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I know nothing about Armenian, Old or New, apart from vosp, ’cause I like lentil soup.

I stared for half an hour at:

• A Grammatical Sketch of Classical Armenian,
• Damme, Dirk Van – a Short Classical Armenian Grammar
• Grammaire armenienne : M. Lauer and A. Carriere .

I think I have the answer.

Old Armenian does not have nouns whose nominatives end in a vowel. So the a-declension, those nouns that in Latin and Greek ended in -a, end in a consonant. Greek gynē corresponds to OArm kin. It seems that final unstressed vowels were systematically chopped off in Proto-Armenian.

So, if a Greek word like plateia comes into Armenian (via Syriac plāṭīā), “square, public street”, Old Armenian could not deal with it as a nominative: it wouldn’t fit the patterns. (I don’t know how are supposed to work when your plural ending is -kʿ: I mean, sg.nom. azg, pl.nom azgkʿ ? Seriously?)

In Old Armenian, plāṭīā ends up as połotay.

Account #1. To make it fit, the word has to end in a consonant. Chopping off the vowels wouldn’t work well, you’d end up with plat, which doesn’t sound close enough to plāṭīā. So the safe thing to do is to add a consonant to the foreign word. And –y is the best consonant to add, because it’s a glide: the result still has a similar syllable structure to the original.

I see that Greek hylē is borrowed as հիւղէ (hiwłē). But Wiktionary also notes the variants hiłeay hiwł and hiwłay, so there was a strong trend to go with -ay.

Account #2. But it may be that this is just a trick of orthography. Lauer & Carriere say that final –ay is pronounced –ā. So this could just be that plāṭīā was pronounced połotā in Armenian, and –ay was how Armenian wrote down the new-fangled long final a.

In any case, this looks like stuff internal to Armenian.

Again, this is all extrapolated guesswork from a couple of sketch grammars.

Fanaticism. A “dyed” Olympiakos supporter (βαμμένος Ολυμπιακός) is a die-hard Olympiakos fan, not an embittered Olympiakos fan. From the Triantafyllidis dictionary:

Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής

3. (μππ.) φανατισμένος οπαδός (πολιτικής παράταξης, ποδοσφαιρικής ομάδας κ.ά.): Είναι βαμμένος αριστερός / φασίστας / Ολυμπιακός.

Fanatical supporter (of a political party, a football team, etc): he’s a ‘dyed’ left-winger/fascist/Olympiakos [fan].

A ‘dyed’ fascist might also be rancorous because their ideology is not getting through; but you can certainly be a ‘dyed’ support when your party is in government, or your team is winning the championship.

EDIT: the expression is also in English: a dyed-in-the-wool Liverpool fan.

I get that it’s a poem by a Christian, that it mentions feeling abandoned by God and the Virgin Mary, that it alludes to God-in-the-Whirlwind from Job in the context of enduring fury and desperation, and that religion is shown as a temporary respite in the end.

But that doesn’t sound like a poem encapsulating Christianity (Michael Masiello’s answer to How can I stop hating religions and God?); it sounds like a poem written by a Christian, having a crisis of faith in Christianity.

Magister?

Bauer’s Lexicon defines ἀρραβών as “payment of part of a purchase price in advance; first installment, deposit, down payment, pledge”. In time, the meaning has shifted to the kind of pledge associated with marriage: a betrothal, an engagement.

(Greeks, please do not cite Ancient words with Modern inflections. It’s just confusing to those not as blessed as you to speak Modern Greek.)

The word actually entered Greek in the classical era; it is used by the Attic orators like Isaeus and Antiphon; so it would likeliest have come in from Phoenecian, not Hebrew. Liddell-Scott does indeed cite the Hebrew as ’ērābōn.

And that word is 6162. עֲרָבוֹן (erabon) — a pledge .

As Dimitrios Michmizos says, “worthy” is the best translation; “worthy” is not about one’s worth, “valuable”, but about one’s merit. It certainly isn’t idiomatic in English as an acclamation, though.

Konstantinos Konstantinides points to the added gloss “deserved”; and while it is not a common expression in English, you will occasionally see the exclamation “Well deserved!”

Seth’s Blog: “Well deserved”

“Congratulations” is fine for winning the lottery, but “well deserved” is reserved for people who put in the effort and the time and took the risk to get somewhere.

See Can you upload audio files as part of your Quora question?.

