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Category: Linguistics
What are the benefits of learning Modern Greek?
My superiors in every way, Michael Masiello and Robert Todd, have given you the high-minded reasons to, and I commend them. But whenever someone offers to convert to Judaism, it is a Jew’s duty to try and talk them out of it three times. And in that spirit, I assume that, by asking for benefits, […]
Are there any dialects of Greek acknowledged to be unintelligible to mainstream Greek within Greece itself?
Now, this is Dimitris Almyrantis asking, so he deserves some politics in his answer! “Acknowledged”? Well put, because mutual intelligibility is often more about identity politics than about communication. As in the cause célèbre of the PM of Macedonia bringing along an interpreter to his meeting with the PM of Bulgaria. Greeks acknowledge idioms where […]
Why do I experience a profound feeling when I read and understand old writings of my mother language?
Oh. This is a fascinating question, Kelvin. And Faleminderit to you, shoku! I don’t get that feeling with Ancient Greek. I don’t get that feeling with Old, Middle, or Early Modern English. I do get a slight feeling of something with Early Modern Greek. Allow me to speculate. A lot of it is missing what […]
Do Greek villages near Albania use Albanian words, just like those in Albania use Greek loanwords?
In brief, yes. First, we need to define “near Albania”. Let’s start with this map from Languages of Greece I’m going to ignore Arvanitika in Central Greece, because that’s nowhere near Albania. I’m going to ignore the Albanian enclaves near Florina, because they were traditionally surrounded by Macedonian Slavonic, rather than Greek. I’m going to […]
How do you say welcome in Greek?
I normally pass on answering these readily Googleable questions, unless I can say something linguistically interesting about them. It’s your lucky day, Anon. Two main ways of rendering “welcome” in Modern Greek. 1. Καλώς ήρθες (singular), καλώς ήρθατε (plural): kalos irθes, kalos irθate. Literally, “well you came”; so it corresponds exactly to English welcome. More […]
Are Greek and Latin roots the only atomic words we know so far from which we can build all the compounded words?
I think what you mean, OP, is: are Graeco-Latin stems the only stems from which compound words can be formed in English. The answer is of course no: there are plenty of compounds in English based on indigenous Germanic words, and there were all the way back to Old English. Statecraft. Breastfeed. Windmill. There was […]
Why have you learned Latin, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit? What aspects of those languages are you fascinated by?
Latin: Opportunity. My uncle’s and aunt’s old Latin textbooks were in my grandfather’s storehouse, and I discovered them when I was 10 (1981). Thinking back, that’s where my love of language started. I read through the grammar, and then went to work translating Cornelius Nepos. I loved the intricacies of the grammar, I guess, but […]
Is there a difference in using the subjunctive “να” vs using “πρέπει να”?
Slight. As with Are να and ας translated identically when used with a first person plural verb in Modern Greek?, it’s mostly a nuance thing: ας φύγουμε: “let’s leave, how about we leave”: pretty weak sauce, gentle prodding πρέπει να φύγουμε: “we must leave”, strong implication that this is an external imposition να φύγουμε: “we […]
Are υπάρχει and είναι used the same way in Modern Greek?
Not quite. In the existential sense that you’re using, είναι ένας άνθρωπος means “it is a man”, and υπάρχει ένας άνθρωπος means “there exists a man”. The latter sounds as formal and logical in Greek as it does in English, though I think it is more widely used than English as an interrogative or negative. […]
Icelandic (language): What is flámæli?
https://www.quora.com/profile/Nick-Nicholas-5 What Lyonel said. I’m away from my references 🙁 , but see North American Icelandic. The story is that Icelanders noticed the merger in the 1920s, stigmatised it as “fisherman’s language”, and got rid of it successfully (although the link says that the e/ö merger is still around). In North America, of course, no […]