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Category: Modern Greek
How widespread among languages the usage of the word for “where” as a general relative pronoun (meaning persons or objects)?
That would be the standard modern Greek relativiser I did my PhD on, in fact. Add Hebrew ašer > še, Bulgarian deto. Anon (you didn’t need to Anon this time, Anon), I can rule out Albanian: që in standard Albanian, çë in Arvanitika are not locative. Answered 2016-10-04 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/How-widespread-among-languages-the-usage-of-the-word-for-where-as-a-general-relative-pronoun-meaning-persons-or-objects/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
Why does Greek Wikipedia use the two different spellings (and pronunciations) Όθων ντε Σικόν and Οτόν ντε Σικόν for the Frankish noble Othon de Cicon?
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%8C%CE%B8%CF%89%CE%BD_%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B5_%CE%A3%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C%CE%BD What Billy Kerr said. To elaborate: the <Otón> transcription is a phonetic transcription from French. The <Óthōn> transcription is the longstanding traditional hellenisation of Otto; it was used inter alia for King Otto of Greece. It incorporates the –th– of the old spelling Otho; and it ends in –ōn, which makes it declinable. (In […]
What is the best way to learn to speak Greek fluently?
There’s the generic answer: the fine old Greek saying, Η μισή ντροπή δική σου, η άλλη μισή δική τους. “Half the embarrassment is yours, the other half is theirs.” Yes. They will think you sound ridiculous, no fear of that. They will also be hugely impressed (especially if they’re in the Greek diaspora), and will […]
Which formerly Ottoman-occupied peoples understand “s–tir” today?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/siktir OP noted that there were many answers already stashed away under What does Siktir (سیکتیر) means in Persian? I’ll paste here the comments that Dimitra Triantafyllidou and I left there for Greek. Some quite obvious parallels with Albanian and Romanian, as reported by Aziz Dida and Diana Crețu. Nick: In Greek it just means […]
Why does Greece not try to retake Anatolia and Constantinople?
See also the related questions: Should Thrace and Constantinople be given back to Greece? Is there any chance of Constantinople reuniting with Greece any time in the near future? Is there any chance of Anatolia reuniting with Greece any time in the near future? Never mind it being an unwise military venture. Never mind NATO. […]
Can modern day Greeks understand and read ancient scriptures in ancient ruins (Like this one?)
Variant of what the others have said. Ruins featuring Roman era Koine? There’ll be some faux amis, but the alphabet shape is recognisable, the grammar and vocabulary you can cope with if you’re educated. Ruins from 500 BC? The alphabet shapes vary from city to city; the ancient dialects can be very different from Attic. […]
Does your language misuse grammatical case or gender to make a rhetorical point?
I’m glad you asked, OP. Language is a system, as the structuralists of yore argued. And if there is a paradigm of cases, then people will exploit choices in the paradigm to communicate different kinds of meaning. Even when those choices should be grammatically incorrect. The example I have in mind is from Modern Greek. […]
What was the profession of 1st Greeks who arrived in Australia and became famous for that?
You’ve read something somewhere, OP, I can tell, but I’m at a loss about where. The answer, pace Romain Bouchard, is not in Wikipedia, but I don’t remember it. Let me try and reconstruct it. The big Greek migration wave into Australia was in the 1950s–70s. The stereotype was milk bar owner (= grocery story) […]
Do modern Greek people feel that Istanbul/Constantinople belongs to them?
27 followers. A lot of people are waiting for an answer to this question. I’ll bite. With the initial note that this is a different question from Do Greeks want to recover Constantinople? I’m not necessarily the best person to be answering this: I lived in Greece in the 80s, before the thawing in relations […]
What is some good Greek music for people that smoke weed?
Lots of the Rebetiko tradition of music is to do with hashish, if that helps. This song in particular references gambling rather than hash, but it certainly sounds like it’s performed under the influence, and it’s hypnotic in its simplicity. Recorded by Yannakis Ioannidis with Manolis Karapiperis on bouzouki, New York, 1928. Τούτοι οι μπάτσοι, […]