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Category: Modern Greek
What do Greeks think of Aristidh Kola (Αριστείδης Κόλλιας)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeks I was not aware that he’d died. I was even less aware of the conspiracy theories about his death. I’d come across his books when I was looking at Arvanitika for my linguistics thesis. (My stuff on Balkan language contact ended up left out of the thesis, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to […]
What languages and dialects are spoken in Corfu?
Greek. Heptanesian dialect, which is rather close to Standard Modern Greek. A hundred years ago, Judeo-Italian and Judaeo-Greek. Two hundred years ago, Italian (Venetian) among the nobility. I’ve seen no evidence of Albanian ever spoken in Corfu. Answered 2016-10-17 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-languages-and-dialects-are-spoken-in-Corfu/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What words/phrases in your language have funny, beautiful or weird direct translations into English?
Originally Answered: What expression from your language would English speakers find really funny if translated word for word? Ah, you remind me of the Golden Treasury of Greek-English expressions: we have not seen him yet, and we have removed him John I posted an analyses of a few of these on my Greek linguistics blog […]
What is the translation of the inscription outside Phanar Greek Orthodox College?
Πατριαρχικὴ Μεγάλη τοῦ Γένους Σχολή. αωπ.The Patriarchal Great School of the Nation. 1880. (ου is written as the ligature ȣ.) More prosaically, it is now known in English as Phanar Greek Orthodox College, and in Turkish as Özel Fener Rum Lisesi. It was established in 1454 and was the premier institute for schooling of Greek […]
What are the characteristics of Greek people?
Originally Answered: How can you describe the personality of the Greeks? Noone’s biting? InB4 “You can’t stereotype all Greeks”, &c &c Mercurial. Impulsive. There’s an apocryphal Turkish saying (which in fact, I’ve only found in Greek sources—but then again, I haven’t asked Quora): Gâvurun/Yunanın akili sonradan geliyor. Του Ρωμιού η γνώση ύστερα έρχεται. A Greek’s […]
What is the word to call the husband in your country’s language?
Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”. Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark. You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between […]
Do Greeks who came from Turkey in 1960 have a different accent?
1960 in the question certainly alludes to Istanbul Greeks. There has been minimal attention paid to the dialect of Constantinople/Istanbul, because it was an urban dialect, and historical linguists were interested in the countryside, as more archaic material: Constantinople itself had all unstressed vowels, like Southern Greece, and unlike the villagers of Thrace, who reduced […]
Do the men of Crete still practice their archery for which they were so famous?
Like Vasilios Danias said, archery would have died out in Crete when rifles came to town; the point of archery, after all, was hunting. And Cretans sure love their rifles now, as Dimitra Triantafyllidou illustrates. But there’s ample evidence of archery used in hunting during Venetian rule, when guns were but new (and presumably not […]
What do you know about Tsamouria (Chameria)? What is your opinion on ‘the Cham issue’?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham_issue?wprov=sfsi1 What do I know about Çamëria/Τσαμουριά? Less than Dimitris Almyrantis, but still, I assume, more than most Greeks: I looked into the ethnic mix of the Balkans for my thesis in dialectology, since I needed to know where Greek was natively spoken. I’ll add a couple of curios: The Tsamiko is one of the […]
What is the right way to say “congratulations” in Greek?
Sofia Mouratidis is right. She’s also right in the formal synonyms, and in one of the informal synonyms. I’ll add a second informal synonym: συγχαρίκια. Amusingly (to me anyway), the original meaning of συ(γ)χαρίκια is “congratulatory gift”. When you brought someone good news, they were expected to reward you with a synkharikin. In fact, before […]