Category: Uncategorized

OK, let’s dispense with hora quickly. Not to belabour it, but yes, coincidence.

Probabilities add up pretty quickly in real life, in a way that clashes with our seeking of patterns: See Birthday problem – Wikipedia. If you put 23 randoms in the same room, there is a 50% probability that two of them will share the same birthday.

The probability is so high, because the coincidence is not that, say, Amy and Nick both have the same birthday on August 29. It’s that any two people out of the 23 will have the same birthday on any of the 365 days of the year. That’s a lot of possible coincidences.

Two random bisyllabic words in two languages, sounding kinda similar and meaning kinda the same thing? It’s guaranteed. Coincidences do happen.

The Bulgarian word for “come!” being elate, and identical to Greek ελάτε? That’s a lot more plausible as a loanword.

The most random spread of Greek, I’d say, is meli in Hawaiian: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some (longer) words that appear or are considered false cognates, but which could plausibly be actual cognates?

What’s the furthest spread of Ancient Greek in lexis? It’s a great question, and I don’t think I’ll do it justice.

• Via Christianity, there’s a smattering of Greek words in most languages with a tradition of Christianity. Bishop and church barely look like episkopos and kyriake [oikia].
• Via Latin and Modern scholarship, there’s more than a smattering of Greek words in probably more languages by now.

Neither of those are what you’re after though.

• There are some Greek words in Hebrew, such as sanhedrin < synedrion, Epikoros < Epicurus.
• Then there’s um… *googles*… *finds hit in Google Books*… *hey, I own that book!* A History of Ancient Greek (I own it in the Greek original).

This leviathan of a book has 110 pages on language contact between Greek and: Semitic, Thracian, Illyrian, Phrygian, Carian, Lycian, Lydian, Iranic, Etruscan, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Celtic, Indic, Arabic. (The contact could be either way.)

They’re all neighbours of Greek, and the furthest reach is Indic. Let me pick the far reaches I find interesting:

• Iranic: Middle Persian dēnar, Modern dīnar < δηνάριος. Middle Persian drahm, Modern dirham < δραχμή. Middle & Modern Persian almās < ἀδάμας ‘diamond’. Middle Persian asēm, Modern sīm < ἄσημος ‘silver’. Sogdian nwm < νόμος ‘law’. Khotan Saka lakāna < λακάνη ‘basin’. Pashto mēčan, Ormuri mučin < μηχανή ‘grindstone’.
• Gaulish: possibly calques, e.g. goddess name Rocloisia ‘listener’ < ἐπήκοος, tooutios < πολίτης ‘citizen?’
• Old Indic stratega < στρατηγός ‘general’, meriakha < μεριδιάρχης ‘battalion commander’, anakaya < ἀναγκαῖος ‘honorary title, initially relative of ruler’; these military terms lasted for just a couple of centuries, and never made it into Sanskrit. Sanskrit did borrow some trade terms: khalīna < χαλινός ‘bridle’, paristoma < περίστρωμα ‘bedcover’, kastīra < κασσίτερος ‘tin’, melā < μέλαν ‘ink’.
• Sabeshan Iyer adds: kēndra < κέντρον ‘centre’, suranga < σύριγξ ‘tunnel/underground passage’
• Arabic: any pre-Islamic loans are via Aramaic or Persian; e.g. dirham. In the Koran, the only loans direct from Greek are fulk < ἐφόλκιον ‘ship’ and possibly iblīs < διάβολος ‘devil’. Another 15 words are via Aramaic or Pahlavi; e.g. zawǧ < ζεῦγος ‘pair’, qamīṣ < καμίσιον ‘shirt’, burūǧ < πύργος ‘tower’.

OK:

ἀγάπα σεαυτόν agápa seautón. That’s the imperative. Konstantinos Konstantinides’ ἀγαπᾶν σεαυτόν agapân seautón is the infinitive “to love yourself”. The quote from St Matthew in Evangelos Lolos uses the future indicative agapēseis: “you shall love your neighbour like yourself.”

