Month: April 2016

Modern Greek: like everyone else said, ηθοποιός. In Ancient Greek this meant “character-building”. The modern meaning came about because plays can be character building, I suppose, but I can’t find out when the meaning shift happened. Pretty sure it’s very recent.

The word is from katharevousa. The old vernacular word is θεατρίνος, which is still around in its pejorative meaning of “drama queen; impostor”.

Like the Ancient word for actor.

Oh, what’s the Ancient word for actor, you ask?

hypokritɛ́ːs.

You recognise that word, don’t you?

Hm.

I know nothing of Russian (Я не знаю ничево в русскаям языкам… which proves my point); but the same polysemy occurs in Greek, and Philip Newton’s answer to Greek (language): Why do we say “παρακαλώ” when answering the phone or saying ‘you’re welcome’? makes sense to me: “please don’t mention it” (“please don’t abase yourself so much as to thank me”).

Intriguingly, the African American use of Nigga please! goes in the completely opposite direction: not an expression of humility, but of exasperation (“please don’t offend my honour/my common sense”)

Emil Manukyan is right about words meaning lots of things depending on their context, though it’s an exaggeration to say it could mean whatever you want: the  meaning is still traceable back to “being well-disposed”.

But don’t quote Saussure, that’s just vague theoretical underpinnings. The way to make sense of this is conversational implicature. As in so much else about language, it was Grice that led the way on this.

Hm.

I keep disagreeing that you’d understand all of the New Testament. Mark and John, sure; Paul, not so much.

Byzantine learned literature: forget it. It’s not identical to Attic Greek, but you’ll need Attic Greek (and a decoder ring) to make sense of it.

Byzantine Vernacular literature (1100  onward): sure, but knowing some dialect, e.g. Cypriot or Cretan will help a lot.

Attic. No. Worse, you’ll think that you understand it, and you’ll be wrong.

Homeric. As I love to say, it might as well be Albanian.

Faleminderit!

The answers given here have opened up a secondary conundrum.

It’s uncontroversial that Turkish got the word from Bulgarian.

The controversy is whether the Slavic word came from Greek, the Greek word came from Slavic, or the similarity is a coincidence.

The Greek word could easily have come from Bulgarian; and if it’s a Slavic-wide  word, that would seem likelier. There were pathways for Greek words into Russian through the Church and the prestige of the Byzantine emperors; so a word for royal garments could have made it. In fact, I was astonished to find the Byzantine clothing φουφούδιον, which I couldn’t find in any Greek dictionaries, has made it as an internet meme in Russia: Фофудья (интернет-мем) — Википедия  (it’s a satire of Byzantine-flavoured hypernationalism.)

But what does the Greek evidence say?

βυσσινί for “purple” is a late inflection, it doesn’t count.

Trapp’s dictionary (LBG, Late Byzantine) has words for purple starting with βυσσιν- from the 12th century (βυσσινόχρους, βυσσινός), and a variant βυσσικός from the 9th century. The variant βυσσικός is said to refer to ὀπός, “juice”, which is suspicious. But none of these words directly refer to cherries. And βυσσικ- points away from vishne, and towards the classical derivation from byssos.

Liddell-Scott gives two definitions of βύσσινος: made of linen, already in Herodotus, and also, as the neuter βύσσινον, in the Bible (Ezra 1:6, Rev 19:8); and in Hesychius’ dictionary, meaning purple (πορφυροῦν). Hesychius preserves lots of very very ancient words. But Hesychius also has lots of more modern words—it’s an utter jumble; and my suspicion is, it’s just a recording of the Byzantine word. Hesychius was supposed to have been compiled in the 6th century, but nothing prevented later interpolations.

Kriaras’ dictionary (Early Modern) has the word βύσσινον (1638), but only in the vernacular translation of Revelations meaning “linen”, so it doesn’t really count either.

So, as far as I can tell, in Greek:

• Byssinon meaning linen is ancient
• Vyssinos meaning purple is mediaeval; possibly pre-Slavic contact, more likely post-, but still likelier to be explained by purple linen than by cherries
• Visino meaning cherry is suspiciously absent in texts older than 1600.

Hypothesis A: the shift “purple” > “cherry” happened in the Middle Ages, and was transmitted with its new meaning from Greek to Bulgarian to Russian—despite there being no evidence of the new meaning in Greek before 1600. The Balto-Slavic cognates that other respondents have mentioned should be ignored.

Hypothesis B: the meaning “cherry” came from Bulgarian vishne reasonably late, and was mapped onto the preexisting word visino, which happened to mean “purple”. (Although given Greek phonotactics, visino is the only way you could pronounce vishne in Greek anyway.) The proximity of “purple” to “cherry” is the coincidence.

Nasty when you get a battle of coincidences like that. I’m inclined to Hypothesis B.  But that’s kneejerk anti-nationalist of me. Interested in others’ opinion.

Or, for those that prefer the IPA, [kaliˈnixta].

Modern Greek. Actually, I have no idea if there is an Ancient Greek word for “good night”…

Depending on the country, the channel, and the time of day, the future’s already here.

The taboos have certainly shifted away from religion and sex and in other directions. America may be unique in referring to the “N-word”; but blasphemy is already pretty much spent in English, and you see fuck a lot more in print and the media than you used to even twenty years ago.

Γαμώ “I fuck” (not, as it would have in Ancient Greek, “I get married”).

Γαμώ το “I fuck it”

Σιχτίρ (Turkish) “I fucked”

If not as worked up, ωχ or αχ.

What they said. I had a colleague who worked on Gaulish; the surprise to me was how much Gaulish looks like Latin. Because they’re both closer to Indo-European, but also because the inflections look similar.

Check out Larzac tablet. Not a boar or flask of magic potion in sight…

‘Cause  we’ve already adopted youse.

The main problem with all the colloquial 2nd person plurals is that they’re colloquial, but so is they as a singular. The secondary problem is that they’re regionally restricted.

And noone actually says yinz, right?

The Greek spoken in Southern Italy sounds like it’s spoken by the Mario brothers. The  Greek spoken in the Ukraine sounds soaked in vodka. And when I’m not in Greece, my dentals become alveolar: I sound like a caricature of “Uncle Nick from America”.

Basques live in Spain. The grammar has remained impervious to contact, which is cool. The lexicon presumably hasn’t, because that’s what happens when you’re a minority language.

My epiphany about accents came when I heard a performance of the 1830s Greek comedy Babel, which was about how Greek accents were incomprehensible. I’ve never heard Cappadocian Greek spoken. There is a Cappadocian character in the play. And damn if his accent didn’t sound Turkish.

Intonation and phonetics are subject to contact as well. Maybe a bit more than grammar: people’s identity doesn’t feel as compromised if they sound like their neighbours, because intonation and phonetics is somewhat less tangible than vocabulary and syntax.

Betcha the Basques across the border sound like Pepe le Pew. And that the German speakers in Alsace do too.