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The question and the question details are asking different things, and I’ll address them separately.

It is the doom of /k/ in front of a front vowel (i, e) to be palatalised, to be pronounced as [kʲ] > [c]. The palate is a notoriously difficult place to articulate a stop (too much surface area). So [c] more often than not ends up become (a) an affricate and (b) palatoalveolar: [tʃ] (moving forward in the tongue root, to where there is a more well defined articulator). It can move even further, and become an alveolar affricate: [ts].

That’s what’s happened to Latin <ci> throughout Romance. Caelum would have started as [cielu]; then [tʃielo] in Italian, then [tsiel] in French, which then simplified further to [siel].

The same change has happened in the Cretan and Cypriot dialects of Greek: /kokina/ ‘red’ > [kotʃina]. Standard Greek, on the other hand, stops at [c]: [kocina]. Both Crete and Cyprus spent time ruled by Venetians. Did they get [tʃ] from the Venetians?

No need to: this is a linguistic commonplace, and it has happened in dialects of Greek with no contact with Italian: Tsakonian, for instance (/kairos/ > [tɕere]), or Cappadocian (/kelyfos/ > /tʃefos/). In fact, Peloponnesian–Heptanesian, the base dialects of Standard Modern Greek, are outliers in not having palatoalveolars.

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The question details throw some words:

Latin Aretium > Italian Arezzo

Darıca, a town in Turkey whose Greek name was Aretsou, and whose ancient name may have been Arethusa (though its classicising name was Rhysion).

Now, alveolars also palatalise cross-linguistically: Latin <ti> has indeed been through a bunch of changes, moving it towards the roof of the mouth, although it typically does not go further than affrication: [ti] > [tsi]. So Latin natione > Italian nazione [natsione] > French [natsion] > [nasion]. English in turn palatalised [sj] to [ʃ].

The corresponding palatalisation of /ti/ in Greek is rarer, but it has happened, and when it has happened, it’s been spectacular: /ti/ goes all the way back to [ci], in Tsakonian and Lesbian.

So. What about Aretsou?

I found out only today that [θθ] > [ts] was a thing in Finnish: Joonas Vakkilainen’s answer to What did your language sound like 500 years ago? (thanks, Joonas). But I’ve gotta say, I’ve never seen the equivalent in Greek. There is what <θ> pronounced as <σ> in Laconian, which appears backed up as rare instances of /θ/ > /s/ in Tsakonian. But that change was ancient, and likelier Laconian pronouncing /tʰ/ as /θ/ much earlier.

Aretsou is in Bithynia, so I was going to say “forget it, Bithynia was resettled by Greek-speakers in the 16th century from Epirus, there can’t have been any continuity from ancient Arethusa”. (Bithynia was the Ottoman heartland, so it was Turkicised early.) But Darıca is only 40km from Istanbul, so it’s plausible that it remained Greek–speaking after the Ottoman conquest.

Still, because I haven’t seen [θ] > [ts] elsewhere in Greece, I think Arethusa > Aretsou is unlikely. Any connection with Arezzo is also unlikely.

I’ve spoken Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon. And as I’ve posted elsewhere, I have a soft spot for Interlingua and Interglosa.

There are studies, but the numbers are hazy. The numbers mentioned here though are congruous with what I know. Esperanto would be in the hundreds of thousands; Klingon in the hundreds, Lojban in the much lower hundreds.

Long-term advantage as a world-language? Even Esperanto has pretty much given up on that.

Benefit that arises because of widespread use? Of course Esperanto has more usage and literature and community. Though English has even more. And what counts as useful really does depend on what you’re after.

In fact, I remember coming across an argument on Usenet along these lines (yes, I am that old), where someone was saying that you can get much more quality interactions in Esperanto than in English, because it’s a better-quality, self-selected community. Yup: the retort came quickly that the interactions in the Klingon and Lojban community are even better by that metric.

The literal calque Fatsovivlio has shown up in Greek, but only in jocular use. (47k hits on Google.)

