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Category: Modern Greek
How do you cheer or say “Hooray!” in your language?
Greek. Ζήτω! Zito! Now, have I ever written a Quora post on how you say something in Greek, without a detailed disquisition on etymology and alternate expressions? I won’t this time either. Zito! is a third person imperative of zo, “to live”: so “may he live!” The third person imperative would certainly have died out […]
Should the Greek people give Alexis Tsipras another chance as their prime minister?
I no longer follow Greek politics for the same reason I stopped following US politics: too depressing. I refer you however to the Greek version of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”, as I have illustrated here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean? I […]
What are the differences between cypriot accent and greece accent?
I’m not going to do this question justice. Phonological differences in the dialect that carry across to the accent: Lots of /n/s that have dropped off in standard Greek, and longer [n]s than in standard Greek. So it sounds nasal: not French, nasal vowel nasal, but lots of nnnns nasal. The Greek counterpart of the […]
Why do many European languages use the same word for “morning” and “tomorrow”?
Brian Collins says “Probably because the protolanguage did not distinguish between those forms.” Actually, Brian has sketched the answer in his response, but the foregoing isn’t quite it. Indo-European languages often use notions of “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early” interchangably. The Ancient Greek for “tomorrow”, aurion, is cognate to the Lithuanian aušrà “dawn”; and the Ancient […]
What is the Greek word for actor?
Modern Greek: like everyone else said, ηθοποιός. In Ancient Greek this meant “character-building”. The modern meaning came about because plays can be character building, I suppose, but I can’t find out when the meaning shift happened. Pretty sure it’s very recent. The word is from katharevousa. The old vernacular word is θεατρίνος, which is still […]
What is the etymology of the Russian word vishnya (cherry)? There seems to be a connection to the Turkish word.
The answers given here have opened up a secondary conundrum. It’s uncontroversial that Turkish got the word from Bulgarian. The controversy is whether the Slavic word came from Greek, the Greek word came from Slavic, or the similarity is a coincidence. The Greek word could easily have come from Bulgarian; and if it’s a Slavic-wide […]
With knowledge of modern Greek what historical literature could I read?
Hm. I keep disagreeing that you’d understand all of the New Testament. Mark and John, sure; Paul, not so much. Byzantine learned literature: forget it. It’s not identical to Attic Greek, but you’ll need Attic Greek (and a decoder ring) to make sense of it. Byzantine Vernacular literature (1100 onward): sure, but knowing some dialect, […]
Is Mykonos considered as a magical land or it is just a Greek island?
So, when I was gathering materials for my PhD in Greek dialectology, I noticed that Greeks collecting texts would transcribe them in the Greek alphabet (natch), but foreigners in the 20th century usually used a Roman-based phonetic alphabet. Not the IPA, that would be way too sensible; typically some adaptation of a God-awful French or […]
What is the degree of intelligibility between Standard Modern Greek and Cretan Greek?
I’ve done the Swadesh list lexicostatistics: 89 of 100 core words, which is comparable to Russian and Ukrainian. (I get the same figure for Cypriot.) Mutually intelligible, but just. Much more now that the dialect is dying out. I was exposed to the dialect 30 years ago when it wasn’t doing as badly; so I’m […]
What is the most difficult non-English tongue twister you know?
A couple from Modern Greek: Μια πάπια μα ποια πάπια. mja papja ma pja papja. “A duck, but which duck?” Surprisingly difficult. Άσπρη πέτρα ξέξασπρη κι απ’ τον ήλιο ξεξασπρότερη. aspri petra kseksaspri c ap ton iʎo kseksasproteri. “White stone, utterly white, even more utterly white than the sun.” Ο παπάς ο παχύς έφαγε παχιά […]