Could you do your local rendition of “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”?

So how *would* I render this in Klingon?

A battle in Star Trek space opera involves spaceships. Mobility in Star Trek involves spaceships, shuttles, and transporter beams. A quick exit in Star Trek routinely involves the latter.

Therefore, obviously,

jolpat! jolpat! jolpat vIDIlmeH, wo’ vInobrup!

A transporter system! A transporter system! In order to pay for a transporter system, I am prepared to give an Empire!

How come the Greek peninsula remained Orthodox Christian and Greek, but Anatolia and Thrace/Constantinople got ‘Islamified’ and ‘Turkified?’

Pre-1453 and Post-1453 policy.

Before 1453, Christians were given the status of Christians anywhere in Islamdom as dhimmis, and were subject to missionary activity, as described in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?.

Even so, intense conversion of Christians to Islam in Anatolia only happened in the 14th and 15th centuries, and presumably is to be associated with the more fervent Islam of the Turkish emirates, rather than the stability of the preceding Seljuk Sultanate. Just because you’re conquered by Muslims doesn’t mean there is immediate pressure for you to convert. For a parallel, see the Copts of Egypt; I learned (from Dimitris Almyrantis, I think) that the mass conversions to Islam only date from the 10th century.

After the conquest of Constantinople, the Rum Millet was instituted by Mehmed II, which afforded Christians in the Ottoman Empire a good deal more autonomy, and less pressure to convert. Accordingly, there was not actually that much missionary activity in the Balkans, or for that matter in the Rûm Eyalet (the Pontus, which was conquered only after the Rum Millet was established). The Muslim indigenous populations in the Balkans (Albanians, Bosniaks) and in the Pontus (Greek-speaking Muslims) resulted from deliberate missionary activity in the 16th and 17th centuries, and they had limited scope. (See e.g. Islamization of Albania)

How is being drunk perceived in your culture?

I don’t know that you’ll find many cultures that think getting blotto is a wonderful thing, but Greek traditional culture is one of many that tut-tuts public drunkenness. The maxim my father used to warn me with was, να το πίνεις [το κρασί], να μη σε πίνει: “You should drink it [wine], you shouldn’t let it drink you.”

(“In Soviet Russia” joke opportunities ignored.)

Greek drinking culture is accompanied by nibbles (mezze), expressly so as to avert quick inebriation—especially if brandy (ouzo, raki) rather than wine is involved. Wine, for that matter, features at the dinner table rather than in the mezze joint. There is a word for drinking without nibbles: xerosfyri, “dry hammer”; the etymology may in fact be “dry + whistling” or a corruption of “dry + sieved”. There is a word for it, precisely because it is looked down upon. Indeed, British drinking culture, with its drinking xerosfyri, was an easy target of criticism for my aunts and uncles in Greece. (Their children of course were already going to bars and knocking back whisky anyway.)

Accompanying this, Greek slang has about as many words for being drunk as Eskimo is alleged to have for snow: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some slang phrases to describe getting drunk in your language or country?

Is it correct that only Orthodoxy kept the Greek language alive? Were non-Christian Greeks not speaking Greek up to the 1900s?

It’s only correct that Orthodoxy kept the Greek alphabet alive; scripts in the Ottoman Empire were associated with creed. Thus, according to the creed of the Greek speaker, Greek was written in

  • Greek script (Orthodox),
  • Latin script (Catholic: the Franco-Levantines, including many works of the Cretan Renaissance, and in the Aegean sponsored by Jesuit schools),
  • Hebrew (Jews: the Judaeo-Greek Pentateuch of 1547, and some other songs and religious texts in Judaeo-Greek), and
  • Arabic (Aljamiado literature, written by and for Muslim Greeks).

Just as Turkish was written in Greek script for Turkish-speaking Christians (Karamanlides). There would be no Aljamiado literature, of course, if Greek Muslims didn’t want to write and read in Greek.

Aljamiado literature (a term borrowed from its Spanish counterpart) has been ignored by Greek scholars until recently. A 2014 lecture on the literature is available at Τουρκογιαννιώτικα στιχοπλάκια και τουρκοκρητικές μαντινάδες: Η ελληνική aljamiado γραμματεία (inaudible Turkish and Greek, with audible but halting simultaneous translation into English).


