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Why is “40” spelled “forty” and not “fourty”?
Thank you OED:
four < *fowr < Middle English fower < feower < Old English feower
forty since 15th century; fourty Middle English up to 17th century < Middle English fourti (and, in parentheses, forti) < feouwerti < Old English feowertig .So the forti spelling was apparently occasional in Middle English, but not regular.
This took some hunting, and OED wasn’t as much help as I’d hoped. I ended up going to Jespersen A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, §4.69
The regular development was fowər > fowr > foːr > fɔːr.
Jespersen notes, though, that vowels are shortened a lot of the time when they are in the first part of a compound, or preceding a consonant cluster. That’s why five goes to fifty with a short vowel—already in the Ormulum (12th century). You can see that with an original long o in nose > nostril, holy > holiday. You can also see that with an original diphthong ow: know > knowledge, Gloucester /glowsester > gl ɔstə/, rowlock [rɔlək], and, Jespersen says, forty from four.
Now, not so fast. The spelling tells Jespersen that fowərti went to fɔrti with a short o, just like know went to knowledge with a short o. But I pronounce the vowels in four and forty the same, long. What’s happened?
One of the following three things, and possibly all three:
- forty is spelled according to the original Early Modern English pronunciation, and used to be pronounced /fɔrti/ accordingly. It is pronounced /fɔːɹti/ now by analogy with four.
- forty is pronounced /fɔːɹti/ in my dialect, because that’s what r’s do; so my dialect has gotten rid of any distinction between [fɔːɹti] and [fɔɹti]. Americans?
- EDIT: I read English-language vowel changes before historic /r/ the hoarse/horse merger correctly, mourning and morning are pronounced differently in South Carolina, Alabama, and in Scots. If there is a historical survival of short o forty, it will be found in those dialects.
- Likeliest: fourty (with a long vowel) and forty (with a short vowel) were both around in Early Modern English as different pronunciations—as the Mediaeval spelling forti hints at. The short vowel version was acting like fifty, in shortening the ow before the –ty. The long vowel version kept the historical form, whether because of analogy with four, or because the diphthong in fowrty was a late development.
The fourty spelling dies out quickly in the 1600s, and I am convinced by the guess in Why is ‘forty’ spelled without a ‘u’ in Canadian/British English? : the King James Bible happened to choose forty instead of fourty, at a time of orthographic whimsy and/or phonetic instability. And that was that.
What I think is less likely is that four and fourty were pronounced identically in Early Middle English, and the King James switched spelling to forty just because. Things like that do happen, English being English; but because forti was a mediaeval spelling, I think there was an underlying pronunciation difference.
Obligatory disclaimer: this is all a guess.
Why does it need to have uppercase letters and lowercase letters in Attic Greek?
The dirty not-so-secret of Attic Greek typography: it adopts the punctuation and capitalisation conventions of the European-language country it is printed in.
So names or adjectives of nationalities (Hellenic/hellenic, Hellene/hellene) will be capitalised based on where it is printed. The quotation marks will follow local practice (and there’s a special place in hell for whoever uses ‘ ’, which are so easy to confuse with breathing marks before capitals). Enthusiasm for exclamation points will depend on local practice, if not whim. (I remember being taken aback at a Dutch printing of the Iliad, chock a-block with “!”)
The one exception: proper names are always capitalised, because they are always capitalised in capitalising languages.
The semi exception: starts of sentences are often not capitalised, following mediaeval Latin practice. But you’ll see many editions where they are; and in Byzantine Greek, from memory, capitalised starts of sentences are normal.
So, do we need uppercase and lowercase in Attic? No. But then again, Attic at the time was quite happy with no space between words too. We use capitalisation in Attic Greek, because we treat it like the contemporary European languages we are used to.
Which raises the question: what would a country with a unicameral script do with Greek? How would India or Thailand or China print Greek?
