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Category: Ancient Greek
What other languages influenced Greek?
In terms of the usual interpretation of the question (what languages did Greek borrow words from), at different times Greek has borrowed words from: Persian (a small number) Latin (a fair few) Slavonic (surprisingly few) Albanian (surprisingly fewer) Aromanian (ditto) Catalan (one word, παρέα < pare(j)a) Romany (very few, although it is the go-to source […]
Why do the names of many Greek letters end in “a”?
The following is intelligent guesswork. In ancient Greek, words were constrained to end in a vowel, /n/ or /s/.The Phoenecian letter names did not fit that pattern, so they were adapted to end in vowels. Of the available vowels, nouns most frequently ended in alpha (neuters or feminines) or eta (feminines). Omega, iota and upsilon […]
How much writing from ancient Greece is preserved? Is it a finite amount that someone could potentially read?
While there are 105 million words in the TLG, most of them are Byzantine. I did a count of the words in the corpus in Lerna VIc: A correction of word form counts in 2009; because there is not massive growth in the number of known ancient texts, the counts still apply. If we define […]
Aeolic θᾶς “until”
This is an RTFM question, and someone must have already worked out the answer to it; but that someone didn’t work out the answer to the question in the 19th century, which would have let me look up the answer easily online. I’m actually halfway hoping that a reader will find the answer in their […]
Sorting of breathings and accents in Unicode
Microsoft’s implementation of Unicode, as a recent post by Michael Kaplan points out, sorts ἒ and ἕ as the same character. In fact, it sorts identically any vowel with acute and rough breathing, and the same vowel with grave and smooth breathing. Why is it so? Allow me to get my geek on. You may […]
The declension of -ευς: Ionic forward to Modern Greek
In the last (but one) post, we worked out a reconstruction of the -ευς declension, to the point that we could explain the Homeric inflections. Where we wanted to get to was not Homer, but Aristophanes’ Attic. But once we have the proto-forms in place, we can use sound change rules and analogy to explain […]
The declension of -ευς: Homeric back to Proto-Greek
I’ve been neglecting Ancient Greek, and I don’t know that my posts on Ancient Greek are particularly quality offerings anyway. But, once again, perusing the comments of the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog has given me an idea for a posting—on Ancient rather than Modern Greek for a change. The post is no surprise to anyone […]
Accent in Ancient compounds
We left off with the tendencies on how to accent words in Ancient and Modern Greek. But our target (or at least, my target) is to work out the rules behind the accent of ξέμαγκας, a compound. Which means we now get to look at the rules for how to accent a compound in Ancient […]
How Greek accentuation works
In a previous post, I accented ΞΕΜΑΓΚΑΣ “the un-mangas, the ex-mangas” as ξεμάγκας. Nikos Sarantakos pointed out the correct accent is ξέμαγκας. I see why that is the correct accent, though it still looks wrong to me. To explain why, I’m going to spend the next few posts building up to this explanation of what […]
Aspiration questions
Nikos Sarantakos raised a few points about my previous post in comments. Rather than give a post-length response in comments, here’s a post-length response as a post: “b) hypercorrection re aspiration has produced some words that managed to get accepted like μέθαύριο or εφέτος.” Why those hypercorrections—”day after tomorrow; this year”, and not others? They’re […]