You know, this will certainly be wrong, and too Modern Greek. But this question has been sitting here for a week, so:
Ὑψίστη ἡ τῆς σταθερότητος διαφορά. Τούτου νοουμένου, ἡ Κοινὴ τῆς ἑλληνικῆς γλώσσης διάλεκτος θέσμιος ποιεῖται. Πᾶσαι ἑτέραι γλῶσσαι οὐ στηρίξονται, ἰδίᾳ δὲ πρὸς λογίαν γραμματείαν.
Backup requested. Please do not get this tattooed without a second opinion. 🙂
… Do we, Kat? I mean, pear-shaped we do say, yes, and the body shape is old (1815); the “things went wrong” meaning is much later, and may (may) be unrelated: Pear-shaped.
But banana-shaped? I haven’t heard that. I have heard “flat as a pancake” instead, and pancakes aren’t fruit. Apple shaped? I haven’t heard that either. I have heard hourglass-figure, but hourglasses are also not a fruit.
And of course there’s real cultural difference at play here. Korea has the whole peculiar trend of using letters of the Latin alphabet to classify body shapes: S-Line, V-Line, and 19 More Korean Body Lines
Two things going on here. The impetus to classify female body types is tied up with the… dare I say objectification? of women. Commodification, certainly. Women are evaluated for desirability according to specific ideals of body shape, and are therefore classified according to how they meet or fail to meet those ideals of body shape.
Why fruit? Well, why letters of the alphabet? Accessible, recognisable shapes, preferably like Kathleen Grace said with connotations of sensuality (which fruit have)—although that is not mandatory, as Korea shows (and so do hourglasses).
As ever, Daniel Ross’s answer is so thorough and well thought out (Vote #1 Daniel Ross’ answer to Why does reconstructed Proto-Indo-European seem so cumbersome to pronounce?), that it is embarrassing for me to attempt a better answer. In fact, I won’t: I’ll offer a worse answer, but one that is actually hinted at in his “PIE might be, in minor ways, a little bit over-reconstructed”.
And that is that the reconstructions of PIE are not for the purposes of being spoken at all. They are for the purposes of expressing correspondences between cognate languages in a shorthand.
We observe a systematic correspondence between k and w and p, and we put them in the blender, and we call it *gʷ. We could have called it *ʛ. Or *%. Or *Jimmy. We called it *gʷ because that’s an economical articulatory hypothesis for how a single sound can end up as k or w or p. But we don’t know for sure; we weren’t there.
And if you multiply that by a few dozen other hypotheses, and add in the strange algebra of Saussure’s laryngeals, you get a proto-language that internally makes sense, has a consistent root structure and explains the daughter languages—but was never meant to be spoken. It’s a theoretical construct. In practice, we may have missed some smoothing out of the sounds. We may be conflating different stages of the proto-language. We may be reconstructing an abstract phonology of the language, and be completely in the dark about its far more pronouncable allophony.
And maybe Proto-Indo-European did actually sound just like that. But remember: its sound is not what it was reconstructed for. It’s an explanatory tool for linguistic diversity, not a time machine.
This question won’t last long.
No justification given in the edit log.
Browsing comments, I can see he got into arguments with people around the Chechen wars, but given the subject matter, the tone was not as acrid as it could have been.
I will draw attention to his name, though. Cf. Abu Omar al-Shishani, nom de guerre of Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili, ISIS commander. Al-Shishani is Arabic for “the Chechen”. The user formerly went by “Chechen al-Shishani”, and changed it recently to “Emir al-Shishani”; Emir is a Muslim first name, but it is of course also an honorific.
Apparere gradus maximus [est].
As always with these questions: no tattoo until you get a second opinion.
English: Bee Em Double You.
Australian English: Beamer.
Greek: well, Greek only referenced English as its default foreign language in the last generation. So it’s the German pronunciation: Beh Em Veh. (Μπε εμ βε)
Cypriot Greek: from memory, Pemve (Πεμβέ) —/b/ is rendered in Cypriot Greek as /p/, since Cypriot Greek has a three way contrast of /ᵐb p pʰ/.
In Sodom, we know from the Torah,
the sinful did dwell, and Gomorrah.
When guests came to visit,
they’d leer: “How exquisite!
What to do to them? Oh! Let’s ask Quora!”
You’re not hinting that my last name is unfortunate there, Michael, are you? 🙂
I haven’t suffered all that much for it. Certainly not as much as some respondents. If someone carries on about it, I inwardly (or maybe even not that inwardly) roll my eyes, and move on. I used to be nicknamed Nick Squared, and I took no offence at that. A couple of decades ago, someone said to me that I would not be as obnoxious as I am if I didn’t have that name. I chose to take that as a compliment.
My reactions when someone expresses surprise at my name are: either to point out that I’ve got three cousins with the same name, so there’s more of me where that came from; or to exclaim that they loved me so much that they named me twice. Just like New York, New York.
The other answers are correct, but the question goes to something broader. Greek kids will sooner or later find out that a lot of mathematical and scientific symbols used in other languages are Greek, just as they find out that a lot of scientific vocabulary in other languages is Greek.
How do they feel? Unsurprised. They have heard all their lives that Greek culture was the foundation of the West. That their ancestors were building Parthenons when everybody else’s ancestors were eating acorns. Learning about that use of the Greek alphabet just comes to validate that for them.
No, by the way. I don’t think that’s healthy.