What is the Greek word for heaven?

Ouranos for “sky, heaven”, and pre-Christian and proto-Christian notions of heaven. It’s what “Our father who art in Heaven” uses. And yes, that is the same word as Uranus; Uranus was the sky god.

Once Christianity was entrenched, Heaven as in where the virtuous dead go is Paradeisos, Paradise, as it is in Catholic languages too; English is an anomaly in retaining Heaven for that sense.

Why do the Greek font characters I’ve written in a Word doc not convert to Greek in a PDF doc but convert instead into their english transliteration?

At a guess, because you have used a non- Unicode font in the Word document, so the actual characters used are ASCII.

There was quite a lot of infrastructure available 10 years ago for converting between ASCII fonts and Unicode. Not sure there will be as much now.

If your source document used a Unicode font, then it’s puzzling. Transliteration is above the paygrade of PDF converters.

Why was the Columbo series so successful?

When I told a colleague years ago that I loved Columbo, his response was a snort: “Columbo. He’s all shtick.”

And yes, that’s why Columbo was so successful. Not because of the innovative inverted story telling; that’s just a convention. Not because of the cleverness of the crimes: the cleverness was variable, and much of the time too clever by half. Not because of trying to work out the incriminating evidence: you’d never convict on Columbo’s evidence much of the time, if it wasn’t for the culprits’ relief in confessing.

But because of the mischievous mind games that Columbo’s shtick involved, and the not too subtle class struggle they embodied.

Seeing a gruff, yelling Columbo with a pressed suit in the pilot is quite the shock…

How do you say grandfather in Greek? Are there more and less formal versions?

Ancient Greek páppos. Modern Greek papús.

Fifty years ago, people would have still been trying to make  páppos the formal version. Now papús is universal. It covers the space from “grandfather” to “grampa”.

Diminutive papúlis is fairly limited, to cutesy child talk: “gramps”, I guess.

Has anyone got any ideas for a simple grammar design?

Look at Interglossa. Minimal number of verbs (a dozen?), which basically only encode thematic structures (feel, act, react, become…); and lots of verb modifiers, which capture the actual verb semantics. A thing of beauty, which has not really been followed up.

Is the modern pronunciation of Greek accurate for koine?

It’s close. This is from memory, so I could be wrong in a couple of details. 1st century AD Koine was the same as Modern Greek in the following:

  • Stress accent, not pitch accent
  • Diphthongs pronounced as single vowels
  • Most vowels with modern values
  • Most consonants with modern values
  • No aspiration

It differs as follows:

  • Upsilon and Omicron iota pronounced as /y/.
  • Eta still /ɛ/,
  • Phi in transition from /pʰ/ to /f/ via /ɸ/.
  • Beta is /β/, on the way to /v/
  • According to Wikipedia, delta and gamma were already /ð, ɣ/. I remember /ð/ being as late  as 4th century AD, but what the hey.

See Koine Greek phonology 

In summary, if we go by the Wikipedia article for popular Greek pronunciation, the only letters whose pronunciation was substantially different  from Modern were eta, upsilon, and omicron iota.

Would the Byzantines have spoken Ancient Greek or something closer to modern Greek?

Modern Greek.

Being literate in Greek has always meant being literate in Ancient Greek; so all our evidence of the vernacular is tainted, right up until the Cretan Renaissance (and there it’s tainted in a different direction, of conventionalised dialect). In the period between the Arab conquest of Egypt (when the papyri run out) and the first experiments with vernacular poetry in the 12th century, we have almost no direct evidence at all, outside of Bulgar inscriptions presumably written on their behalf by Greek prisoners of war.

But what we do know and can reconstruct tells us that the spoken language looked close to Modern Greek by the 7th century, and the texts we have in the 12th century, though macaronic, are identifiably macaronic with Modern Greek.

There would have been registers of spoken language as with every language. We have a hint from Filelfo, writing in the 15th century, that the language of the court in Mistras and Constantinople was “purer” than everywhere else. That suggests a proto-Puristic Greek, with more influence from written, atticist Greek than in the countryside.

Can you create your own rules in conlangs?

What others said. Yes, but make sure there is an internal logic to your rule, and that you’re applying it consistently and meaningfully.

Klingon has an internally consistent story with its zero copula constructions: the pronouns in copula constructions (“he — teacher”, ghojwI’ ghaH) have been reanalysed as verbs, and take verb aspect endings (“he is being a teacher”, ghojwI’ ghaH-taH) and subjects (“Worf is a teacher” ghojwI’ ghaHtaH wo’rIv’e’, literally “teacher he-ing, Worf”.)

Suzette Haden Elgin once accused Marc Okrand of linguistic malpractice, because he’d said that Klingon pronouns have subjects. Think of all the kids whose understanding of grammar will be destroyed, she exclaimed.

Fool. Cairene Arabic does pretty much the same with its pronouns.

But the key is that the rule has to be internally consistent. As Jim Grossman says, the rule likely makes more sense if the noun denotes a nominalisation to begin with. And as Zeibura Kathau says, the rule as stated is probably not what a linguist would end up describing it as—they would talk of complements of nouns instead.

And be aware of what ambiguities and dysfunctions the rule could introduce. You can have the same particle for objects of verbs and complements of nouns, as Olivier Simon does. But what happens when you have both a verb and a noun taking objects in the sentence: it is clear which of the two the complement belongs to?

Are Northern Italians really as “German-like” as they are portrayed?

My experiences when I was actually in Italy did not quite fit the stereotypes. We were embraced by the owners of a Florentine trattoria the way I would have expected in Sicily; and the Passeggiata in Desenzano del Garda was pretty much the volta I remember from my upbringing in Greece.  Taormina, on the other hand, was stuck up enough to be in Tuscany (modulo the rustic beauticians).

Then again, as a colleague from Palermo pointed out to me a week later, “You were not in Sicily. You were in Taormina.”


On the other hand, my experience of Italian jazz fit the stereotype beautifully.

Maybe a decade ago, I attended an Italian Jazz festival, right here in Melbourne town. There were two acts in the  Italian Jazz festival.

The first act was a second-generation local boy and his trio. He was from down south. Like most Italians here, because it was the poor Italians that felt they needed to migrate. The exception are the Italians from the Veneto. Because they too were poor.

The first act made sure you knew he was from down south. He was voluble and emotional and casual, and he was having a lot of fun with his act. His last number was a Tarantella, for God’s sake. A Tarantella. In a Jazz festival.

Then the second act came on.

The second act were from Trieste.

The second act looked like Dieter and the Sprockets (Saturday Night Live)

They also pretty much sounded like it.

They introduced their set with:

Ve play vot ve used to call Northern. Italian. Jazz. Ve now prefer to call it Central. European. Jazz.

And I’ll tell you, that’s exactly what they played. No Tarantellas in their set.

Other than that: what everyone else here said.