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Category: Modern Greek
What are the meanings of lyrics to the Greek song “To Prosfigaki”?
Το προσφυγάκι – Μέλκον Μάρκος – Στίχοι, Video – kithara.to Translating from the site: Year of composition: 1950 Singing and Oud by Marko Melkon. The recording was made in the USA around 1950. The song melody follows the Hicazkâr Makam scale, which corresponds to the byzantine Plagal Second Mode. Besides the oud, there is a […]
Does Greek have an equivalent of “ch” as in “chicken”?
Standard Greek does not. <ch> gets transliterated as /ts/. For example, when I was in Goody’s (the Greek competitor to McDonald’s) and ordered a cheeseburger, my order was relayed as ena tsiz! . You’ll see many Turkish loanwords with /ts/ in them: every single one corresponds to a Turkish <ç>. On the other hand, many […]
Does word villa, meaning house, have the same meaning in all European languages or are there some exceptions?
Yes, yes, OP, in Cypriot Greek, βίλλα, as a variant of βίλλος, does mean “dick”. Hence, per βίλλα – cySlang (the Cypriot counterpart to urbandictionary) and βίλλα, βίλα – SLANG.gr (the Greek counterpart to urbandictionary), the fans of Marcos Baghdatis would shout: Του Μάρκου η βίλα γκαστρώνει και καμήλα!Marcos’ dick will impregnate even a camel! […]
Is there a place in the world where we have differences between women and men in accent or even in vocabulary?
There’s lots of gendering in language, and people who have studied sociolinguistics more intently than me will be able to offer better examples. I actually don’t know of instances in Crete that OP has in mind. I do know that in Tsakonia in the 19th century, the palatalised allophone of /r/ appeared to be [r̝], […]
What is your hometown’s dark secret?
I have several hometowns, but the hometown I’ll pick is Sitia, Lasithi prefecture, Crete. Small, no account place, placid, few tourists. I’ve made several discoveries about my hometown that came as a surprise to me. They had not exactly been publicised, and they’re embarrassing, so I guess they’re dark secrets. They get progressively darker. 1. […]
Why is the word “cat” almost the same in all languages?
The word cat is the same in a lot of languages, for the same reason that Coca-Cola is the same in even more languages. Because most cats were domesticated, and originated, in one place: Egypt. Not all cats: there was a separate domestication, Wikipedia tells me (Cat), in China. And extremely early domestication in Cyprus […]
Why was literacy so low in the Ottoman Empire?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuz%C3%BBl%C3%AE Yes, Arabic script was a spectacularly bad fit for Turkish. But a more proximate reason, surely, was that mass literacy presupposes printing—and the Ottomans did not allow printing in a Muslim language. (They didn’t allow it in Christian Greek either, but at least Venetian printers were able to capitalise on that.) Global spread of […]
Do people in the Near and Middle East still refer to Westerners as Franks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks#Legacy In Greece: it was very much a mainstream term from Mediaeval times right through to the early 20th century. It was also used to refer to Greek Catholics; hence the classic song Frangosyriani “Catholic girl from Syros” (1932), from Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Catholic boy from Syros. The conflation of Western Catholics and Levantine […]
How hard is for Greeks that speak Standard Modern Greek to understand Tsakonian?
Not mutually intelligible. At all. The bizarre thing with Tsakonian is: the non-core vocabulary, you can understand, because it’s pretty much the non-core vocabulary of Greek. Except you’ve got some quite massive regular sound changes to deal with, which were regularly applied even to modern loans. [ɣramatici] for example, “grammar”, ends up as [ɣramacitɕi]. But […]
What is the root of word “Havales”, denoting in Greek, “spending time, having fun”?
A magnificent resource I have just stumbled on, in seeing if someone has already answered this question (do I look like a Turcologist to you?) is tourkika.com. An online Turkish grammar resource for Greek learners of the language, with lots of etymology for loan words into Greek. The etymology… is enlightening. Χαβαλές – havale. From […]