… They’d learn Greek via some Western scholarly tradition or other, and they’d follow that particular Western tradition (or traditions). Sorry.
Is French word fiancailles translated in Hebrew as Erabon?
No. No no no.
The Hebrew word ’erabon “pledge” (Strong 6162. עֲרָבוֹן (erabon)) shows up in Greek as arrabōn. In fact, it doesn’t quite: the word was borrowed in Classical times, so it was likely taken from Phoenecian instead.
Within Greek, arrabōn ended up meaning “engagement, betrothal”, because a betrothal is a kind of pledge. But that change is no earlier than Athanasius of Alexandria (according to Lampe), which makes it 700 years after the word is first attested in Greek. And it has nothing to do with Hebrew. Therefore, עֲרָבוֹן cannot be translated as “fiancailles”.
How many towns have or had the name Tripolis?
Let’s collate these responses against Tripoli (disambiguation) from Wikipedia:
- Tripoli, Libya
- Tripoli, Lebanon, the second largest city in Lebanon
- Tripoli, Greece, the capital of Arcadia, Greece
- Tripolis (Larisaia), an ancient city
- Tripolis ad Maeandrum, an ancient city on the borders of Lydia, Caria and Phrygia
- Tripolis (Pontus), an ancient city
- Tripoli, Iowa, a city in Bremer County, Iowa, United States
- Tripoli, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community, United States
- New Tripoli, Pennsylvania, a village in Pennsylvania, United States
Not mentioned by Wikipedia and mentioned by Pamela Dennett Grennes’ link to Geotargit:
- Tripoli, St Ann, Jamaica
- Tripoli, Atlantida, Honduras
- Tripoli, near Cortland, New York
Why did Old Armenian change -ա to -այ (-a to -aj)?
I know nothing about Armenian, Old or New, apart from vosp, ’cause I like lentil soup.
I stared for half an hour at:
- A Grammatical Sketch of Classical Armenian,
- Damme, Dirk Van – a Short Classical Armenian Grammar
- Grammaire armenienne : M. Lauer and A. Carriere .
I think I have the answer.
Old Armenian does not have nouns whose nominatives end in a vowel. So the a-declension, those nouns that in Latin and Greek ended in -a, end in a consonant. Greek gynē corresponds to OArm kin. It seems that final unstressed vowels were systematically chopped off in Proto-Armenian.
So, if a Greek word like plateia comes into Armenian (via Syriac plāṭīā), “square, public street”, Old Armenian could not deal with it as a nominative: it wouldn’t fit the patterns. (I don’t know how are supposed to work when your plural ending is -kʿ: I mean, sg.nom. azg, pl.nom azgkʿ ? Seriously?)
In Old Armenian, plāṭīā ends up as połotay.
Account #1. To make it fit, the word has to end in a consonant. Chopping off the vowels wouldn’t work well, you’d end up with plat, which doesn’t sound close enough to plāṭīā. So the safe thing to do is to add a consonant to the foreign word. And –y is the best consonant to add, because it’s a glide: the result still has a similar syllable structure to the original.
I see that Greek hylē is borrowed as հիւղէ (hiwłē). But Wiktionary also notes the variants hiłeay hiwł and hiwłay, so there was a strong trend to go with -ay.
Account #2. But it may be that this is just a trick of orthography. Lauer & Carriere say that final –ay is pronounced –ā. So this could just be that plāṭīā was pronounced połotā in Armenian, and –ay was how Armenian wrote down the new-fangled long final a.
In any case, this looks like stuff internal to Armenian.
Again, this is all extrapolated guesswork from a couple of sketch grammars.
What sort of crime was punished by Scaphism?
You’ve linked to (and read) the English language Wikipedia article in the Question Details. From the English and German Wikipedia articles, we actually don’t know anything else about scaphism: it was described once in Plutarch, and then recapitulated in Eunapius and Zonaras, Byzantine sources. We don’t even know if it was something the Persians actually did, or something Ctesias (the source Plutarch likely cited) made up as a tall tale.
