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Category: Modern Greek
What is the word for the thief in the every day language of your country and in the New Testament?
Ancient Greek made a distinction between thieves and robbers: kleptēs vs lēistēs or harpax. Both kleptēs and lēistēs are used in the New Testament; the men crucified with Jesus were lēistai. The Modern Greek vernacular had lost the word lēistēs, and had kept the word kleptēs (as kleftis) to refer to both thieves and robbers. […]
Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country?
To expand on Fey Lepoura’s answer to Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country? Historically, Greece contained a large number of ethnicities, and a large number of distinct cultures to go with those ethnicities: Greek Orthodox Catholic Muslim Turkish Arvanite Albanian (in the Northwest, mostly Muslim, but also Christian) Aromanian Megleno-Romanian Macedonian (Slavonic) Bulgarian Christian Muslim […]
What are the unusual punctuation marks in your language?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language Survey question, and I’m looking forward to someone bringing up the Amharic sarcasm mark. Greek punctuation functionally corresponds to English punctuation—mostly. Upper dot <·> corresponds to semicolon. In Ancient Greek typography, the upper dot is usually also used in the function of the English colon. Modern Greek typography uses the colon. Ancient punctuation had […]
What is the origin of the terms “Bourazeris” and “Vlamis”, obsolete from the 21st century Greek language?
The Triantafyllidis dictionary is online: βλάμης [vlamis] “blood brother” < Albanian vlam: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής. Obsolete, but certainly familiar from rebetiko and later songs. The 1951 song Παλαμάκια is probably the best known instance of the word—or rather, of its feminine vlamissa: μπουραζέρης [burazeris], variant μπραζέρης [brazeris], was not familiar to me, and is […]
Are there similarities between Turkish and Greek Music?
There are underlying similarities between Turkish and Greek music at a deeper level, and there are clear similarities between Greek pop and Turkish pop at a more proximate level. At a deeper level, the scales and instruments used by Turks and Greeks are related, through close to a millennium of coexistence. The tunings and modes […]
Why do I have to place an emphasis mark on some vowel in every Greek word on writing, even if the meaning might not even change if you just leave it?
Well there’s the simple reason, and there’s the historical justification for it. The simple reason is: BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE RULES. 🙂 And if it were up to me, you’re not putting enough accents on Greek words. The blanket rule that all monosyllabic words are unstressed, whether they are function words or content words, does […]
Should καί be stressed when writing Standard Modern Greek with polytonic orthography?
Yes. It was never written unaccented, because it was never treated as a clitic. On the other hand, the unstressed variant κι was indeed never accented. Answered 2017-04-16 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/Should-καί-be-stressed-when-writing-Standard-Modern-Greek-with-polytonic-orthography/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Where can one find the obscure works (i.e. plays and poems) of Nikos Kazantzakis (“Julian the Apostate”, “Odysseus”, “Tertsinas”, etc.)?
In Greece, it’s not particularly difficult to find all the works of Kazantzakis in any middling bookstore; and bless you for mentioning the Terza Rimas, that I have a lot of affection for. In the Anglosphere, a university with a Modern Greek teaching program will have them. A university that used to have a Modern […]
Are there any dialects of Greek that Nick Nicholas can’t understand?
First up, my vanity is well gratified! Well, there’s the question, and then there’s the details. Can I understand someone speaking modern Tsakonian, or read ancient Arcadian and understand it, sight unseen? Mate, I struggled to understand the Cypriot of my cousin’s husband Fotis; and I have no idea what Homer is on about. Homer! […]
Do modern-day Greeks feel continuity with their ancient civilization like Indians or Chinese?
They proclaim it and they are taught it, and yes, they feel it. But they feel it at a superficial level, as either ancestor-worship, or a totem to beat up Westerners with. Nick Nicholas’ answer to If your country had a slogan what it would be?: “When we Greeks were building Parthenons, you barbarians were […]