Month: December 2015

To add to Achilleas Vortselas’ answer for Greek,

The prefix παν- “all” is another intensifier, which was also in use in Ancient Greek. So πάμμαυρος “all-black” (which is not ancient), παμμάταιος “all-vain” (which is).

Greek also has superlative adjectives (so μαυρότατος “blackest”).

And a colloquial (negative) intensifying prefix is in fact… καρα-, which is Turkish kara– in OP’s question. This is mostly used with nouns, e.g. καράβλαχος (not “black Wallachian”, but “damn hillbilly”), but it does extend to verbs (καρατσεκάρω “black + English check: “I’ll damn well check”), and occasionally adjectives:  Google has 673 instances of καραάσχετο, Internet Greek for “damned irrelevant” (i.e. “this is irrelevant to the thread, but…”)

Rather than join the United States of Mexico in adopting a name that won’t make a difference, the easier way for Australia to subvert chants of “USA! USA!” is through appropriate use of Syncopation. As follows:

A US!A US!A US!A US!

This is not to be confused with German “Aus! Aus! Aus! Das Spiel ist Aus!”, for when Germany won the World Cup in 1954.

…

Really, Quora. My answer needs to be longer. OK, I tried it out on an American friend living here, and she was suitably annoyed. (The A-U-S version, not the Aus! Aus! version.) Does that help?

Like a lot of Ancient Greek verbs, aphiēmi has an impossibly broad range of meaning. Literally, it means “send from”. If you look at the range of meanings in LSJ (which is Classical Greek rather than Biblical Greek, but that helps us avoid the temptation of theologically influenced glosses), you’ll find:

I. send forth

II. send away

II.1.b. let go a person, release a person; and as a ditransitve, release a person from  something, acquit someone from something.

As others have said, releasing someone from a debt is the same thing as forgiving someone’s debt. (In fact, one of the instances of “release a person” given is from Polybius, “release them untaxed”, i.e. let them not pay their taxes.) But the concept involved is  forgiving a debt (or “trespass”), not  forgiving in general.

-o, -onis is the native Latin declension. –on, -onis is not native Latin, so it is a morphological import from Greek.

So if it drops the -n, the word or name has been felt to be common or salient enough to be nativised as Latin. If it does not drop the -n, it is felt to be a Greek loanword, and is being spoken, as it were, with a Greek accent.

Apollo was a well established god in the Roman pantheon; in fact Wikipedia indicates he was already in Etruscan, as Apulu. So his name was assimilated into Latin, and dropped the -n. Orion was not a well established figure in Roman mythology; so his name stayed looking more like Greek.

Same story with famous vs not so famous Greeks. Plato, Crito, Zeno, but Euphorion, Solon, Philemon. And yes, it’s a very arbitrary dividing line, and accordingly you will find names with both endings: Euphorio or Euphorion, http://latinlexicon.org/definiti…

Of course, this only applies to the Greek –ōn, -ōnos declension (Latin -o, -onis); if it’s a different declension, Latin will stick with –on; eg Xenophon, -ontis.

1. Because Greek was the language of pioneers of STEM in antiquity.

2. Because Greek was the scientific language of the Roman Empire, and as such kept contributing to the naming of scientific concepts.

3. Because Latin (with the Greek layer of scientific vocabulary included) was the scientific language of the West from mediaeval times up until the 1800s.

4. Because even when Graeco-Latin stopped being the scientific language of the West, enough of the scientific vocabulary had already been contributed into Western languages by Graeco-Latin, that new terms kept drawing from that source—for consistency and associated prestige, well into the 20th century.

Nothing to do with Latin being dead (which, as a scientific language, it wasn’t), stable (Neo-Latin wasn’t), or concise (if you want concision, you go to Greek, which handles compounds a lot more flexibly than Latin). Nothing to do with Latin being secret: all intellectuals in Europe understood it, and it was the language of the church that persecuted Galileo, as well. (Yes, Latin kept the Unwashed Horde out of science. Contemporary English-based jargon does just as well.)

