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Category: Ancient Greek
How different is the syntax of English (in the last three centuries) from those of ancient Greek or katharevousa?
The “last three centuries” gives me pause. Syntactically, there have been changes from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek, and in fact Katharevousa is closer to Modern than Ancient Greek, though it did pick up nesting articles inside articles (“the of the meeting chairperson”). But in the big picture typologically, they’re all pretty similar: free (pragmatically […]
How many words does the Greek language have?
I wrote an extensive set of blog posts in 2009 under Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (read them backwards), trying to deal with this question with a fixed(ish) corpus, that I was responsible for lemmatising: the TLG. It has a whole lot about the distinction between word tokens (individual instances of words), wordforms, and lemmata (dictionary words). It starts […]
What is the timeline of the Greek breathings?
I’ve written a fair bit up about this at http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… . All secondary research, but it’s secondary research that seems to have been cited at Wikipedia. Your timeline is right: There was a distinct heta letter for /h/, which looked like H, but it was not used in all locations. There was an innovation in […]
Ancient Greek: where is a “w” sound used in Greek?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvVWiDsPWQ OK, Nick wading in. Like James Garry and Robert Todd said: the digamma, ϝ, is an archaic letter of Greek, pronounced as /w/. It is present as a sound in Linear B, and it survived into Aeolic, but it did not survive into the other *written* dialects of Greek. We know it was there […]
Is the Ancient Greek contribution to Western civilization overstated?
Whensoever you get a silly-looking premiss, think harder. 🙂 It’s a very good question, Habib le toubib. I mean, in one way, of course not, Western civilisation started with the Greeks, and throughout the renaissance, it kept checking back with the Greeks, to see whether they were Doing It Right. But on the other hand, […]
What are some examples of sentences that can be either Ancient Greek or Modern Greek?
Hm. No participles, no infinitives, no relativisers, no conditionals. Some conjunctions are the same, but you can already see we’re surrendering a lot of syntactic complexity to do this. No future or perfect, no unaccented augments, no datives, no prepositions with genitives (and the rest look different anyway), bits of the 1st and 3rd declensions […]
What are the distorsions in the various (French, German, etc.) versions of the Erasmian Ancient Greek pronunciation?
Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching – Wikipedia Wikipedia enumerates English, French, German, Italian. I’ll list the pronunciations that I would deem wrong from the currently accepted reconstruction of Ancient Greek. I’m not even going to list the traditional distortions of Erasmian in English courtesy of the Great English Vowel Shift, and some bizarre notions […]
Why did the Ancient Greeks refer to Ancient Blacks (the Ethiopians) as ‘blameless’ and ‘favored by the gods’? Also, what does it mean?
(Oh, God, not Afrocentric history, anything but that.) Afrocentric pages online say Diodorus Siculus said: “The Aethiopians (Ethiopians) are high favored with the gods, they were the first of all men created by the gods and were the founders of the Egyptian Civilization.” Diodorus Siculus actually says this: LacusCurtius • Diodorus Siculus Now the Ethiopians, […]
How did the pre-Persian Semitic peoples of the Levant, Assyrian and Babylonian call the Greeks?
As OP clearly knows (by his “pre-Persian” restriction), the main Semitic name for Greeks, Yunan, derives from Persian contact with Ionian Greeks. We know that the Hittites used the term Achiyawa to refer to what we reasonably guess were the Achaeans; that’s contact dating from Mycenaean times. From Greek Contact with the Levant and Mesopotamia […]
What were the musical notes’ names in Ancient Greece?
The notes of the Ancient Greek musical system were organised into tetrachords, groups of four notes. Two tetrachords made an octave. The central octave went: {Hypate, Parhypate, Lichanos, Mese}, {Paramese, Trite, Paranete, Nete} It gets rather more complicated than that; the paramese, for example, is an interstitial note, and the tetrachords keep going above and […]