How many placenames have been Turkicised in Turkey?

If by Turkicised, OP, you simply mean “made to adhere to Turkish phonotactics, and often Vowel Harmony”, the answer is indeed most if not all. To add to Pierrick Jaouen’s examples, stin Poli (to the City) > İstanbul, is Nikea (to Nicaea) > İznik, Oinoë (mediaeval Greek /ynoi/) > Ünye, Ikonion > Konya, Kaisareia > Kayseri. And so on.

Not all towns have kept their old names of course. Rhaedestus was originally Rodosçuk in Turkish; it turned into Tekfurdağı “Byzantine Lord’s mountain” and then Tekirdağ after the 18th century. Some town names have been translated, though the two examples I thought of turn out to have been translated from Turkish into Greek, rather than vice versa: Κιρκλαρελί (contra what is said in Kırklareli: “Forty Churches” is not a Byzantine name) and Gümüşhane (the Pontic Greek name is Kanin, Argyropolis is learnèd).

The biggest Turkish city with a new Turkish name replacing an old Greek name (List of cities in Turkey) is Eskişehir (Byzantine Dorylaeum).

Are there some non-agglutinating languages that have vowel harmony?

Originally Answered:

Are there any fusional languages affected by vowel harmony?

Not necessarily the answer you were looking for, but the Greek dialects of southern Cappadocia (e.g. Ulagaç), which were the most profoundly influenced by Turkish, had vowel harmony extending to verbal inflections. See Richard McGillavray Dawkins’ Modern Greek in Asia Minor.

Why are all ancient Persian names written in their Greek forms?

Because, for a very long time, the West only knew of Persian historical figures through Greek sources. And even if they didn’t, the prestige of Greek and Latin meant that names mediated thorough those languages were more familiar. Thus, Cyrus, Ramses, and Moses.

Which was the most southern border city of Byzantine Empire, before Arab conquest?

Since Andrew has blocked me, I have to add a correction here to Dimitris Sotiropoulos on https://www.quora.com/Which-was-…

Iotabe is identified tentatively with Tiran Island, 27°57′N 34°33′E

Syene is Aswan, 24°05′20″N 32°53′59″E

Berenice Troglodytica is 23°54′38″N 35°28′34″E

So Iotabe is not the southernmost point, unless Dimitris has evidence for an alternate identification of Iotabe as being south of Aswan.

Were the classical greek drama texts complete?

Given the addendum from OP: https://www.quora.com/Were-the-c… (which I’ve added to question details):

The bulk of Ancient Greek drama that has survived has survived as part of the postclassical school curriculum, and has been transmitted through manuscript. Even so, we know that bits of the text that the authors must have written (for the text to make sense) has been left off or garbled. Not a huge amount—a verse here, a couple of verses there; but enough that editors exercise their own ingenuity when reconstructing the complete text, and different editors’ of the dramatic texts will be different.

(Usually, it’s the editors, not the translators doing the conjecturing.)

Outside the manuscript tradition, we have significant chunks of Menander in papyrus, but classical dramatists indeed survive only in small fragments; and for the most part, these aren’t snatches of papyrus, but one or two verses quoted here and there by later authors—usually grammarians.

Did Henry Kissinger ever usurp the function of Richard Nixon, taking executive decision without assent?

I can’t recall an instance where Kissinger did, though there were plenty of instances where he undermined Nixon or disobeyed instructions. I am reading Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger right now though, and will update if I find an instance.

Haldeman came closer by routinely failing to pass on Nixon’s enraged instructions to fire everybody. In his sober moments, Nixon was grateful to him for that.

The closest Nixon came to being usurped was just before his resignation. Def Sec Schlesinger and I think Haig agreed they’d block any attempt by Nixon to launch thermonuclear warfare.


EDIT: Now that I have got up to the relevant chapter of Nixon and Kissinger (p. 530). The Yom Kippur War coincided with the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon was in no state to deal with the war, and left the handling it to Kissinger. I was prepared to think of much of it as delegation, though it was increasingly hard to: anything Nixon said during the war, Kissinger considered counterproductive.

On the night of the 24th of October, the US needed to head off Soviet threats to intervene unilaterally in the Middle East. The Washington Special Action Group, a committee for serious crisis management within the National Security Council, met, and raised the military alert to Defcon III. It worked: the Soviets, caught by surprise, stood down, and the war was over in a couple of days.

As Wikipedia mentions, citing one historian’s account:

When Kissinger asked Haig whether [Nixon] should be wakened, the White House chief of staff replied firmly ‘No.’ Haig clearly shared Kissinger’s feelings that Nixon was in no shape to make weighty decisions

Dallek’s account sounds like something Toby Ziegler would say in the West Wing, when a fairly similar scenario played out:

It was an amazing turn of events: None of the seven officials who met for over three hours until 2 A.M. had ever been elected to anything by voters. Yet they were setting policy in a dangerous international crisis. Kissinger rationalized Nixon’s absence by saying that he had never attended WSAG meetings. However, the WSAG had never confronted a crisis of this gravity before. More important, the group made decisions that should only come from the president, though Kissinger and Haig were confident that they reflected the President’s views. Others at the meeting were not so sure.

Are there any scientific publications with swear words in them?

Well, there’s the classic ENGLISH SENTENCES WITHOUT OVERT GRAMMATICAL SUBJECTS by Quang Phuc Dong of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology (pseudonym of James D. McCawley, 1967), and several others in that vein. But that’s linguists writing about swearing, not swearing per se. (There’s was quite a trend of little “who, me?” bombs in linguistic examples in the late 60s and early 70s, prominently including John called Sam a republican, and then he insulted him from George Lakoff).

OP then asks:

Why censor people’s right to swear just because it is science?

Because it’s science. Scholarly papers are meant to at least pretend that they are arriving at rational conclusions through objective consideration of arguments. Swearing is avoided in scholarly papers, for the same reasons exclamation points are. Because it makes you look like you’re not a scholar, and can’t string together a convincing argument.

In Modern Greek, is there any difference between “I have said” and “I have been saying”?

έχω πει, the perfect tense, is only used in perfective contexts (completed actions); so you can’t use it for “I have been saying”. You will use the imperfect, έλεγα, for that. So Greek makes no distinction between “I was saying” and “I have been saying”.

The English “I have been saying” looks like it’s both perfect and imperfect; in fact, the tense is imperfect, and the use of the perfect in that combination has its secondary meaning, of “present relevance”. If anything, if you want to emphasise the present relevance in Greek, you will end up switching from the imperfect to the present tense, with an adverbial phrase to indicate that the action was continuous in the past. So:

Σου το έχω πει: I’ve told you

Σου το έλεγα: I was telling you; I have been telling you

Σου το έλεγα εδώ και μήνες: I was telling you for months

Σου του λέω εδώ και μήνες : I have been telling you for months (lit. I am telling you for months)