It’s all the more jocular, because it uses the Italian loanword fatsa < faccia, rather than the Greek prosopo, for face. Loanwords are usually pejorative; Fatsovivlio sounds more like “ugly mug book”. SLANG.gr went one better, using a Turkish (though ultimately Greek) word for “book”, and ending up with fatsoteftero.

Interesting.

Pilafás is a real Greek surname. Googling, the most famous instance of a Pilafas is some businessman’s son cum DJ who’s married the actress Katerina Papoutsaki. Παναγιώτης Πιλαφάς βιογραφικό – iShow.gr

Whatevs.

Pilafas means, straightforwardly, “Pilaf guy”. and the -as suffix weighs towards “Pilaf maker”. Pilaf, rice in broth, is an exceedingly popular dish through a large swathe of Asia and Southeastern Europe.

Piliafas is also a real Greek surname. The most prominent exponent thereof on Google appears to be Christos “The Mad Greek” Piliafas, Mixed Martial Arts expert from Traverse City, MI.

In Greece, the most prominent exponent is Andreas Piliafas, who plays in the Corinthian Soccer League. There’s also some junior playing in Ioannina.

Suffixes of Greek surnames are usually regional patronymics, and they tell you where the bearer is from. But this is a professional suffix, and it doesn’t.

The second <i> in Piliafas, which makes it pronounced [piʎafas] (palatal l) bothers me. I’ve got a hypothesis, and I’m very unsure of it.

I’m finding Piliafas’s in Ioannina prefecture and Corinthia. I’ve also found an Albanian businessman (presumably ethnic Greek) in Athens, eChamber, with both a Greek and an Albanian name: Vasillaq Piliafa/Vasilakis Piliafas, son of Theologos.

Pilafi in Greek comes from Pilav in Turkish. In Albanian, it’s pilaf, pronounced [piʎaf]: [pilaf] would be spelled pillaf (like Vasillaq).

Ioannina prefecture is across the border from Albania. Corinthia was traditionally Arvanitika-speaking.

So I suspect that Piliafas is a variant of Pilafas. The variant looks like it applies to the Greek of Southern Albania, and the Greek spoken across the border from the Greek of Southern Albania; it also looks like it’s what Albanian would come up with. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s only Albanian; for all I know, pilâv [piʎav] is also a variant pronunciation in Turkish.

The Corinthia thing may be a coincidence; the Albanian spoken there would have been already cut off from Albania by the time they were introduced to Pilaf.

So: it’s Greek, there’s weak evidence for Epirus or other areas influenced by Albanian; and that’s all I’m getting from Google.

A capital question.

You were right, Zeibura, in the discussion that prompted this: the Balkans is a big mess of not continuously attested languages and dialects; and the only hints of whether a feature originated in one place rather than another is whether the feature is also present in Koine Greek or Old Church Slavonic—both of which predate the Sprachbund.

We are, as far as I know, out of luck with the future, because neither is the case. The will-future first shows up in Greek about the time all the Balkan stuff shows up, in the 14th century. One of the first instances I know of is in Sylvester Syropoulos’ Memoirs (about the Council of Florence, 1438), when he speaks of Emperor John VIII Palaiologos strongarming Patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople, telling him “you want to agree to Church Union.”

Joseph II wanted no such thing: he was an opponent of Church Union. What John VIII was actually telling him, of course, was: “You will agree to Church Union.”

It is true, as Diana Vesselinova points out, that will-futures are a linguistic commonplace (it also happened in English, after all). But given that every single Balkan language does it, it’s hard to believe there was no influence between the Balkan languages.

You’ve also asked why the will particle is invariable. There’s a parallel phenomenon that was going on in the Balkans at the same time (and this time, we’re pretty sure Greek was the starting point for it): the elimination of the infinitive. We actually see multiple forms competing at the same time in Greek: I will go could be expressed as θelo ipaɣin “I.will to.go”; once you lose the infinitive, you end up with a phrase with both verbs marked for person, θelo na ipaɣo “I.will that I.go”, competing with an alternate phrase with only the main verb marked for person, θeli na ipaɣo “it.wills that I.go”.

