I don’t know that you’ll find many cultures that think getting blotto is a wonderful thing, but Greek traditional culture is one of many that tut-tuts public drunkenness. The maxim my father used to warn me with was, να το πίνεις [το κρασί], να μη σε πίνει: “You should drink it [wine], you shouldn’t let it drink you.”
(“In Soviet Russia” joke opportunities ignored.)
Greek drinking culture is accompanied by nibbles (mezze), expressly so as to avert quick inebriation—especially if brandy (ouzo, raki) rather than wine is involved. Wine, for that matter, features at the dinner table rather than in the mezze joint. There is a word for drinking without nibbles: xerosfyri, “dry hammer”; the etymology may in fact be “dry + whistling” or a corruption of “dry + sieved”. There is a word for it, precisely because it is looked down upon. Indeed, British drinking culture, with its drinking xerosfyri, was an easy target of criticism for my aunts and uncles in Greece. (Their children of course were already going to bars and knocking back whisky anyway.)
Even so, intense conversion of Christians to Islam in Anatolia only happened in the 14th and 15th centuries, and presumably is to be associated with the more fervent Islam of the Turkish emirates, rather than the stability of the preceding Seljuk Sultanate. Just because you’re conquered by Muslims doesn’t mean there is immediate pressure for you to convert. For a parallel, see the Copts of Egypt; I learned (from Dimitris Almyrantis, I think) that the mass conversions to Islam only date from the 10th century.
After the conquest of Constantinople, the Rum Millet was instituted by Mehmed II, which afforded Christians in the Ottoman Empire a good deal more autonomy, and less pressure to convert. Accordingly, there was not actually that much missionary activity in the Balkans, or for that matter in the Rûm Eyalet (the Pontus, which was conquered only after the Rum Millet was established). The Muslim indigenous populations in the Balkans (Albanians, Bosniaks) and in the Pontus (Greek-speaking Muslims) resulted from deliberate missionary activity in the 16th and 17th centuries, and they had limited scope. (See e.g. Islamization of Albania)
A battle in Star Trek space opera involves spaceships. Mobility in Star Trek involves spaceships, shuttles, and transporter beams. A quick exit in Star Trek routinely involves the latter.
Therefore, obviously,
jolpat! jolpat! jolpat vIDIlmeH, wo’ vInobrup!
A transporter system! A transporter system! In order to pay for a transporter system, I am prepared to give an Empire!
Your insight is correct, Riccardo: declensions and genders are both classes of nominals. The difference in Indo-European is that gender, not declension, is what governs the agreement of non-nouns with nouns, while declension is how the morphology of nouns themselves works.
So in Ancient Greek, gender only affects the ending of the noun in patches—a couple of cases differ by gender in each declension. But a third declension noun will agree in gender with a 1st/2nd declension adjective or pronoun, without any problem.
You wouldn’t design things like that; it’s kind of a happenstance. Gender is slightly (only slightly) more predictable than an arbitrary declension, which makes it a better candidate for agreement. But it’s an accident of how Indo-European developed. And recall that the feminine is a late development in Indo-European anyway, originating in a collective suffix.
Many languages outside Indo-European have noun classes, and the term “noun classes” is used precisely because in those languages, there is not much of a distinction between declension and gender to be made. Swahili has 18 noun classes; that number sounds more like a declension count than a gender count, but there is a strong semantic component to them (as there is in noun classes in general), and animacy takes over as a factor in agreement anyway.
Frisk’s etymological dictionary concurs with Frank Dauenhauer’s answer, that the bustard was called ōtis ‘one with ears’ (“from its cheek tufts or head? See Thompson, Birds”); thus also ōtos ‘scops owl’, from its ear tufts.
This isn’t the answer, and I hope it will trigger an answer from the more knowledgeable.
Notions of human-crafted art as an expression of the sublime are not particularly new. But in the 19th century, art inspired not merely “almost” religious reactions; it actually came to occupy the place of a surrogate religion. This was dispelled with World War I, and the various forms of art retreated from the Sublime in different ways. The visual arts did it with dadaism, and they’re still going on about it to this day.
I got the fullest articulation of this from looking over the shoulder of someone doing his PhD on the Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter; you can see a reflection of this in the Wikipedia page, where Man overpowers malign Nature through capital-R Rhetoric. Poor naive bastard, I thought. Just as well he killed himself before WWI.
Wagner was the most full-throated expression of this notion of a surrogate religion. He was a prolific writer despite being a composer; he architected his operas as Total works of art, combining the visual, the musical, and the literary; he ladled mysticism heavily both in the librettos and the staging of the operas; and he had a lot of loyal acolytes.
Why would Wagner think that up? There was a change in how music was produced, from court entertainment to subscriptions and paying customers. There was a change in how the artist was regarded, from decorator to conduit of the sublime to expressor of emotions. Both are wound up in where Romanticism comes from. But the extent to which Wagner took it must have come, in at least some part, from the diminishing of power that religion had over the intelligentsia.