I lived in Irvine from 1999 to 2001, though it doesn’t sound like much has changed since. I was in my late 20s, an urbanite, with no car. It was horrid.

Irvine had just gotten Safest City in America status, with zero murders in the past year. After a few months there, I took to saying that it all made sense: people have to be alive before they can be killed.

It’s a Diaeresis (diacritic) or tréma, so named because it divides up two vowel letters to be pronounced as two syllables, which would otherwise be pronounced together as a single syllable (and typically a single vowel). So Zoë is pronounced Zo-ee, as distinct from rhyming with Joe.

It looks identical to the Germanic umlaut, but the umlaut is used to change the pronunciation of a vowel, and historically derived from a small <e>. The diaeresis OTOH has been two dots since it was invented for Hellenistic Greek.

1. If the first list of the Seven Wonders was compiled by Herodotus (Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), then the Parthenon was under construction at the time he compiled it; and even if it had been built, it would have been too new to include. But that argument doesn’t work, because the Mausoleum was done after Herodotus.

2. The criteria for the Seven Wonders appear to have been Big Is Beautful, rather than rewarding perfect structures per se. And perfect temples were probably a dime a dozen back in the day. Per the wikipedia link above, the  original term was θεάματα, “spectacles, sights”, and the emphasis was on the spectacular. Antipater of Sidon’s list, which is quoted there, is also all about the spectacular:

I have gazed on the walls of impregnable Babylon along which chariots may race, and on the Zeus by the banks of the Alpheus, I have seen the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Helios, the great man-made mountains of the lofty pyramids, and the gigantic tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the sacred house of Artemis that towers to the clouds, the others were placed in the shade, for the sun himself has never looked upon its equal outside Olympus.

The Parthenon may be perfect, but it is not impregnable, gigantic, a man-made mountain, or towering to the clouds.

3. It has been argued by Anthony Kaldellis (Department of Classics)  that the Parthenon was not considered that big a deal in antiquity, and that its reputation as an amazing structure only emerged in Byzantine times, when it was a church. (Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.12.18 , https://www.lsa.umich.edu/UMICH/… )

To give a pragmatics answer to why you would use either a conditional model or a present model in questions, to begin with:

In many cultures, and English is one, indirect requests are considered more polite than direct requests. An indirect request implies a direct request, but it gives the listener the (fictional) option of backing out by misunderstanding it, and it also gives the listener the (conventional) option of offering to fulfil the request, rather than being seen as complying with a demand.

“Pass the salt”. (Oh, that’s a direct request. Can’t get out of that. I have been put on the spot. Damn blunt furrner. Should get Trump to slap an armband on him.)

“Can you pass the salt?” (I can. Why would he ask? Might  he need salt? Why, in that case, let me spontaneously and completely off my own initiative offer the salt! I feel so  empowered!)

“Could you pass the salt?” (I could, hypothetically, if the need arose. Why would he ask? etc etc…. Oh, and he might not have needed the salt after all, since he was being so hypothetical about it; so kudos to me for being so proactive and able to anticipate his needs!)

Cultures do funny things with requests, since they can be seen as confronting and invoking a power differential. Greek, by contrast, usually limits the indirectness to a question (“Will you pass the salt?”), but it uses other means of toning down the threat to the listener’s face. Like sticking a diminutive on the object requested. Μου δίνετε το ονοματάκι σας; “Will you give me your eensy-teensy name?” There’s nothing eensy-teensy about most Greek names; but that creates the fiction that the request for the name is hardly any imposition at all: I’m only asking for this one tiny thing…

The outlier dialects, Tsakonian, Pontic, Cappadocian, Mariupolitan: not mutually intelligible, with Tsakonian clearly the furthest away. In terms of the Swadesh list (100 words), Tsakonian has 70% in common with Standard Greek.

Cretan and Cypriot both have 89% words in the Swadesh-100. With dialect attrition, there are versions of Cypriot and Cretan that Athenians can understand, and versions that they can’t.

The other dialects of Greek are mutually intelligible, although there are some isolated instances of berserk phonological change; Samothracian was the one that has surprised me the most, since Northern Greek is not normally that far from the standard.