Nick on Quora

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.)

Pi approximation day?

By almost remembering it. Just two days off…

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?

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)

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!

Masiello. Pegah. Jimmy Liu.
Sophie Dockx. Laura Hale. Ulrich, too.
de Guzman. Lisa Lai.
Jian Sun. By and by,
all are gone.

And then, me.

And then:

You.

Your insight is correct, Riccardo: declensions and genders are both classes of nominals. The difference in Indo-European is that gender, not declension, is what governs the agreement of non-nouns with nouns, while declension is how the morphology of nouns themselves works.

So in Ancient Greek, gender only affects the ending of the noun in patches—a couple of cases differ by gender in each declension. But a third declension noun will agree in gender with a 1st/2nd declension adjective or pronoun, without any problem.

You wouldn’t design things like that; it’s kind of a happenstance. Gender is slightly (only slightly) more predictable than an arbitrary declension, which makes it a better candidate for agreement. But it’s an accident of how Indo-European developed. And recall that the feminine is a late development in Indo-European anyway, originating in a collective suffix.

Many languages outside Indo-European have noun classes, and the term “noun classes” is used precisely because in those languages, there is not much of a distinction between declension and gender to be made. Swahili has 18 noun classes; that number sounds more like a declension count than a gender count, but there is a strong semantic component to them (as there is in noun classes in general), and animacy takes over as a factor in agreement anyway.

Frisk’s etymological dictionary concurs with Frank Dauenhauer’s answer, that the bustard was called ōtis ‘one with ears’ (“from its cheek tufts or head? See Thompson, Birds”); thus also ōtos ‘scops owl’, from its ear tufts.

If you go to A glossary of Greek birds : Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 1860-1948 Sir, p. 200, you’ll find he says the etymology is doubtful, as well as whether the bird is the Great bustard (Otis tarda) or the Houbara bustard. But I don’t see what else it would be.

This isn’t the answer, and I hope it will trigger an answer from the more knowledgeable.

Notions of human-crafted art as an expression of the sublime are not particularly new. But in the 19th century, art inspired not merely “almost” religious reactions; it actually came to occupy the place of a surrogate religion. This was dispelled with World War I, and the various forms of art retreated from the Sublime in different ways. The visual arts did it with dadaism, and they’re still going on about it to this day.

I got the fullest articulation of this from looking over the shoulder of someone doing his PhD on the Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter; you can see a reflection of this in the Wikipedia page, where Man overpowers malign Nature through capital-R Rhetoric. Poor naive bastard, I thought. Just as well he killed himself before WWI.

Wagner was the most full-throated expression of this notion of a surrogate religion. He was a prolific writer despite being a composer; he architected his operas as Total works of art, combining the visual, the musical, and the literary; he ladled mysticism heavily both in the librettos and the staging of the operas; and he had a lot of loyal acolytes.

Why would Wagner think that up? There was a change in how music was produced, from court entertainment to subscriptions and paying customers. There was a change in how the artist was regarded, from decorator to conduit of the sublime to expressor of emotions. Both are wound up in where Romanticism comes from. But the extent to which Wagner took it must have come, in at least some part, from the diminishing of power that religion had over the intelligentsia.

Wagner comes before Nietzsche, but to many Wagnerians, God was already if not dead, sickly: in a rationalist, enlightenment worldview, religion just didn’t hold the same mystique. And since this worldview was still quite recent, the deist and atheist intelligentsia went looking for their recently lost experience of the transcendental elsewhere.

Maybe Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things” (πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος)?

He also is believed to have created a major controversy during ancient times through his statement that, “Man is the measure of all things”, interpreted by Plato to mean that there is no absolute truth, but that which individuals deem to be the truth. Although there is reason to question the extent of the interpretation of his arguments that has followed, that concept of individual relativity was revolutionary for the time, and contrasted with other philosophical doctrines that claimed the universe was based on something objective, outside of human influence or perceptions.