EDIT: Btw, the notion you will occasionally hear in Greece, that the Greek church somehow preserved Greek is actually bundled up in the notion that the Greek church preserved Greek identity and Greek learning during Ottoman Rule. The Rum Millet, you can argue, did in fact do so; but that was not a Greek idea, but Mehmed II’s. (Dimitris Almyrantis, I’m fishing for an answer from you here.)

Is there a linguistic term for when someone answers a question by asking a question?

A question also posed at Is there a word for answering a question with a question?, over at Stack Exchange.

Maieutics and the Socratic method are not it. That’s Socrates’ use of questions to encourage someone to rethink their premises; Socrates wasn’t ELIZA.

The answer with a long list of rhetorical figures, posed in the form of a bunch of questions, is inaccurate too: those rhetorical figures cited are just questions, as you can check at https://rhetfig.appspot.com/list.

The only reputable-looking answer is counterquestion, which is on Wiktionary (counterquestion – Wiktionary), and in the OED, dating from 1864:

Is there a phonological explanation of why the letter “s” dropped in many French words (resulting in adding the circumflex accent)?

Between them, Christopher Ray Miller’s answer and Brian Collins’ answer have most of it covered. There’s one more way to look at it though.

French dropped /s/ at the start of consonant clusters, at the start and in the middle of words. So /sp/ > /p/, /sn/ > /n/, /st/ > /t/ etc: hospital > hôpital, Rhodanus > *Rhodne > *Rhosne > Rhône, establir > établir.

The motivation for this in phonotactics is to reduce the complexity of syllable structures, which make syllables easier to pronounce. It is linguistically common for /s/ to drop off at the start of clusters like that. Dennis Rhodes’ answer notices a similar process going on in some dialects of Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico): español ends up pronounced as etpañol, which is on the way to epañol. In my favourite language, Tsakonian, /s/ followed by a consonant is replaced by the aspirated consonant: stoma > tʰuma, sporos > pʰore.

Should we try to collapse blatantly bigoted questions, or let them be answered appropriately?

You’ve got a variety of responses here.

If Obvious Troll Is Trolling, your answer is not going to educate them, the question is likely going to be deleted anyway, and your answer will become inaccessible unless you archive it off to a blog. As many have said, Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer most succinctly.

If you write a good answer anyway, i.e. answer it appropriately: don’t do it for the OP, as Tong Hui Kang’s answer argues. Do it to spread good information. And do it if you think it is really important to spread that information, because the risk that the question is going to be deleted anyway is pretty strong.

Don’t do it to give a withering witty reply back. Not unless it’s Oscar Wilde God Level funny. Countersnark gets boring quickly.

Don’t do it to virtue signal. I don’t care if the term has been appropriated by the Cultural Right, it points to a real phenomenon, there’s way too much of it on Quora, and it is boring. And not particularly informative.

Don’t do it to flame them right back to oblivion. The way BNBR works, you’ll be the one ending up in oblivion.

And lastly and most difficult of all: Do not assume by default that everyone who disagrees with your worldview is an Obvious Troll Trolling. Stating that assumption in an answer is, in fact, a BNBR offence. (I’m sure Jennifer Edeburn has the reference for that somewhere.) Hanlon’s razor applies to Quora questions, just as it does to Quora UX.

What Greek dialects sound Italian?

Lara Novakov and Konstantinos Konstantinides are both right.

The dialects of the Ionian islands have had the longest exposure to Italian (from 1200 through to 1800), and has substantial Italian vocabulary. This performance of Petegola from Corfu (Mardi Gras skits) may exaggerate the intonation as vaudeville, but exaggerated vaudeville is probably the closest you’re going to get nowadays to dialect intonation; and it sounds a little Italian to me:

Why yes, petegola is Venetian, for ‘gossip’.

Of course, nothing sounds more Italian than the Greek actually spoken in Salento and Calabria: it really is Greek as rendered by the Mario Bros.

Answered 2017-07-24 · Upvoted by

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