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Category: Modern Greek
Why are the Latin and Greek alphabets the only ones with capital/minuscule letters?
There are a few others, but they are mostly neighbours of Greek and Latin, or else motivated by them. Letter case – Wikipedia Writing systems using two separate cases are bicameral scripts. Languages that use the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Adlam, Varang Kshiti, Cherokee, and Osage scripts use letter cases in their written form […]
In Greek, when do you use Iota, Eta and Upsilon? What’s the difference?
So, here’s the mainstream answer. 🙂 Greek had iota, eta, and upsilon as different letters, because they used to be pronounced differently: Iota was always an /i/ Eta was a long /ɛː/. In fact, in many archaic variants of the Greek alphabet, it was written as an epsilon /e/; that was the case in Athens […]
What does the last name “Galifianakis” mean?
-akis is the patronymic suffix used in Crete; it’s a diminutive, like most patronymics in Greek surnames are. The surname in Greek is Galifianakis Γαλιφιανάκης or Galyfianakis Γαλυφιανάκης; I see the upsilon surname much more frequently online (except with reference to Zach himself). Galifianos means “from Galifa”; there are references online to a Galifian carnival, […]
What are some differences between the Greek of Greece and Cypriot Greek?
Cypriot Greek is one of the South-Eastern group of Greek dialects, along with Chios and the Dodecanese. So the differences between the Greek of Rhodes (in Greece) and the Greek of Cyprus are less far apart than the Greek of Athens and the Greek of Cyprus. In fact, if you aren’t finely attuned to the […]
When did Melbourne first develop its large Greek community?
It’s doubtful the Greek population of Melbourne ever exceeded 300k; and the more Greeks assimilate, the harder that is to count. I think it could be argued that Chicago had a larger Greek population at least at one point. Thessalonica has a population over a million, so Melbourne was never the largest Greek city outside […]
What are some characteristics of the Greek dialect spoken by Sarakatsani?
Stand back everyone, I’ll handle this one. 🙂 The Sarakatsani are traditionally nomadic shepherds in Northern Greece and Bulgaria, who speak Greek. Their origins have excited interest, because the Vlachs are traditionally nomadic shepherds through the southern Balkans, who speak Aromanian, and there has been speculation about whether the two populations are related. The most […]
How likely is it that the Cypriot Greek word for ironing board is related not only to horse but also to the English “apparatus”?
Not likely. Not impossible. But not likely. Let’s think this though, and the considerations for us thinking this through are not specific to Cyprus; they are pretty generic in etymology. English was a donor language to Cypriot Greek while the British ruled Cyprus, from 1878 through 1960, and as an international language since. While there […]
What names were historically used to refer to your spoken language before assuming their current form?
http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~coby/essays/gloss.htm As Names of the Greeks – Wikipedia details, the name that the Byzantines gave themselves, and the name that Modern Greeks traditionally gave themselves as a result, was Romans: Romioi, with Hellene reserved for the Ancient Greeks (or for pagans in general). It follows that the name Greeks traditionally gave their vernacular was Roman, […]
Why do most people focus on ancient Greek history ignoring the rest of the Greek history?
The West claims its patrimony from the Renaissance West and Mediaeval West. The Mediaeval West claimed its patrimony from Rome. Rome, and the Renaissance West, claimed their cultural patrimony from Ancient Greece. So Ancient Greece matters to the West, because the West regarded itself as the cultural inheritor of Ancient Greece. The Byzantine Empire was […]
Why is Aromanian not officially recognized in Greece?
Oh dear. Greece has long had a model of state nationalism which, like that of France, treated minorities as a threat to national unity, and pursued assimilation. The Greek Orthodox ethnic minorities of Greece, who had identified with ethnic Greeks as fellow members of the Rum millet, enthusiastically embraced assimilation for the most part. So […]