The last one is the one that prevailed, with “it.wills that” θeli na ultimately reduced to the particle θa: θeli na > θena > θa. The principle is one of markedness: if the auxiliary only ends up marking futurity, then there’s not much point marking it independently for person. There also would have been analogy with other modals like prepi ‘it.must’ or bori ‘it.can = it is possible’; and θa itself ended up in the same paradigm as the suspiciously similar looking subjunctive marker na.

One of the people I’ve been following was accused of that. She did not take kindly to it.

If she sees this, she can answer for herself; I’ll just post my comment to her here:

Even if you did make them up, they’d be communicating a higher truth than the incidentals a security cam would. Those are stories you’re writing, not documentaries.

Because, from this stray comment (https://www.quora.com/Has-your-Q…), and from my own experience, the Quora feed this week is promoting more “ancient” answers in general.

In the topics I prefer to frequent, this is a very very good thing indeed, and I do not want to see it undone.

The correct answer would be to treat politics and other recentist topics differently in time depth than slower-moving topics. But frankly, no, I don’t have the confidence that Quora can implement that right.

The Quora text editor does not support ANY Plane 1 Unicode characters: characters whose 5th digit is 1, not 0. For example, U0001f60f. Emoji are included in Plane 1. So is Gothic: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Will Quora ever support emoji?

It’s not, I would contend, targeted at Emoji; that’s just a “happy accident”.

But these Plane 0 dingbats, I’d argue, are Emojis:

⏱ ☃☹☺☻♨⛄⛱✊✋✌

And they render just fine.

Chad, you’ve been answered by the best, Gigi J Wolf. So there’s little for me to add.

I’ll go ahead anyway.

First of all, my immediate reaction was: Who the hell are you, OP, and what the hell have you done with Chad Turner?

Knowledgeable, studious, taciturn Chad. Always at the ready in the Classics questions with a well thought out answer, but a man of few words and dry. This does not sound like the kind of question Chad would pose, surely.

In fact, Chad came up in conversation I had once with another Quoran, linguâ graecobarbarâ. (The context was Hellenists’ reactions to another poster.) That was the closest I’ve ever been to stalking him. “Nice guy, but a bit stryphnos” was my interlocutor’s remark. Yeah, I guess you could translate stryphnos as “dry”.

Ignore any negative connotations you might find in your Greek–English dictionary under stryphnos. Greeks don’t get dry.

In order to ascertain who the hell OP is, and what the hell he has done with Chad, I popped over to his feed. I do follow Chad, but I don’t see his stuff that often.

My verdict:

…. You’re goddamn hilarious, Chad (or whoever it is that’s running Chad’s feed). The non-Classics answers sound like they’re written by the selfsame guy who writes the Classics answers I’ve seen, and they are fricking bone-dry delicious. I am pissed off that I haven’t seen more of your stuff, and you’re getting a shovel of upvotes from me to address that.

So why haven’t you been stalked?

• Dry and curt makes you a very small target. Most Quorans, like most Greeks, don’t get dry.
• You’re not an attention-whore like, oh, me: you don’t seem to chit chat much, or hang out in threads full of selfies or interminable flame wars.
• And of course, all the stuff Gigi enumerated. Including cleavage.

Is the pic you, btw, or some pop culture reference I’m too Australian to get? I can’t work it out.

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EDIT: Hey, we’re both 45! I think you’ve got yourself a stalker!

No, thank God. Although there’s some noteworthy continuities in what has survived: the morphology and semantics are pretty much the same. In the indicative:

• Present: yes.
• Imperfect: yes. The imperfect shows up in subjunctive contexts, to do the work of the erstwhile optative.
• Aorist: yes.
• Future: no. Replaced by a succession of auxiliary formations (μέλλω, έχω, να subjunctive, θέλω); the θέλω formation has prevailed, and is now a θα particle. Just like the will future in English.
• Perfect: no. Replaced by auxiliary formation, with have or be. Just like the perfect in English.
• Pluperfect: no. Replaced by auxiliary formation, with had or was. Just like the perfect in English.
• Future perfect: no. Replaced by auxiliary formation, with θα and have or be. Just like the future perfect in English.

In the subjunctive, imperative, and participle, the present/aorist distinction survives, and is purely aspectual.