Chad Turner went with the middle voice imperative of philéō: φιλέου “be loved [by thyself]”. The verb is fine—Greek philosophers used philéō more than agapáō, and I think agapáō became more popular in Koine. But the cultural resonance of the New Testament use of agapáō is pretty strong; and while the middle voice as a reflexive is intelligible, the unambiguous reflexive seauton is a lot clearer. (If you want to use this verb in the imperative, it’s φίλει σεαυτόν phílei seautón.)

As OP hinted, Greek is one. English is not one. The difference between the two is, I believe, instructive.

Greek planitarkhis πλανητάρχης means “planet ruler” (or “planet leader”); the Classicising form of it in English would be planetarch. The term was coined in Greek in the early 1990s, when the fall of the Soviet Union meant that the world transitioned from two superpowers to one. The term refers to the US President, as the most powerful man in the world under the new dispensation: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής. It is commonplace in journalistic Greek, which loves those kinds of figurative flourishes: the Greek press would rather use “The Planetarch” in headlines than “Obama” or “Trump” or “POTUS”.

Looking online, Google Books confirms it as a post-1991 word: the first instance cited is from 1993, in a fictional conversation with Bill Clinton in Takhydromos magazine (“You’re a Planetarch, I’m just an inhabitant of the planet.”) Recently, the term has also started to be used more loosely, to refer to world champions in sport (Olympiakos basketball team, Andy Murray, Lewis Hamilton).

Recent news reports, somewhat gleeful about a prospective diminution of American power, are eager to speculate that the mantle of planetarch is passing to Xi Jinping (Ο Σι Τζινπίνγκ θέλει να γίνει… πλανητάρχης)
or Vladimir Putin (Νέος πλανητάρχης ο Β.Πούτιν: Κυρίαρχος στη Σύνοδο των G20 – Eπεισόδιο Κίνας-ΗΠΑ και γελοιοποίηση του Μ.Ομπάμα (εικόνες-βίντεο) – Pentapostagma.gr). Of course, what that really means is that we’re moving back into a multipolar world where there is no single Planetarch; but Greek journalistic cliches are going to be slow to adjust.

Alexis Heraclides in 2001 (Hē Hellada kai ho “ex anatolōn kindynos”) identifies the expression as originating in Greek:

Οι ΗΠΑ γίνονται «ο Αμερικάνος», ο «ιμπεριαλιστής», ο «Πλανητάρχης» (το τελευταίο ίσως είναι μοναδική ελληνική πρωτοτυπία).

The USA is reduced [in popular parlance] to “The American”, “The Imperalist”, “The Planetarch” (the latter is perhaps a unique Greek original coinage).

I would be delighted to hear of any other language with a similar expression.

English, of course, does not have an expression like “Planet Leader” (outside of science fiction). What it did have, up until the fall of the Soviet Union, was Leader Of The Free World. That term acknowledged the duopoly of power before 1991, just as Planetarch acknowledges the temporary monopoly of power after 1991. English also has World Leader, which is again an explicitly multipolar term: there are always multiple World Leaders, not just the one.

As shown by both the Wikipedia definition and answers to the Quora question Why is the President of the United States of America sometimes referred to as the leader of the free world? Is this term still true today?, Americans are rather embarrassed by that old Cold World locution “Leader Of The Free World”.

It was heavily referenced in American foreign policy up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, and has since fallen out of use, in part due to its usage in rhetoric critical of American policy.

The Quora questions, written from an Anglosphere perspective, suggest that the world is already too multipolar for “Leader Of The Free World” to make sense, and the allies of the US too independent-minded. You can see why an American or a Brit would think so.

You can also see why a Greek, with their national discourse of being victimised by Great Powers, would be inclined not to think so: weak countries are hyperconscious of hegemony, in a way that hegemons aren’t. So where Americans see bickering French and Russian challenges and plucky Britain, Greeks have long been inclined to seeing one overriding hegemon bossing everyone around, even when that picture doesn’t quite ring true anymore. (And when it doesn’t, they pass on the mantle to Putin or Xi, rather than recognising that there is no mantle any more.)

