Πατριαρχικὴ Μεγάλη τοῦ Γένους Σχολή. αωπ.The Patriarchal Great School of the Nation. 1880. (ου is written as the ligature ȣ.) More prosaically, it is now known in English as Phanar Greek Orthodox College, and in Turkish as Özel Fener Rum Lisesi. It was established in 1454 and was the premier institute for schooling of Greek […]
*Looks at profile of OP Tia, hoping for a hint* … You’re Australian, and in fact live on the same train line as me (my wife used to live in Berwick). Well, shit, Teah, that doesn’t help me at all. You’re Australian, so that name could be from anywhere. 🙂 Let’s think. Names ending in […]
Our guesses: Language change is quicker in places where there are a lot of people, lots of social difference, and a lot of traffic. Lots of people generate more random linguistic variation; lots of social difference generates more deliberate linguistic variation; lots of traffic helps idiosyncratic distinctions that one person comes up with propagate. Iceland […]
Only what was in Ctesias’ work Indica (Ctesias). The text only survives in quotations from later authors, and in a summary by Photius: Photius’ excerpt of Ctesias’ Indica It was second hand information: Ctesias worked in the Persian court, and relayed fanciful Persian notions of what India was like. Megasthenes, the first Greek author to […]
Imagine a world in which humans didn’t have Electroreception. None of that electric frisson you get when a predator lurks outside. No ability to use your body as a compass; why, the number of humans that would get lost on hikes! No ability to tell what’s in front of you just by its capacitance or […]
–tōr is an agent suffix: Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges (misscanned) a. The primary suffixes τᾱ, τηρ, τορ, τρο, ευ, denoting the agent or doer of an action, are masculine. … 3. τορ (nom. -τωρ): ῥή-τωρ orator (ἐρέω shall say, ἐρ-, ῥε-), εἴ-ρη-κα have spoken, κτίσ-τωρ founder (κτίζω found, κτιδ-), σημάντωρ commander […]
Most metaphors, we’d like to assume, were new once. (Likely not all of them: cognitive metaphor is tied up with cognition.) Some new metaphors, or figurative speech, or just plain collocations, become popular. Others do not. Some of those popular collocations become so popular, they become entirely conventional and characteristic of a genre. And in […]
Three candidates. Lexical aspect: the distinction between achievement, accomplishment, activity and state it took from Vendler. It’s not inherently inscrutable, but rattling off Vendler’s nomenclature is not the way to make people understand it. The shades of difference between abstractors: nu, du’u, sedu’u, ka, su’u. The distinctions are real, but they are more confusing, and […]
Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”. Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark. You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between […]
Originally Answered: How can you describe the personality of the Greeks? Noone’s biting? InB4 “You can’t stereotype all Greeks”, &c &c Mercurial. Impulsive. There’s an apocryphal Turkish saying (which in fact, I’ve only found in Greek sources—but then again, I haven’t asked Quora): Gâvurun/Yunanın akili sonradan geliyor. Του Ρωμιού η γνώση ύστερα έρχεται. A Greek’s […]