Wagner comes before Nietzsche, but to many Wagnerians, God was already if not dead, sickly: in a rationalist, enlightenment worldview, religion just didn’t hold the same mystique. And since this worldview was still quite recent, the deist and atheist intelligentsia went looking for their recently lost experience of the transcendental elsewhere.
Maybe Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things” (πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος)?
He also is believed to have created a major controversy during ancient times through his statement that, “Man is the measure of all things”, interpreted by Plato to mean that there is no absolute truth, but that which individuals deem to be the truth. Although there is reason to question the extent of the interpretation of his arguments that has followed, that concept of individual relativity was revolutionary for the time, and contrasted with other philosophical doctrines that claimed the universe was based on something objective, outside of human influence or perceptions.
Articulatory phonetics was indeed done before Palatography. And not just by the Ottomans: the Korean script Hangul originated in articulatory phonetics, and for that matter both the Sanskrit grammarians and the later Graeco-Roman grammarians had pretty much had it figured out.
And they could just as my students in first year were able to learn phonetics from me, by watching my mouth and thinking about their tongue positioning. Yes, we used diagrams like that too, but people do know what the roof of their mouth is, or their hard palate, or that bumpy thing just behind their teeth; they know when they are rounding their lips, and when their tongue moves to the front or back of their mouth. For the phonemically distinct places and manners of articulation of any language—just half a dozen each—you don’t need any more detail in location than what you can introspect by being aware of what your mouth muscles are doing.
Phonetic detail needs more than that. And phonetic detail is the domain of the palatograph and the spectrogram.
Contemplating the follies of Quora, as I am wont to do, is an often dispiriting exercise. An Existentialist Parable, as I have called it. An exercise that can made one go all nihilistic.
I’m already warning friends to intervene if they find me muttering “Tear it down, Elias!”
To help them do so, I need to recount what that phrase means.
I could cite Constantinos’ answer, but I’d rather retell the story myself.
The phrase comes from a Greek movie triptych about loneliness, It’s a Long Road (1998). The first two parts of the movie are obscurantist and ruminative, in the way you’d expect of a European arthouse film: a game warden confronted by the shooting of the last midget goose in a national park; an archaeologist stumbling on an ancient tomb of Macedon.
The third part was not as popular with the critics, because its dabbling in Greek low culture makes it stylistically more uneven than the muted first two parts. The third part is nihilistically over the top, and was, quite plausibly, something of a hit with non-arthouse audiences; it even has a Facebook fan page. The YouTube commentariat, vulgar and sexist though they are, are quite unanimous that this film should be taught in school. And they draw parallels with the wasted finances of the 90s, that have brought Greece to where it is now.
But mostly, revelling in the macho nihilism.
The full 40 mins is online. It is a very good film:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GdXWJi0VSWs
This clip is abridged (10 mins); it doesn’t give enough of the protagonist’s despair, and it emphasises the over-the-topness over the lead up, but it works:
Times given from the 10 min abridgement.
Makis Tsetsenoglou runs a furniture factory in the small town of Kilkis. His wife leaves him and takes the kids. (“Two months ago, you came to my bed and stunk of Bulgarian women.”) The abridgement skips Makis’ shock and isolation, and picks up with Makis heading to the local bouzouki joint, Vietnam, to drown his sorrows. His sorrows won’t drown easy.
He orders rosepetals cast onto the chanteuse (2:30). His sorrows do not drown.
He orders all the plates in the establishment brought to the dancefloor for smashing (3:00). His sorrows do not drown.
He bids the reluctant establishment owner come out (“Why the hell didn’t you tell him I wasn’t in?”), and asks him to bring out whatever glassware can be smashed from the kitchen (4:50). His sorrows do not drown.
As bored Bulgarian hookers look on, the owner comes out to check whether Makis is having a good time (6:00). Why, no, my dear Mr Makis, there is nothing left to smash. All that’s left is the bathroom tiles. Makis turns to him with a smile. The toilet bowls are ceremonially dispatched on the dance floor; he is paying, after all. Yet his sorrows do not drown.
“Tell me. (7:15) How much do you reckon this joint is worth?” “Maybe 20–25 mill?” “Fine, I’ll give you 30 mill, to sell it to me this instant.” “What do you want to do, Makis? Run it?” “Run it? Don’t be stupid. I want to smash it.” His sorrows do not drown, but he does finally start dancing.
The musicians adjourn outside. He signs the check (8:00), and when the owner sycophantically says και το καινούργιο δικό σου, μεγάλε “You can own the rebuilt joint too, chief”, Makis issues one of those ceremonial phrases that Greeks and Turks are renowned for—though this particular ceremonial phrase is original with him: να ’χουμε να γκρεμίζουμε. “May we always have enough money to keep demolishing with.”
He then takes a bottle of whisky, and uses it to set his tie alight to the sound of the bouzouki. He sets his favourite trenchcoat alight, and dances with it.
And at last (9:20) he calls out to his mate: Ρίχ’ το Ηλία! Ηλία ρίχ’ το!
Tear it down, Elias!
A bulldozer comes into view. The bulldozer keeps going, and takes Vietnam nightclub with it. And Makis stumbles, dancing into the dawn.
