It’s kinda guess work, but this is my thinking on the topic.

Musics of adjoining regions have a family resemblance. German music and Greek music don’t have a lot in common. But German music has things in common with Czech music, which has things in common with Hungarian, which has things in common with Romanian, which has things in common with Serbian, which things in common with Greek music. (I don’t actually know this for a fact, I’m just arguing it.)

Greek music isn’t being exported to China, Thailand, and Kenya. It’s being exported to areas where there is cultural affinity for the music, where it sounds familiar, because those are neighbouring areas which have had cultural interaction.

And the music being exported successfully isn’t Greek Euro-pop. It’s music from the Greek Laïko tradition: what I usually call on Quora “bouzouki pop”. Laiko ultimately derives from Rebetiko, which ultimately derives from Smyrneiko—as Wikipedia describes it, “Ottoman café music”. The Peiraeus sound of Markos Vamvakaris in the 1930s was Smyrneiko with subtle Western influences, both in the jaunty beat and in the selection of modes. Government censorship after 1936 encouraged less oriental-sounding modes; and Laiko itself is Rebetiko with much more overt Western influence.

In other words, the Greek pop music being successfully exported is a fusion: it’s identifiably Levantine, but it also sounds much more Western than its antecedents. Fusions, I surmise, are more approachable to external audiences, so they travel better.

The big story that Evangelos Lolos’ formulation of the question misses (I asked it, but he asked it first as a comment) is Israel. Greek music is huge in Israel.

Members of the Anglosphere might be puzzled to hear this, because their understanding of Jewish culture is mainly Ashkenazi, and Ashkenazi music is supposed to be Klezmer, it’s not supposed to sound Middle Eastern or Turkish. Or Greek.

To which, two retorts. First, Israel is not just Ashkenazi. It’s also Sephardi and Mizrahi. And both are Levantine, and as a result have significant cultural affinity with Greek music.

The second retort is a thought experiment. What happens if you take a Greek modal, quick, whirling folk dance tune—and you put a Germanic oom-pah bass underneath it?

Nikos Skalkottas. 36 Greek Dances. #11: Syrtos.

Tell me if that doesn’t sound Yiddishe to you.

If that doesn’t work, see here:

There’s no dialectal difference, although I wouldn’t expect one from an epic poem: Homer is not Aristophanes. Of course, the Iliad is not a documentary, and while the poem concedes that the Trojans’ allies did not speak Greek, it’s doubtful that the actual Trojans of 1200 BC spoke Greek either.

Trojan language – Wikipedia mentions that Hilary Mackie has observed in her monograph Talking Trojan Speech and Community in the Iliad that the style of the Trojans’ speech in the Iliad is different from the Achaeans’:

in simplest terms, Trojans speak poetically, with the aim of avoiding conflict, whereas Achaeans repeatedly engage in public, ritualized abuse that linguists term (from another source) flyting: “Achaeans are proficient at blame, while Trojans perform praise poetry”

So no “Khello Komrade Priamsky, please to drink kykeon wit me” or “Zis is Troy! Ve do not drag ze korpses behint uns!” But something subtler, yes.

Originally Answered:

How does one contact Quora Content Review?

Not by reverting it, reporting it for vandalism, thanking it, or commenting at it. As Jack Munzel’s answer says, it’s a bot, and it’s a very stubborn bot at that.

Christopher VanLang has indicated the only way to stop QCR edit warring you is to report its action as a bug. That, at least, will actually get looked at by a human. I can report that it’s stopped a couple of my edit wars with QCR.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why is Greek music being exported so successfully to outside markets like the Balkans, Turkey and the Middle East?

Mutual intelligibility is very, very hard to quantify.

There is an exceedingly crude measure, Lexicostatistics, that gets used in underdocumented languages, and that noone would dare used among familiar European languages. For what it’s worth (and it’s not that much), if two lects (= dialect or language, being agnostic about it) diverge in 20 out of the 100 words in the Swadesh 100 list of core vocabulary, they are considered different languages. It’s what you get for Ukrainian vs Russian.

Either Swadesh or myself (I honestly don’t remember!) ran the Swadesh list for Cretan and Cypriot against Standard Greek once. The result was 81% similarity for both. I did do Tsakonian vs Standard Greek, and came up with 70%.

Again: that number isn’t worth much. Cretan may have been subject to more assimilatory pressure than Cypriot, but I do think the combination of more phonetic change and intonation make Cypriot harder to understand than Cretan. Then again, I identify as Cretan rather than Cypriot, so I would say that.

I know I have been genuine difficulty in understanding heavier forms of the dialect, such as that spoken by my grandmother or my cousin’s husband Fotis. Be aware that there is a diglossic continuum in Cypriot, with people speaking on a spectrum between Standard Greek with a Cypriot accent, and what the locals call horkatika.

Are there any Standard Greek speakers who don’t understand what horkatika means? Good. Cypriot fortitions [j] to [k] after /r, ð, p/. In Standard Greek, that’s horjatika: “villager-talk”.

Approach 1. You need a name that can straightforwardly inflect in Greek, or that looks like something that straightforwardly inflects. That means a male name ending in -os, -is, -as, or a female name ending in -a, -i, -o.

Not a lot of English names do, but you’d be surprised. My uncle Andreas (Andrew) is rendered by my aunt in Greek as Andros. I believe Andros is a Cypriot variant of Andreas already, but it’s also how such grammatical assimilation can happen.

If an English male name ends in -a, -i, -o, stick an s on and you’re done. As in fact occurs for English names bused by Greeks already. Jimmy > Dzimis.

