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Tag: Ancient Greek
κερητίζειν: Ancient Greek Field Hockey?
A brief note for the Classicists still reading, despite the deluge of very very Late Greek here—to point to a post at Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, jointly researched with commenter π2, on whether the infrequent verb κερητίζειν refers to an Ancient Greek sport similar to field hockey. This has been claimed by the archaeologist Georgios Oikonomos […]
What are the longest words of Greek?
Everyone knows (or should know) about the longest word of Greek ever—the word that broke the title bar of Wikipedia, Aristophanes’ fantastical dish of 17 ingredients at the end of the Ecclesiazusae, that lopado-temacho-thing: λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιολιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοπιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών (172 chars) Ah. It breaks blogspot too. 🙂 λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιολιπαρομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοπιφαλλιδοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερυγών (172 chars) Have you ever wondered what the next longest words […]
New TLG words in DGE VII
As I posted last month, the new volume of DGE (Diccionario Griego–Español) has appeared, spanning ἐκπελλεύω–ἔξαυος. As with any lexicographic work of an older language, some philology and textual emendation has been involved; this paper by Eugenio Luján Martínez gives four such instances, in Epicurus, Aretaeus, Nicander, and Galen. I have gone through this volume […]
Comparison, TLG BC and AD: log-likelihood
Helma Dik left a comment on my post on comparing TLG AD and BC through Wordle, suggesting I use Dunning’s Log-Likelihood measure of differential word frequencies in corpora, as Wordled by Martin Mueller. That lets you work out what the real shifts in frequency are, rather than trying to eyeball them through the aggregate word […]
Comparison, TLG BC and AD
In the previous post, I used Wordle to illustrate stop words in Greek (and, by the by, the exponential distribution of function words following Zipf’s Law). After getting rid of a whole bunch of stop words, I ended up with a Wordle of the lemmata of the TLG:But I stopped short of making sense of […]
Wordle and Greek stop words
Some of you may be familiar with Wordle, an online tool which displays the words in a text with different sizes, depending on their frequency. Wordle is a convenient tool for seeing what the frequently mentioned concepts are in a text, so it gets a fair amount of use in blogs. It’s the same concept […]
DGE Vol VII
Volume VII of the Diccionario Griego-Español (ἐκπελλεύω–ἔξαυος), intended to be the most comprehensive dictionary of Ancient and Early Middle Greek, has been published in 2009, and is available for purchase. (I’ve just ordered it.) I found the new volume by googling; you’d be none the wiser about that from the DGE’s own web page, which […]
The 23 to 29 Apolloniuses of Classical Literature
I’m parking this posting here for lack of somewhere else to park it. (It’s not strictly language-related, but I’m realising philology posts are probably better pitched here than in The Other Place.) In my day-job capacity, I’m posting on the fluidity of identity in repositories—how, particularly if you’re relying on computer deduplication of identity, there […]
Deictic force of Hellenistic demonstratives
Quick note: Ἐν Ἐφέσῳ notices from the linguistics literature that the meaning of demonstratives in Modern Greek depends on their position: αυτό το μπουτάκι “that-one the pork-joint” is more physical deixis (“that pork joint which I’m pointing at”), whereas το μπουτάκι αυτό “the pork-joint that-one” is more discourse deixis (“that pork joint which I mentioned […]
Nastratios in Pagdatia
A thread last month at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog, about insulting commentary on a candidate MP from the Muslim minority, got derailed in comments (the way good comment threads do) into a discussion of whether there was any point teaching Ancient Greek in high school in Greece. The reason why Ancient Greek is taught […]