Category: Linguistics

I’m not sure. Really, I’m not sure. I say that, because the following is speculation that your friend might not welcome. Vavasis Βαβάσης does not have an obvious Greek etymology to me. It may have one, but I can’t discern it. My first guess was that it is a hellenisation of Babasis Μπαμπάσης, which turns […]

Dimitris Sotiropoulos reports in his answer that in some areas of Central Greece, this means “I will go to bed”. The normal meaning of the verb in modern Greek is “to look”, but the current accepted etymology of the verb is indeed from an ancient Greek verb for “to lie down”. This was not always […]

Well have both Yiannis Papadopoulos’ answer and Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer put it. Upvote them. Some further supplemental detail, expressed linguisticiously: Salonica Standard Greek is pretty much Athens Standard Greek with a few shibboleths; it’s a situation comparable to Scottish Standard English (such as you’ll hear in Edinburgh)—you’ll hear wee a lot more, and you’ll hear […]

Now, the notion that karpouzi ‘watermelon’ would derive from karpos ‘fruit’ is so preposterous, the only mentions of it you’ll see online are in a comment on a Greek blog article on karpouzi ( Το ελληνικό πεπόνι με τα πολλά ονόματα : “Is it out of the question that karpouzi should be a Rückwanderer? Just […]

You know how Quora questions are really just an excuse for us to write interesting stuff? This is how this answer came about. I was reminded of this question, and Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer, when I used the phrase with him today. I went googling, because the account given in his link didn’t sound convincing: it […]

To start with: the default assumption in Greek historical linguistics is that the ancient dialects vanished under the Koine, and that the dialectal diversity of Modern Greek does not owe anything to the dialectal diversity of Ancient Greek. That means that the null hypothesis is that there was no survival of Ancient Greek dialect; and […]

Since 1453? Hm. It’s hard to pin this down, because Greek at the time was a whole bunch of dialects, whose pronunciation we don’t have a good handle on historically—but which was likely stable. (There aren’t any surprises in the Renaissance Latin alphabet transcriptions of Cretan for example.) For that matter, Standard Modern Greek did […]

See also Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer, which this is complementary to. First names in Greece are either (mostly revived) Ancient names, Judaeo-Christian names, or Saints’ names (which end up being either of the first two). There are a few later names (though they are less in vogue now), and some of them can be long, like […]