Brandon Li’s answer of Pharaoh is excellent, but given the Judaeo-Christian context of Pharaoh, I’d argue that a bigger villain in that culture was Judas Iscariot. Tony Wright has argued that for pre-Hitler Australian politics, but I’m sure Judas was invoked much more widely than that: From Judas to Goebbels: when political insult risks dying of shame 

Originally Answered:

In your opinion, which languages sound awful?

French. Mumble mumble mumble through my nose mumble.

Portuguese. Mumble mumble mumble through my nose mumble while lounging on a beach.

Romanian. Way, way too many diphthongs.

Hm. Noone teaches Byzantine Greek as something distinct from Ancient Greek. That’s because for most purposes, it isn’t distinct.

I’m going to go through a potted history of Byzantine Greek for others who might stumble on this question.

There are three registers of Mediaeval Greek to consider; I’ll use Mediaeval to include Greek under Latin rule.

• The vernacular doesn’t show up much at all; nothing systematic before the 14th century. There is exceptionally a vernacular corpus from the 9th century, the Category:Bulgarian Greek inscriptions. You don’t need Modern Greek to read them.
• Low literary Greek was an officialese Koine, with occasional hints of vernacular developments, and lots of Latinisms.
• High literary Greek was Atticist: it was an attempt to write in the Attic of the ancients, with varying degrees of over-enthusiasm.

If you’re going to work with Mediaeval or Byzantine Greek, you do the following:

• Learn Ancient Greek. There will be atticisms of various flavours, a bit more than in the Gospels (though some church fathers had reasonable Attic learning).
• Be across Koine.
• You won’t need to learn Modern Greek unless you are actually working on vernacular texts.
• Read a couple of histories of Greek, so you know in broad terms what’s likely to come up. Medieval and Modern Greek (9780521299787): Robert Browning, A History of the Language and its Speakers (9781118785157): Geoffrey Horrocks
• There isn’t much in terms of a grammar of Byzantine Greek; An historical Greek grammar chiefly of the Attic dialect [By] Antonius N. Jannaris is still the best out there. There are specialist articles, but you likely won’t need them.
• Bring a dictionary. Bring three, actually: A Patristic Greek Lexicon: G. W. H. Lampe; Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität; Greek lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine periods (from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1100) : Sophocles, E. A.
• Be prepared for oddities. The oddities will depend on who’s writing and when. Atticists get enthusiastic to the point of fictional grammar. (When Harry Turtledove was a Byzantinist, he wrote “Most Byzantine historians felt they knew enough to use the optatives correctly; some of them were right”.) Byzantine authors systematically misaccented words, because they could. Some authors slip up and let vernacularisms in, though that’s more a late Byzantine thing.

*Probably* not.

Language change is influenced by several things, in both a conservative and a innovative direction. Input from older versions of the languages demonstrably has an effect in holding back language change — or at least, in promoting use of the older version’s features in parallel.

• Outright reversing language change doesn’t happen that often, and needs special circumstances—like with Icelandic and flæmeli (small population, universal literacy). Conservative influence however has a lower threshold for success.

But the success of conservative influence is incidental to it being older. The real reason why any conservative input would be successful is that it is being held up as prestigious. This is what happens with standard literary versions of languages: they happen to be more conservative than spoken variants of languages, but they influence language change because they are held up as prestigious, particularly in education.

So for old recordings to influence language change, it is not enough that they become available. They would need to be actively promoted in mass education as models to be emulated. In western culture at least that seems unlikely.

One area where recordings have much more of an impact is language revival efforts. In that context, knowing what your ancestors’ native accent was like is very important, though it may not be enough for you to shake off your modern accent…

Logan R. Kearsley has written a comprehensive answer on one angle. I will throw a hint on another angle: if you have enough Noun Incorporation (linguistics)  and polysynthesis at a language, you’re going to end up with languages where what European languages treat as nouns or adjectives usually end up as affixes—so what look like words are mostly verbs. In fact, from time to time you do hear people claiming that some such languages (almost always Amerindian languages) don’t have nouns, though my recollection is that the claim is marginal.

So you can in principle have languages with just verbs. However in practice you do have affixes that will tend to signify arguments rather than predicates—so you’ve really just pushed the noun/verb distinction down into morphemes rather than words.

Oh, I see Logan has also written on the converse, whether a language can have just nouns: Is it possible to make a language with just nouns and adjectives?

Did the Ancient Greeks have a different *language* for sacred purposes? No, Ancient Greek was their language.

But the Ancient Greeks did use different dialects for different genres of literature, to an extent that has not been paralleled since. Epic dialect (a mix based on archaic Ionic) for epic poetry, and allusions to it, is the closest they had to a Latin or Sanskrit, given the immense prestige of Homer. Doric for choral poetry, Aeolic for lyric poetry, Ionic for history and medicine (following Herodotus and Hippocrates), Attic for default prose.

The Mediaeval and Modern Greeks are a better comparison. There was a little Epic, Ionic and Doric written now and then, but the main distinction was between learnèd registers and the vernacular, with the vernacular avoided thoroughly until the 12th century, and by most writers right until the 20th century. The learnèd registers were varying mixes of Attic, Koine, and calqued French. (Those who’ve read Psichari know what I mean by the last bit.)

And to this day, the Greek Orthodox (and those of that heritage) are very uncomfortable with the vernacular being used in a Christian religious context. I did a spit-take walking past a Greek Catholic church, and hearing the mass in Modern Greek. Catholics in Greece are post-Vatican II, after all. Unthinkable in Orthodox  services. The most vernacular language used in the services is probably the Gospels…

This is NSFW. Kinda.

The Greek word for a porn film is tsonta.

The word comes from the Venetian word zonta, which is cognate with Italian giunta and English joint.

The original meaning of tsonta was the same as Louisianan lagniappe: it’s an extra helping, an extra portion of the merchandise you’re buying, that the vendor throws in for free.

The cultural loading of the etymology is just startling. Have you guessed why porn was called tsonta?

And why you can infer from it that Greek movie audiences in the 50s were predominantly, if not exclusively male?

Felidae  is the Family (biology)  that cats and great cats belong to. All animal families are formed with the suffix –idae. In this case, –idae is suffixed to the Latin word felis, meaning cat.

The –idae suffix is a Latin plural counterpart to Greek –idai (singular –idēs), meaning offspring. In the plural, the –idai suffix was used to denote tribes or groupings of people with a common ancestor; e.g. the Heracleidae, the descendants of Hercules. It was also generalised to names of dynasties, and not just Greek ones either: the Fatimid Caliphate is so called as a Hellenisation of al-Fātimiyyūn “offspring of Fatimah”.

So by analogy with Heraclids, “the tribe of Hercules”, and Fatimids “the tribe of Fatimah”, you get felids, the tribe of cats.

Currently, no.

Historically, Greek has been used routinely to write other languages, including the Bactrian language (hence Sho (letter) ), Karamanli Turkish, and Albanian.

There’s lots of these—Modern Greek from Ancient Greek, Russian from Old Church Slavonic—but I’m not aware of a generic term. In Greek. for example, these are referred to as learnèd loans (λόγιο δάνειο)—but a learned loan in English is a loan from Latin, not Old English. (In fact we do have a term for learned loans in English: inkhorn terms.)

Such borrowings are often the result of linguistic purism, which seeks to use “native” lexical resources instead of foreign terms. But purism isn’t the only motivation for them, so I wouldn’t call them purisms…