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Category: Modern Greek
What are some of the strangest loanwords in your language?
For Modern Greek: parea ‘group of people hanging out socially’. Either our solitary Catalan loan, or one of our few Ladino loans, from parea (Spanish pareja) ‘couple’. The Catalan etymology is seductive, as it involves the Catalan Company, a parea marauding the Greek countryside. tsonta ‘porn film’. From Venetian zonta ‘joined on’ (Italian giunta); originally […]
Which Turkish words adopted by the languages in the Ottoman territories have been most grammatically productive (in those languages)?
I’m not proud to bring up puşt “bottom, male homosexual on the receiving end of anal sex, faggot”, because homophobia is not something to be proud of. But the word has certainly been productive in Greek, as you might expect of an insult. From the Triantafyllidis Dictionary: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής pustis ‘faggot’ (used as […]
Does βαμπίρ have female and plural forms in modern Greek?
Being a foreign word ending in a non-Greek ending, there is no plural. In Modern Greek, if a noun ends in something other than a vowel or sigma, it can’t be declined. (Nu is archaic; rho xi psi even more so.) So το βαμπίρ, τα βαμπίρ. I see that at least one person online has […]
How are the clusters “μψ” and “γξ” pronounced in Modern Greek?
Modern Greek has nasal Sandhi. That means that following a word ending in /n/, any voiceless stop is voiced. (And in the case of /ks/ and /ps/, so is the following /s/.) The /n/ in turn assimilates in place of articulation to what follows. So: patera “father”, san patera [sam batera] “like a father” keo […]
Are βαμπιρ and βρικόλακας the same word in modern Greek?
As other answers have pointed out, the vrikolakas is an indigenous Greek creature rising from the grave, with its own mythology, which is only somewhat similar with that of the vampire. Andreas Karkavitsas‘ harrowing novella The Beggar (1897) depicts the associated superstitions in detail. When I was a kid, as far as I remember, the […]
How to say transgender in Greek
In A cis lament for the Greek language, I posted on the difficulties of rendering transgender and intersex in Greek. The solution I reported there seems not to have been the settled solution. I did some further reading since, and this is an expanded version on the challenges that were involved. The first challenge to […]
Do Greeks have more in common with the Turks than they do with the French or Germans?
For much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Greek identity was a tug of war between a Romaic and a Hellenic construct, between an identification with Ancient Greece via Western Europe (or vice versa), and the folk culture informed by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. The Hellenes have won, but that victory is fairly recent. […]
Is it possible to shorten the ordinal numbers in modern Greek?
The traditional way of doing that is to use a Greek numeral; you could use them indiscriminately for ordinals, cardinals, and in antiquity even multiplicatives. So World War II, Henry VIII: Βʹ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Ηʹ, which are in fact read out loud as Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Όγδοος, with ordinals and not […]
Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes?
Evangelos Lolos’ answer to Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes? gives the prominent Latin affixes of Modern Greek. No, I’m not going to cite them here. You’re going to have to go over there and upvote him yourself. The suffixes Evangelos quotes are vernacular; they aren’t part of the whole apparatus of […]
A cis lament for the Greek language
Today, I felt sad for the Greek language. As I was describing on Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does modern Greek still have Latin prefixes and suffixes?, Greek has withstood the pressure to make like the Western languages for millennia. Oh, the common folk borrowed words from Latin and Turkish and Italian and Albanian, but scholarly […]