So if other countries have a similar discourse of Planetarchs, they won’t be in the Anglosphere, and they likely won’t be close allies of the US—who would make a point of avoiding a discourse claiming that the US rules everyone. They’d be countries like Greece, which are either powerless or which like to think they’re powerless.

I was a late convert to fish; it grossed me out until adulthood, and even now I’m on the picky side. But I do have a holy trinity of fish faves:

• Sashimi in general, and salmon sashimi in particular. Raw delicate flavour goodness.

• Canned tuna with chilli oil. Particularly, Sirena Tuna with Chilli in Oil. Joy in a can.

• That Sephardic gift to British cuisine, fish and chips. Most fish are fine, but I find myself particularly partial to grilled Whiting. Salt, lemon, white fish flesh: lovely. Pity fried chips disagree with me now in my dotage…

Russian: Addressing taxi/bus driver by “шеф”/”командир” – where does it come from?

A taxi, and particularly a bus driver, is the “chief” or “commander” of a small mobile unit with a lot of “horsepower.”

Such a driver is also responsible for the safety of several passengers. At least in New York City, this person is “in charge” not only of the vehicle, but everyone that is in/on it at any given time. A bus driver has the right to ask a passenger to move (to balance the vehicle) give a seat to a handicapped person, or do other things that make vehicle safer. Assaulting one carries extra penalties otherwise associated with assaulting a policemen.

Any Russian speaker in the city would understand why such terms are used.

In fact, Russian is a far better illustration of “master” for bus drivers than Cypriot Greek, which the question details suggest.

The Cypriot Greek term alluded to in details is mastros, which is cognate with master in English, and which derives either from Old French maistre or Venetian mestre. It has a cognate in Standard Greek mastoras, which grammatically points back to Byzantine Greek maistor, and ultimately Latin magister. (Of course, magister is also behind maistre and mestre and master.)

The thing is, words related to master don’t just mean “master”. Some of you will have noticed me address Michael Masiello as Magister, for example. That’s the (Mediaeval) Latin for “teacher”. A teacher is a master of their pupils, particularly in the old school way of schooling.

In Cypriot, the primary meaning of mastros is “boss”. A boss is a kind of master, but it’s the kind of master that makes sense under contemporary capitalism, rather than mediaeval feudalism.

There is a secondary meaning in Cypriot of mastros, which corresponds to the primary Greek meaning of mastoras. That meaning is “craftsperson, tradesperson”, and by extension “expert”. And it’s the friendly term with which you address a builder, a plumber, a carpenter, and so forth. It acknowledges their exercise of a practical skill.

That sense of course is hardly alien to English: we have master craftsmen and apprentices, we speak of someone being a master of their art or craft.

I don’t know for a fact why a bus driver in Cyprus is addressed as mastros. It could be, as in Russia, that you address him as “boss” because the vehicle, and your life, is entrusted in his hands. My own hunch is that you address him as “craftsman”, like you would any builder or plumber, out of deference to his professional exercise of skill.

There are a few others, but they are mostly neighbours of Greek and Latin, or else motivated by them.

Letter case – Wikipedia

Writing systems using two separate cases are bicameral scripts. Languages that use the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Adlam, Varang Kshiti, Cherokee, and Osage scripts use letter cases in their written form as an aid to clarity. Other bicameral scripts, which are not used for any modern languages, are Old Hungarian, Glagolitic, and Deseret. The Georgian alphabet has several variants, and there were attempts to use them as different cases, but the modern written Georgian language does not distinguish case.

