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Category: Modern Greek
Which poem or song best represents Greece in your opinion?
I’m going with the Birds of the Netherworld. stixoi.info: Του κάτω κόσμου τα πουλιά It’s got a lot of what makes Modern Greek culture so rich: Cryptic, magical dread. The lyricist based it on a nightmare he had; but the song was released in 1974, during the death-throes of the Greek dictatorship—so people assumed what […]
Did Greek Cypriot took Venetian caraguol, Spanish caracol with the nuance “fort” to denote a snail (karaolos)?
Thanks to Eutychius Kaimakkamis and Alberto Yagos. Alberto, you have Andriotis’ etymological dictionary? Awesome! The Cypriot dictionary I opened up at random confirms caracol/caracollo as the origin of karaolos, and they confirm your etymology as “twisted”. It did not say that the etymology of caracol in turn was ultimately Greek kokhlias via Vulgar Latin *cochlear, […]
Is the Greek Cypriot and Cretan pronunciation kk = ts (zz) derived from Venetian, or is it archaic?
The question and the question details are asking different things, and I’ll address them separately. It is the doom of /k/ in front of a front vowel (i, e) to be palatalised, to be pronounced as [kʲ] > [c]. The palate is a notoriously difficult place to articulate a stop (too much surface area). So […]
Is Facebook called a different nickname in your country?
The literal calque Fatsovivlio has shown up in Greek, but only in jocular use. (47k hits on Google.) It’s all the more jocular, because it uses the Italian loanword fatsa < faccia, rather than the Greek prosopo, for face. Loanwords are usually pejorative; Fatsovivlio sounds more like “ugly mug book”. SLANG.gr went one better, using […]
What is the origin of the surname Piliafas?
Interesting. Pilafás is a real Greek surname. Googling, the most famous instance of a Pilafas is some businessman’s son cum DJ who’s married the actress Katerina Papoutsaki. Παναγιώτης Πιλαφάς βιογραφικό – iShow.gr Whatevs. Pilafas means, straightforwardly, “Pilaf guy”. and the -as suffix weighs towards “Pilaf maker”. Pilaf, rice in broth, is an exceedingly popular dish […]
Where in the Balkan sprachbund did the invariable future tense marker originate?
A capital question. You were right, Zeibura, in the discussion that prompted this: the Balkans is a big mess of not continuously attested languages and dialects; and the only hints of whether a feature originated in one place rather than another is whether the feature is also present in Koine Greek or Old Church Slavonic—both […]
Does modern Greek still use the six tenses of classical Greek?
No, thank God. Although there’s some noteworthy continuities in what has survived: the morphology and semantics are pretty much the same. In the indicative: Present: yes. Imperfect: yes. The imperfect shows up in subjunctive contexts, to do the work of the erstwhile optative. Aorist: yes. Future: no. Replaced by a succession of auxiliary formations (μέλλω, […]
What are some Greek folklore stories?
Category:Greek fairy tales – Wikipedia Category:Greek folklore – Wikipedia That’s a start. We’ve got Christmas goblins (kalikantzaros), we’ve got vampires (vrykolakas), we’ve got mermaids (gorgona). Fairy tales involve, interchangeably, fairies (neraida), ogres (drakos), and black men (arapis). And saints. My favourite fairy tale rather incongruously involves Jesus Christ. The Blessed Card Deck, from Kephallonia. Let […]
Do other countries have an Uncle Sam figure?
Besides the Positive personification of Greece, Athena, there’s also the negative personification of Greece, Ψωροκώσταινα Psorokostena, “Kostas’ Mangy Wife”. In fact the cartoonist Bost (Chrysanthos Mentis Bostantzoglou) in the ’60s drew Psorokostena as a Mangy Athena: Although the contemporary blog Psorokostena has adopted a homelier figure: The story of the historical Kostas’ Mangy Wife is […]
How does the character of Nasreddin Hodja change across different Muslim countries?
Greeks got him from Turks; he’s much bigger, I noticed, in Cyprus than in Greece. I don’t know enough to compare with Nasreddin in Muslim countries, but in Greek accounts he’s a promulgator of often absurdist folk wisdom. “The argument over the mattress” is a journalistic cliché in Greece. The argument over the mattress? Glad […]