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Category: Linguistics
Were all books of the New Testament written in perfectly correct Koine Greek?
Revelation is notorious for its grammatical errors; google Revelation and Solecism (fancy Greek for “bad grammar”) or Barbarism (fancy Greek for “L2 Greek”). You’ll see lots of attempts at explaining it, from the straightforward “he barely spoke Greek” to “he was cutting and pasting bits of the Septuagint without adjusting the grammar” to “there’s a […]
What did your language sound like 1,000 years ago?
Greek: 1000 years ago, the language was already Early Modern Greek. Unfortunately, we have very very very few records of the vernacular to sift from, out of the archaic Greek everyone was writing. We have the Bulgarian Greek inscriptions from 1200 years ago, but by 1000 years ago, the Bulgars were using Slavonic. We have […]
What is the best way to learn to speak Greek fluently?
There’s the generic answer: the fine old Greek saying, Η μισή ντροπή δική σου, η άλλη μισή δική τους. “Half the embarrassment is yours, the other half is theirs.” Yes. They will think you sound ridiculous, no fear of that. They will also be hugely impressed (especially if they’re in the Greek diaspora), and will […]
Which formerly Ottoman-occupied peoples understand “s–tir” today?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/siktir OP noted that there were many answers already stashed away under What does Siktir (سیکتیر) means in Persian? I’ll paste here the comments that Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I left there for Greek. Some quite obvious parallels with Albanian and Romanian, as reported by Aziz Dida and Diana Crețu. Nick: In Greek it just means […]
In Koine Greek, what is the difference between the perfect tense and the aorist tense?
Ancient Greek has four past tenses; Modern Greek has two, and an auxiliary formation for the other two. The tenses differ in aspect. The imperfect emphasises that the past action was ongoing or continuous. The perfect emphasises that the past action is now complete. The main reason for doing that is, as Konstantinos Konstantinides points […]
Can modern day Greeks understand and read ancient scriptures in ancient ruins (Like this one?)
Variant of what the others have said. Ruins featuring Roman era Koine? There’ll be some faux amis, but the alphabet shape is recognisable, the grammar and vocabulary you can cope with if you’re educated. Ruins from 500 BC? The alphabet shapes vary from city to city; the ancient dialects can be very different from Attic. […]
What does the Greek word παράκλητος (paráklitos) mean? What was the original Aramaic/Hebrew word?
I’ll add to the other answers there’s a subtle nuance in paráklētos. A nuance so subtle, you’ll most often see it discussed in explanations of paráklētos, and the evidence for the distinction can be shaky. Paráklētos follows the pattern of preposition + verbal adjective; it literally means “by-called” (hence, helper or advocate, some you call […]
What is the etymology of Gylippus? It has to do with horses, but what else?
Γύλιππος (Gýllipos) in Gerhard Köbler’s site is all I get, and all it says is “origin unclear”. It does indeed look like a compound of gyl– and hippos “horse”. There is no gyl– word in attested Greek. There are the diminutives gyl-arion and gyl-iskos referring to kinds of fish; and there is the noun gylios, […]
Could Google Translate maintain a central codex “language” therefore bypassing artifacts that come from English-as-central-language issue?
Google Translate, like many machine translation projects, does not maintain [math]n^2[/math] language pairs when adding languages to its bank; it appears to maintain just n:English mappings—so that a translation from, say, Greek to Persian is pretty clearly via English as an interlanguage. That is a clear scalability issue, if you’re going to maintain the number […]
Does your language misuse grammatical case or gender to make a rhetorical point?
I’m glad you asked, OP. Language is a system, as the structuralists of yore argued. And if there is a paradigm of cases, then people will exploit choices in the paradigm to communicate different kinds of meaning. Even when those choices should be grammatically incorrect. The example I have in mind is from Modern Greek. […]