Vocaroo | Online voice recorder has become popular here lately in answers on “what does your accent sound like”.

I reluctantly agree with Konstantinos that the question should not be a “what sound is this”: not exactly googleable, and I have seen questions like this torpedoed. If the sound *illustrates* what you’re asking about, that’s different.

Greeks (OK, Byzantines) gave the Russians Orthodoxy, and feel a bond with them out of that. During Ottoman rule, the Russians saw themselves as the Third Rome—the successor state to Byzantium, which the Greeks felt was their lost empire. The Greeks in turn longed to be rescued by the Russians:

Ακόμη τούτην άνοιξη (ραγιάδες, ραγιάδες)
τούτο το καλοκαίρι (Μωρηά και Ρούμελη),
Οσο νάρθει ο Μόσκοβος (ραγιάδες ραγιάδες)
να φέρει το σεφέρι (Μωρηά και Ρούμελη)!

Just one more spring (ye slaves, ye slaves),
just one more summertime (Morea and Rumeli),
Till Moscow comes
bringing the army down.

The Greeks certainly remember the Orlov Revolt of 1770 a lot more clearly than the Russians do.

Yes: Sparta was an Ancient Greek city, and the inhabitants of Sparta spoke a dialect of Greek and participated in the Olympic games. So Spartans were ancient Greek people, in the same way Persepolitans were ancient Iranian people. The more usual ancient designation of those people, though, was Laconians or Lacedaemonians, referring to the region that Sparta controlled. (Hence Laconic wit, referring to the stereotypical terseness of Spartans.)

Sparta was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece. In antiquity the city-state was known as Lacedaemon, while the name Sparta referred to its main settlement on the banks of the Eurotas River in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese.

The town of Sparta (modern) was rebuilt in 1834, and “Spartan” is a surname that Greeks have adopted. (cc Kelley Spartiatis). So Spartans are also Modern Greek people.

Quora wants academics to promote their bios, in order to enhance the credibility of their answers, and thence of Quora answers as a whole. So while they can participate as just another user, the intent is that not all answers are equal.

When it comes to popular opinion, of course, all answers are equal, because kitty cats get more upvotes than three page screeds.

By the same token, no question is owed an answer by anyone, whether the question is posed by “an original researcher” or a layperson or a crackpot. Anyone is allowed to dismiss questions for whatever reason, and an academic is allowed to dismiss questions which the discipline as a whole would dismiss as crackpot. (That, after all, was the real motivation behind the “original research” requirement in Wikipedia.) That’s not an equity matter, that’s a matter of people being free to choose how to engage with questions.

You can object that this is groupthink and inflexibility. But just at Wikipedia, this is not the forum where you get to persuade an entire discipline that they’ve got etymology all wrong.

… I come into this knowing only an outline of Byzantine History, and Wikipedia. But, to focus on what the question details say:

• Constantinople fell to the Crusaders in 1203/1204, to the Niceans in 1261, and to the Ottomans in 1453.
• The Siege of Constantinople (717–718) by the Arabs was unsuccessful.
• The Siege of Constantinople was planned to take advantage of the Twenty Years’ Anarchy, when one Byzantine Emperor was deposing another.
• Leo III the Isaurian seized power five months before the siege began, in March 717.
• Leo III also introduced Byzantine Iconoclasm as official policy (nine years later), which threw the Empire into religious strife for the next century.

I think what you’re asking, Dimitris (and it is usually hard to make out) is whether Leo III’s ascent to the throne was a kind of “taking over” of Constantinople, like 1204, 1261, and 1453?

Iconoclasm, Wikipedia says, was a long time coming: it wasn’t an idea that just popped into Leo III’s head in 726. (The Byzantine historians say that it did, in response to a tsunami he read as divine disapproval of icons. But our historians know that’s not how history works.) So there were rabble outside Constantinople’s city walls that wanted an iconoclast in the palace. And most of them would have been on the borders with the Caliphate, since iconoclasm may have been inspired by the aniconic preference of Islam.

But Leo III took over in 717 as just another usurper. He didn’t take over with a ten-year plan to reform Orthodoxy. If I had a denarius for every time a usurper took power in Constantinople (let alone Rome), I would have a whole bunch of denarii. The fact that Leo III had iconoclast supporters doesn’t mean Constantinople fell to the iconoclasts, any more than Julian’s ascent meant that Constantinople fell to the pagans. They were just another faction internal to Byzantium.