We know that the incident Plutarch cited was the murder of Mithridates (soldier) for killing Artaxerxes II of Persia’s brother Cyrus the Younger (even though Mithridates killed Cyrus accidentally, while the Cyrus was fighting to depose Artaxerxes). Given how spectacular the execution was, it’s reasonable to assume that, if real, it was reserved for the crime the king found most offensive: regicide (or at least, murder of a member of the royal family). Regicide does tend to attract spectacular executions, as occurred in France—and indeed, post mortem punishment, as occurred with Cromwell.
What is a cool way to say “friends” or “group of friends” or “small circle” in other ways or languages?
Parea παρέα in Greek. Cool because it’s the only word in Greek with an Iberian origin. It comes from either Ladino parea or Catalan parella, cognate with Spanish pareja.
The Catalan derivation is probably too good to be true: it refers to the Catalan Company, mercenaries who ran bits of Greece (including Athens) in the 14th century. The parea is a social group of people who hang out together, including having coffee or entertainment together; it would be cute to derive the word from marauding bands of mercenaries, terrorising the countryside of Attica.
What do Greeks think of Italians and Italy?
Half of Greece (the islands) was a colonial outpost for various Italian republics—mostly Venice and Genoa. But that was a very, very long time ago, and Greeks have forgotten that, for example, Cretan villagers welcomed the Ottomans as relief from Venetian feudalism. What was left behind was significant cultural transmission from Italy to Greece: a lot of vocabulary, and some material culture, again particularly in the islands.
For example,
Crete is famous for its small cheese or herb pies, called Kalitsounia. They resemble a common cheese or stuffed pie with the principal difference of its filling and serving variations.
I only worked out last year where the word comes from.
Calzone. And, Wikipedia tells me, Calisson.
So there is cultural familiarity. There’s some shared vocabulary. There’s physical similarities. And as Konstantinos Konstantinides points out, there’s no recent border hostilities, apart from WWII. (And when Griko-speaking Italians were part of the occupying forces, Greeks were delighted to meet them: “You can’t be fascisti! You’re our brothers!”)
Is Hebrew erabon,equal to αρραβωνας and Paul’s phrase,Cor.II,I,22″Give us arravon of spirit”means “give us new covenant, pledge with the holy spirit”?
Bauer’s Lexicon defines ἀρραβών as “payment of part of a purchase price in advance; first installment, deposit, down payment, pledge”. In time, the meaning has shifted to the kind of pledge associated with marriage: a betrothal, an engagement.
(Greeks, please do not cite Ancient words with Modern inflections. It’s just confusing to those not as blessed as you to speak Modern Greek.)
The word actually entered Greek in the classical era; it is used by the Attic orators like Isaeus and Antiphon; so it would likeliest have come in from Phoenecian, not Hebrew. Liddell-Scott does indeed cite the Hebrew as ’ērābōn.
And that word is 6162. עֲרָבוֹן (erabon) — a pledge .
Why do Greeks love Russia so much?
Greeks (OK, Byzantines) gave the Russians Orthodoxy, and feel a bond with them out of that. During Ottoman rule, the Russians saw themselves as the Third Rome—the successor state to Byzantium, which the Greeks felt was their lost empire. The Greeks in turn longed to be rescued by the Russians:
Ακόμη τούτην άνοιξη (ραγιάδες, ραγιάδες)
τούτο το καλοκαίρι (Μωρηά και Ρούμελη),
Οσο νάρθει ο Μόσκοβος (ραγιάδες ραγιάδες)
να φέρει το σεφέρι (Μωρηά και Ρούμελη)!
Just one more spring (ye slaves, ye slaves),
just one more summertime (Morea and Rumeli),
Till Moscow comes
bringing the army down.
The Greeks certainly remember the Orlov Revolt of 1770 a lot more clearly than the Russians do.