 years of working at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae! Yes, but I never did formally study Ancient Greek. And I know enough linguistics that I can filter out stuff about Ancient Greek that I’m not supposed to know. […]