Category: Modern Greek

This is NSFW. Kinda. The Greek word for a porn film is tsonta. The word comes from the Venetian word zonta, which is cognate with Italian giunta and English joint. The original meaning of tsonta was the same as Louisianan lagniappe: it’s an extra helping, an extra portion of the merchandise you’re buying, that the […]

To elaborate on the other answers, malakas does indeed mean “masturbator”, but note that it does not have the same connotation as either American jerk < jerk off or Commonwealth wanker. A jerk and a wanker are both obnoxious, presumably because masturbation is narcissistic. A malakas is a fool, a dupe. (Cartoons will often feature […]

Because that’s the Modern Greek word for grandmother. 🙂 The Triantafyllidis dictionary gives a shrug for the etymology: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής λ. νηπιακή: γιάγια και μετακ. τόνου για προσαρμ. στα άλλα ανισοσύλλαβα ουσ. Baby talk: yáya and accent shift to adapt to other imparisyllabic nouns Babiniotis’ dictionary gives the same shrug. The motivation is […]

I assume OP is asking about the West Anatolian dialects of Modern Greek, not Ancient Greek. 1. Not studied enough. 2. Not old. Pontic and Cappadocian are relic dialects, cut off from the rest of Greek for a millenium, and they are both archaic in phonology and morphology, and influenced by Turkish to a great […]

http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/intadjlist.htm To add to Achilleas Vortselas’ answer for Greek, The prefix παν- “all” is another intensifier, which was also in use in Ancient Greek. So πάμμαυρος “all-black” (which is not ancient), παμμάταιος “all-vain” (which is). Greek also has superlative adjectives (so μαυρότατος “blackest”). And a colloquial (negative) intensifying prefix is in fact… καρα-, which is […]