Now, of these, Cherokee, Osage, Deseret, Adlam, Varang Kshiti are recent scripts, that got the idea from Latin. That leaves us with:

• Cyrillic, whose lowercase is pretty half-hearted—they look just like the uppercase, and they’d have gotten the idea from Greek and/or Latin (Peter the Great) anyway.
• Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Glagolitic, which are also immediate neighbours of Greek.
• Georgian used to be cased, and now isn’t. The uppercase and lowercase look different. (Meaning, they look authentic, originating in cursive.) EDIT: I was wrong: Georgian scripts – Wikipedia . The introduction of case, by mixing two historical variants of the script, was a shortlived innovation in the 1950s; historically Georgian was never cased.
• Armenian lowercase also looks different.
• Not sure how much case was used in Glagolitic.
• Coptic is now cased, but my impression from Googling is that casing is rare; Bicameral scripts speaks of “limited modern use”, and any facsimiles I’ve seen of Coptic were unicameral.
• Old Hungarian: if you read the fine print in Old Hungarian alphabet, not really cased, just makes the first letter of proper names slightly bigger. And Old Hungarian would presumably have gotten the idea from Greek or Latin as well.

So all the scripts that have case are either modern, and got the idea from Latin, or were neighbours of Greek. They developed case either at the same time as Greek and Latin (9th century), or later on.

The explanation is that case was a meme that originated in Latin and Greek, at the same time—independently or not, who can tell; it originated as a space compression technique associated with the high cost of parchment; and it spread out geographically from Greek to its cultural neighbours. It didn’t spread any further than Armenian and Coptic. Arabic and Syriac would have been next, and I don’t think their letter shapes would have made sense with case. Amharic would have made more sense I guess, but I don’t know how much cultural contact there was between Coptic and Amharic, and I don’t think casing was that prevalent in Coptic anyway.

Active users are roughly 3% of all users, last time the now deactivated Laura Hale checked: Percentages of active accounts by Laura Hale on quora numbers. Is there a significant differential between active and inactive users for the national proportion of users? Maybe, but I don’t think Laura had looked into it.

The latest data from Alexa (Mar 2017) is:

Quora.com Traffic, Demographics and Competitors

• 40% US
• 15% India
• 6% UK
• 4% Canada
• 2% Japan

India exceeded the US in 2014, by quite a margin: Shreesha Mokhashi’s answer to What are the numbers and percentages of Quora members by country?

See

• Why do Americans use the spelling color and British use the spelling colour for the same word?
• Why do some people believe that the ‘ISE’ suffix is English and the IZE suffix is American?

There have been many proposals for spelling reform in English over the years, and in fact the variant spellings color and –ize have been around for a long time. (They reference Latin and Greek respectively, whereas colour and –ise are taken from French.)

As discussed in English-language spelling reform – Wikipedia, the spelling reforms proposed by Noah Webster had the most success of any, but they only succeeded in the US. Not all of his proposals were accepted: see 26 of Noah Webster’s Spelling Changes That Didn’t Catch On

Add Greek: φοράω κολώνια. Same word as for clothing.

Of course any Illuminati that you have in mind as relating to Ancient Greece will have precious little to do with the historical freethinkers of Bavaria. So in answering this question, I am safely untethered from historical fact, and find myself adrift in a world of which Meek Mill raps “I don’t have to join the illuminati just to get a new Bugatti”. [24]

Yet even in this fondest flight of Conspiracy Theory, I have to pause and point out that to the ancient Greeks, Egypt was the site of magical and poorly understood lore, and Greeks only occasionally understood what hieroglyphics were about.

If Greek could be used to translate all those other ancient languages, they had a funny way of showing it. Like the Chinese, and for the same reasons, the Greeks were relatively incurious about other cultures — up until Hellenistic times, when people from those other cultures were themselves writing in Greek.

In any case, the only things Greek does that Latin doesn’t are a greater propensity towards compounds, definite articles, and the optative. You could argue that makes Greek better suited for translating Sanskrit, and perhaps German. It would be a pretty tenuous argument.

Though it would be an argument that the historical Bavarian Illuminati would no doubt approve.