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Category: Linguistics
How did the Byzantine Empire named the Mediterranean Sea?
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium confirms John Bard’s answer: As late as the 4th C., the Mediterranean continued to be an “inner sea,” totally surrounded by the territory of the Roman Empire. It was the only sea for Greeks, the esō thalassa [internal sea] (Aristotle) as opposed to the exō thalassa [external sea] or ocean; […]
How would you translate “Ithaca-bound” (as in “sailing towards Ithaca”) into Ancient Greek (Homeric or Attic work)?
Ἰθάκηνδε, which occurs five times in the Odyssey (1.88, 1.163, 11.361, 15.157, 16.322). Answered 2017-08-13 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/How-would-you-translate-Ithaca-bound-as-in-sailing-towards-Ithaca-into-Ancient-Greek-Homeric-or-Attic-work/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What does the ancient Greek word ‘βρουχος’ mean?
Like Riccardo Radici’s answer says: It is a variant of βροῦκος = locust (see: Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Βροῦκος) OP has expanded on his inquiry: Its a word in the Greek Septuagint. Ive seen it translated in 3 different ways: Caterpilar,grasshopper,or lightning. But I have no idea how they came with […]
What is the so-called Greek word Albania/Αλβανιά (derogatory word), and from what does it stem?
There’s a lot of subtle linguistic history going on here. The –ia suffix for names of countries did not get used much in the vernacular of 1800, but when it did, it was pronounced in the vernacular way, as –ja: the vernacular did not tolerate -e– or –i– as a separate syllable before another vowel, […]
How did the Greek name Konstantinos (for short, Kostas) become Gus? It appears that “Dean” is much closer, especially to the Greek Ntinos.
The Greek diaspora often had to translate its unfamiliar names into names the locals found more familiar and/or pronouncable. Hence the long line of people called Athanasios who ended up as Arthur, or Dimitrios who ended up as Jim. Constantine was a peculiar case. As a Latin name, it should have translated into English readily, […]
Why didn’t Modern Greek unify all the ancient Greek dialects? See my comment.
The answer is Niko Vasileas’ answer. I’ll add that koineisation, the merger of dialects into a new norm, happens a lot. Australian English is a dialect koine, for example, and so is the contemporary dialect of London, and so is Early Modern English. They do tend to have a dominant dialect as their basis, typically […]
How much of casually spoken Cypriot Greek conversations can a Greek from Greece understand?
Mutual intelligibility is very, very hard to quantify. There is an exceedingly crude measure, Lexicostatistics, that gets used in underdocumented languages, and that noone would dare used among familiar European languages. For what it’s worth (and it’s not that much), if two lects (= dialect or language, being agnostic about it) diverge in 20 out […]
What are some English/British given names that can survive intact against (cypriot-) Greek vernacular?
Approach 1. You need a name that can straightforwardly inflect in Greek, or that looks like something that straightforwardly inflects. That means a male name ending in -os, -is, -as, or a female name ending in -a, -i, -o. Not a lot of English names do, but you’d be surprised. My uncle Andreas (Andrew) is […]
What did short monophthongal epsilon and omicron sound like in 5th Century BC Attic Greek?
One extrapolation is Modern Greek, which (as Rich Alderson’s answer says) has them as short mid-high tense: [e̞ o̞]. Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca is the authoritative work in English on Ancient Greek pronunciation and the evidence we have for it, and it treats short mid-high tense as the default assumption. It rejects the notion that […]
Are the Trojans in the Homeric Epics portrayed to speak Greek differently than the Achaeans?
There’s no dialectal difference, although I wouldn’t expect one from an epic poem: Homer is not Aristophanes. Of course, the Iliad is not a documentary, and while the poem concedes that the Trojans’ allies did not speak Greek, it’s doubtful that the actual Trojans of 1200 BC spoke Greek either. Trojan language – Wikipedia mentions […]