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 […]
Diadochi: The Diadochi (/daɪˈædəkaɪ/; plural of Latin Diadochus, from Greek: Διάδοχοι, Diádokhoi, “successors”) were the rival generals, families and friends of Alexander the Great who fought for control over his empire after his death in 323 BC. The Wars of the Diadochi mark the beginning of the Hellenistic period. … How many successors? Five Diadochi […]
Let me try to unpack OP’s question. The Tarantella, known in Salento as pizzica, is a dance associated with a hysterical condition known as Tarantism (supposedly triggered by a tarantula bite). A couple of scholars have speculated that tarantism is a survival of Ancient Greek bacchanalian rites, which were driven underground by the Roman senate. […]
Not that I know, but there’s a region of the South that does a stereotypically Canadian thing. The stereotypically Canadian thing is Canadian raising: pronouncing the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ as /ɐɪ/ and /ɐʊ/ before voiceless consonants. It’s the thing that Americans make fun of, by saying Canadians say aboot instead of about. Canadian raising […]
Thank you Google RAWOHIPOEN SOEGENG. As Daniel Lindsäth pointed out, SOEGENG is Indonesian. When you google SOEGENG, you get Sugeng, which reminds me that Indonesian used to be spelled more Dutch than it is now, including using oe. I also realised that the SOEGENG comes first, the writing forms an arc. SOEGENG RAWOH IPOEN. Switch […]
So… lemme get this straight. A guy who was worked for Google Translate is A2A’ing someone who did a couple of graduate courses on Machine Translation 20 years ago? Once again, Adam, you flatter me. We agree, and I defer to your superior expertise; I’ll just, eh, restate what you said. Machine Translation is AI-hard: […]
I can’t count Esperanto, since I have already been fluent in it. Nor Klingon, ditto. Nor Lojban, ditto. So let me go through the others, and say why or why not I’d like to learn it, if I was 20 again, back when I had the free time. Ranking from less to more. Láadan. Pfft. […]
Like Vasilios Danias said, archery would have died out in Crete when rifles came to town; the point of archery, after all, was hunting. And Cretans sure love their rifles now, as Dimitra Triantafyllidou illustrates. But there’s ample evidence of archery used in hunting during Venetian rule, when guns were but new (and presumably not […]
1960 in the question certainly alludes to Istanbul Greeks. There has been minimal attention paid to the dialect of Constantinople/Istanbul, because it was an urban dialect, and historical linguists were interested in the countryside, as more archaic material: Constantinople itself had all unstressed vowels, like Southern Greece, and unlike the villagers of Thrace, who reduced […]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham_issue?wprov=sfsi1 What do I know about Çamëria/Τσαμουριά? Less than Dimitris Almyrantis, but still, I assume, more than most Greeks: I looked into the ethnic mix of the Balkans for my thesis in dialectology, since I needed to know where Greek was natively spoken. I’ll add a couple of curios: The Tsamiko is one of the […]