If an English female name ends in -a, -i, -o, you’re already done. Jenny > Dzeni.

If you’re not in that category, you can get creative, as Andros shows.

Approach 2. A name that can be translated into a Greek equivalent straightforwardly, because they’re cognate. There’s no shortage of names that show up in both English and Greek, because they are either Greek or Latin in origin (Philip, Nick, George, Luke, Mark, Lucy: Filipos, Nikos, Yorgos, Loukas, Markos, Loukia), or because they are common Christian patrimony as originally Jewish names (John, Elizabeth, James, Mary: Yannis, Elisavet, Iakovos, Maria).

Approach 3. A sound-alike name, which I don’t think really counts. The Greek diaspora is full of Athanasios that have renamed themselves Arthur, and Dimitrios that have renamed themselves Jim, and Kostas that have renamed themselves Gus (that was always a US thing, and didn’t happen in Australia: they stuck to Constantine > Con there). You could flip that, and turn Arthur into Thanasis, and James into Dimitris.

One extrapolation is Modern Greek, which (as Rich Alderson’s answer says) has them as short mid-high tense: [e̞ o̞].

Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca is the authoritative work in English on Ancient Greek pronunciation and the evidence we have for it, and it treats short mid-high tense as the default assumption. It rejects the notion that they were close mid [e o], because that would have likely clashed with the newly monophthongised <ei> <ou>, which were pronounced [eː oː]. He concedes that <ei> [eː], which historically reflected Homeric <ee>, was the long version of /e/;

But phonetically Attic ε probably lies midway between classical η [ɛː] and ει [eː], and there seems nothing to be gained by setting it in a special relationship with either.

I must say that I don’t find this argument convincing, but I do agree that mid-high is the null hypothesis.

Allen thinks the fact that Latin ĭ was often transliterated as Greek ε indicates not that Greek ε sounded like an “i”, but that Latin ĭ sounded like an “e” (“peculiarly open”—which I’ll translate into IPA as [ɪ]—”and so as near to Greek ε as to ι”. Ditto Greek ο used for Latin ŭ (presumably closer to [ʊ]).

The fact that Greek o transliterated the ŭ of other languages, e.g. Persian and Sanskrit (Mardonius, Greek <Mardonios>, was Old Persian Marduniya), indicates to him that the alternative υ was not by then [u] at all but [y]. Greeks at this point are likely asking “then why didn’t they use ου?! <Mardounios>” Because ου was a long vowel (Mardūnios); and back in Classical times, the difference between short and long vowels was extremely important.

Question Sources are not Question Details, and they aren’t a substitute for Question Details. Sources may be triggers for a question or context for a question; they are not an elucidation of a question, a reason for asking, or a framework for the kind of answers sought.

They’re not useless, but they’re not useful as often as details are. The fact there’s only one of them allowed can be a problem too. Compared to the free text of the detail, Sources are (by design) a straitjacket. So I anticipate that I will use sources less often than I used details.

I anticipate they’ll mostly be dumping grounds for YouTube links (which may be relevant to the question), images in image identification (and good luck wording that question usefully), and links to news articles for current affairs questions.

No, the reference in Jack Munzel’s Question Session of Quora News as an Insurgency knockoff is to The Insurgency blog.

Do bring a drink with you. Don’t expect to find cheap drinks in the vicinity.

On my latest visit to the Sacred Rock, I said to a vendor at the foot of the hill:

—As our ancient ancestors used to say: I’ll have a coke please.

The vendor replied.

—As our ancient ancestors used to say: that’ll be €5, buddy.

Don’t run eager to see the Marvels Of The Holy Rock, like I did when I was 8. It’s a 100m climb: you want to pace yourself.

Do look out for the Anafiotika. It’s a Greek Island village perched right on the Acropolis hillside. Which makes sense, because it was settled from a Greek island: “The first houses were built in the era of Otto of Greece, when workers from the island of Anafi came to Athens in order to work as construction workers in the refurbishment of King Otto’s Palace.”

Don’t expect the Parthenon frieze. There’s only tiny bits of it left on site: the frieze is scattered among museums throughout the world, though I was grateful that the British Museum sold a book which put photos of them all together.

Do expect scaffolding: the Acropolis has been a building site for restoration since 1975.

Don’t expect that you’re seeing all the history of the Acropolis. You’re seeing Bavarians’ impression of what the history of the Acropolis should be like. The Acropolis had 2500 years of history after Pericles, as a citadel and a cathedral. All of it was stripped away after Athens became the capital of the Modern Greek state.

Frankish Tower (Acropolis of Athens) – Wikipedia

Photo from 1872.

The tower was dismantled in 1874, as part of a wider cleaning-up of the Acropolis from post-Classical buildings, a project initiated and financed by Heinrich Schliemann. The demolition of such an “integral part of the Athenian horizon” (Théophile Gautier) drew considerable criticism at the time, while the eminent historian of Frankish Greece William Miller later called it “an act of vandalism unworthy of any people imbued with a sense of the continuity of history”.

Do expect to find the Caryatids, the “maidens of the rock”, and do expect people to tell you the story that the five maidens wept when their sister was stolen away by Lord Elgin.

Don’t expect the same people to say that the Caryatids you’re looking at are replicas: the real remaining five sisters are shielded from Athens smog in the Acropolis Museum.

And, hate to say it, do expect odd looks if you do a Hellenic Pagan prayer. Hellenic pagans exist, but they’re not widely known.