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Category: Ancient Greek
Are second Aorist tenses in Ancient Greek more frequent that first Aorist?
More frequent? No. But certainly very noticeable! The second and first aorists are equivalents of the strong and weak verbs of Germanic. Strong verbs and second aorists form their past tense by ablaut, vowel change. Weak verb and first aorists form their past tense by suffix. The older pattern is the ablaut; the newer and […]
Why do most people focus on ancient Greek history ignoring the rest of the Greek history?
The West claims its patrimony from the Renaissance West and Mediaeval West. The Mediaeval West claimed its patrimony from Rome. Rome, and the Renaissance West, claimed their cultural patrimony from Ancient Greece. So Ancient Greece matters to the West, because the West regarded itself as the cultural inheritor of Ancient Greece. The Byzantine Empire was […]
What is a fetish for being bitten called?
I draw attention to Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it called when you get aroused by watching people die? as my credentials for answering this. Especially my line: Is not knowing shit about Classical languages a prerequisite for sexologists?! It is, and I’m not finding the bite fetish in Aggrawal’s exorbitantly misspelled listing of […]
How would you translate Rilke’s line “du musst dein Leben ändern” into an appropriate Ancient Greek dialect?
http://www.sporkworld.org/guestartists/picot/rilke.html Ah, Desmond. I wade in where fools fear to tread, but better a fool than noone. The point of the line “You have to change your life” is that the sculpture is so strikingly beautiful, it forces someone to change their life. Well, let’s assemble our building blocks. δεῖ σε τὸν βίον “it is […]
I heard that old languages didn’t have future tense, and that it developed only in younger languages. Is this true? Why would that happen?
We know that the ancient Greek future tense suffix –s– is derived from an Indo-European desiderative suffix –sy-. In other words the suffix that already in Homeric Greek meant “I will” is derived from a suffix that I originally meant “I want to”, and that in fact independently survived in Ancient Greek with that meaning […]
Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language?
Vote #1, Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language? Vote #2, Brian Collins: Brian Collins’ answer to Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language? I’ll add that Linear B […]
Will the 2011 edition of the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon by the TLG ever be published in print?
I no longer work for the TLG, and I didn’t get to speak for the TLG when I did. But while a lot of work over several years went into the TLG redaction of the 1940 LSJ (involving myself among others), that work involved proofreading, corrections to mistagging, typos or misprints in the digitisation (and […]
What English words of Greek origin don’t sound like they come from Greek?
Glamour, as a Scots mutation of Grammar, from the same Education = Witchcraft equation that gave us Grimoire. Diocese. I had no idea until a month ago that this is just dioikēsis “administration”. For more palatalisation catching me unawares: cemetery from koimētērion. Dram, and for that matter Dirham, as derivatives of drachma. Answered 2017-02-07 [Originally […]
What is the etymology of etymology, and is it good etymology or bad etymology?
I think I get your question. Is the etymology of etymology subject to the Etymological fallacy? The etymological fallacy is a genetic fallacy that holds that the present-day meaning of a word or phrase should necessarily be similar to its historical meaning. This is a linguistic misconception, and is sometimes used as a basis for […]
Where did the pronunciation of Ancient Greek (in modern times) come from? Who determined that it should sounds this way and why?
The ball got rolling, as Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching – Wikipedia notes, in the early Renaissance, a generation before Erasmus. Erasmus published the system that prevailed in the West since, and that was a closer approximation of the modern reconstruction than Modern Greek pronunciation was: The study of Greek in the West expanded […]