What obstacles will I run into transitioning from Attic to Koine Greek?

Like Michael Masiello said, no real obstacles: things are simpler. There will be fewer Attic futures and Attic second declensions. In fact, they were historically called Attic not because they were alien to Doric (Doric loved the “Attic” future), but because they were alien to Koine. So λαός, σκανδαλίσω, not λεώς, σκανδαλιῶ. Some Latin loan words, but you will recognise them from English anyway: κουστωδία, κεντυρίων. Some particles are moving towards Modern Greek, so their usage may surprise you: ἵνα for example is closer to a subjunctive marker then just a purposive.

I’d just jump in. If you find it too easy, I’ll point you in the direction of Nonnus’ Homeric paraphrase of the Gospel of John. 🙂

What are the most romantic restaurants in Melbourne?

We truly are spoiled for choice in this town, Miguel Paraz.

I did take my future wife for Valentine’s Day to Grossi Florentino our first year of dating. It truly is a high temple of dining. It would have to be, at $200 a person.

But the place that pops into my head is Scugnizzo. Tucked away in a laneway of the more downmarket side of the CBD, in a lovely old brick warehouse, with a courtyard. Featuring an expansive mad genius Italian chef with creativity to spare, and good ingredients. It’s a place that makes you smile just to walk in. And I think it is well suited to canoodling…

Is it possible to shorten the ordinal numbers in modern Greek?

The traditional way of doing that is to use a Greek numeral; you could use them indiscriminately for ordinals, cardinals, and in antiquity even multiplicatives. So World War II, Henry VIII: Βʹ Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Ηʹ, which are in fact read out loud as Δεύτερος Παγκόσμιος Πόλεμος, Ερρίκος ο Όγδοος, with ordinals and not cardinals. (It is “Second World War”, never “World War Two”.) This is done for names and titles.

The ordinal numbers can have a superscript inflection ending, as is done in Romance languages. That does not happen with titles, but it is optional with non-titles: you can say α[math]^{ος}[/math], β[math]^{ος}[/math], γ[math]^{ος}[/math] πρωταθλητής for 1st, 2nd, 3rd champion. Alternatively, the suffix can be hyphenated: α-ος.

These days, you will also see Arabic rather than Greek numerals, always with the inflection, and the inflection can appear with no hyphen or superscript: 1[math]^{ος}[/math], 1ος. This is newer, and if Google is any indication, that’s the most common mechanism now. In the 80s, my primary school, Sitia Second, was named Βʹ Δημοτικό Σητείας (primary schools and high schools are numbered in each town); its blog now names it 2o ΔΗΜΟΤΙΚΟ ΣΧΟΛΕΙΟ ΣΗΤΕΙΑΣ. Patras Third High School, which is old and venerable, is listed on Wikipedia as Γ’ Γυμνάσιο Πατρών; but its Facebook page names it as 3ο ΓΥΜΝΑΣΙΟ ΠΑΤΡΩΝ.

Do Greeks have more in common with the Turks than they do with the French or Germans?

For much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Greek identity was a tug of war between a Romaic and a Hellenic construct, between an identification with Ancient Greece via Western Europe (or vice versa), and the folk culture informed by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.

The Hellenes have won, but that victory is fairly recent. I don’t believe it truly predates the European Union. And that victory has certainly not been as thorough-going as people like to think.

Turks have been the Other for Greeks too long for them to identify with the Turks. Especially when Greeks have so much invested in identifying as European.

All I can say is, there is a joy of recognition when I talk to Turks, that I don’t feel talking to Germans. That’s not just because of the commonalities in low rather than high culture. It’s also because those commonalities have been deprecated in official discourse. They have not been ignored, but they have been cast as something to be embarrassed about. So when I do encounter those commonalities, they are all the more resonant for me.

Are there any features, besides vocabulary, of human languages that only appeared relatively recently?

Written registers are a reasonably recent thing in human language, so the peculiarities of written language would qualify as innovations.

The catch is, the characteristics of written language I can think of are matters of degree, rather than categorical differences from spoken language. But they include things like syntactic complexity, anaphora referring back a long way, intolerance of ambiguity (because of the lack of access to immediate feedback), and notions of periodically structured sentences.

Answered 2017-06-06 · Upvoted by

Logan R. Kearsley, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy. and

Steve Rapaport, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.

Are speakers of non-standard languages discouraged from using the web?

The bulk of material on the Web, like the bulk of written material in general, is in standardised forms of languages. If you know the standardised form of your language, or the official language of your country, you can access the Web as well. And if you’ve gone to school at all, then you know a standard language. That’s a big part of the reason you went to school in the first place.

But the web does not suppress non-standard languages. On the contrary, it actually gives them a space to flourish. There is no gatekeeping for publishing content on the web, the way there is for Print Media; and the web encourages informal expression, which is associated with non-standard languages. Reportedly, texting has also encouraged people to use dialect, for the same reason. There is certainly much more Cypriot Greek content online proportionately, than has ever appeared in print.