A capital question. You were right, Zeibura, in the discussion that prompted this: the Balkans is a big mess of not continuously attested languages and dialects; and the only hints of whether a feature originated in one place rather than another is whether the feature is also present in Koine Greek or Old Church Slavonic—both […]
Interesting. Pilafás is a real Greek surname. Googling, the most famous instance of a Pilafas is some businessman’s son cum DJ who’s married the actress Katerina Papoutsaki. Παναγιώτης Πιλαφάς βιογραφικό – iShow.gr Whatevs. Pilafas means, straightforwardly, “Pilaf guy”. and the -as suffix weighs towards “Pilaf maker”. Pilaf, rice in broth, is an exceedingly popular dish […]
The literal calque Fatsovivlio has shown up in Greek, but only in jocular use. (47k hits on Google.) It’s all the more jocular, because it uses the Italian loanword fatsa < faccia, rather than the Greek prosopo, for face. Loanwords are usually pejorative; Fatsovivlio sounds more like “ugly mug book”. SLANG.gr went one better, using […]
Category:Greek fairy tales – Wikipedia Category:Greek folklore – Wikipedia That’s a start. We’ve got Christmas goblins (kalikantzaros), we’ve got vampires (vrykolakas), we’ve got mermaids (gorgona). Fairy tales involve, interchangeably, fairies (neraida), ogres (drakos), and black men (arapis). And saints. My favourite fairy tale rather incongruously involves Jesus Christ. The Blessed Card Deck, from Kephallonia. Let […]
No, thank God. Although there’s some noteworthy continuities in what has survived: the morphology and semantics are pretty much the same. In the indicative: Present: yes. Imperfect: yes. The imperfect shows up in subjunctive contexts, to do the work of the erstwhile optative. Aorist: yes. Future: no. Replaced by a succession of auxiliary formations (μέλλω, […]
The Byzantine navy had already been dissolved in the 1320s; Venice and Genoa ruled the waves. The crown jewels were pawned off in 1343, never to be redeemed. Byzantium had been wracked by civil war for decades; and the civil wars were being fought on behalf of the factions by Serbs and Turks. Gallipoli was […]
Besides the Positive personification of Greece, Athena, there’s also the negative personification of Greece, Ψωροκώσταινα Psorokostena, “Kostas’ Mangy Wife”. In fact the cartoonist Bost (Chrysanthos Mentis Bostantzoglou) in the ’60s drew Psorokostena as a Mangy Athena: Although the contemporary blog Psorokostena has adopted a homelier figure: The story of the historical Kostas’ Mangy Wife is […]
Hello. Neighbour here. I know Greeks’ opinion on this question might not be welcome, but it’s reminded me of a very similar question: Why do Greeks (fairly unanimously) hate the 500 years of Ottoman rule but no hate against Venetian rule which was 400–600 years? You could argue rather convincingly that Venetian rule in the […]
In the world of scholarly consensus, the earliest fragment of a Greek New Testament gospel is Rylands Library Papyrus P52, containing a few lines of the Gospel of John, and dating anywhere between 125 and 170 AD. As one might expect, there’s a lot of controversy around the exact date. It’s a fragment of a […]
Originally Answered: What is the most beautiful written script according to you? Armenian. Not because my wife’s Armenian. She doesn’t speak the language. Not because the alphabet’s well-designed. I think all the letters look the same. In fact, precisely because I think all the letters look the same. The results look like this: Beautifully flowing. […]