Day: December 30, 2016

My father used to to work with a nurse who was from the same village as George Michael’s father. I asked him years ago, and he sneered that George Michael doesn’t know what Greek means.

There’s also this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jWTsikyE9ns

“Thank you… for thir-… twenty five… years.”

Very halting, and no accent fluency. Comments in the YouTube thread say he did respond to Greek interview questions in English, so likely some passive competence.

Albanian.

I’m biased as someone who’s both Greek and a linguist; but there’s lots of Indo-European grammar, lots of areal effects, lots of tussling between Latin and Greek in the lexicon, and of course its syntax is ridiculously familiar for a Greek speaker. That, and it is an isolate branch that’s quite unfamiliar to the masses, so it has exoticism appeal.