In Greece: it was very much a mainstream term from Mediaeval times right through to the early 20th century. It was also used to refer to Greek Catholics; hence the classic song Frangosyriani “Catholic girl from Syros” (1932), from Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Catholic boy from Syros. The conflation of Western Catholics and Levantine Catholics makes sense in the context of the Ottoman Millet system.

Nowadays, I’m probably the only person who uses it with any contemporary reference, because I’m an antiquarian like that. Greeks now consider themselves Westerners, and have for a while; so they have no use for a term Othering the Westerners.

But as a historical reference, whether to crusaders, or to the Latin Empire of Constantinople, or to the confused relation between Greeks and Philhellenes during the Greek War of Independence, Greeks will still get it.

Not mutually intelligible. At all.

The bizarre thing with Tsakonian is: the non-core vocabulary, you can understand, because it’s pretty much the non-core vocabulary of Greek. Except you’ve got some quite massive regular sound changes to deal with, which were regularly applied even to modern loans. [ɣramatici] for example, “grammar”, ends up as [ɣramacitɕi].

But the grammar is massively simplified (it’s actually a lot like English); and the core vocabulary, in between Doric survivals, archaic vernacular words, and massive sound changes, is unrecognisable.

I’ve found a Tsakonian Berlitz online. I’m bolding the words that a Modern Greek speaker would understand without effort (and italicising the words they would recognise as archaic). I anticipate people saying “but I recognise X! or Y!” Not conversationally and without prior exposure, you wouldn’t. Although I suspect by the end of the passage, readers will have worked out the main sound changes.

The writer btw ignored the aspirated stops. I’ve put them back in.

Φράσεις στα τσακώνικα

Τσ’ έσ’ ποίου;
How are you?

Εζού κά έννι, αφεγκία ντι.
I’m fine, how about yourself?

Καούρ εκάνατε καμπζία.
Welcome children. [No, that’s not “you do”. You recognised εκάνατε wrong.]

Καούρ ερέκαμε νιούμου.
Well have we found you.

Καούρ εμαζούμαΐ.
Well have we gathered. [OK, that word has something to do with μαζί, “together”, I’ll give you that.]

Που ντ’ έν’ αούντε;
What’s your name?

Μ’εν’αούντε Αλέξαντρε.
My name is Alexander. [Finally!]

Τσούνερ έσι;
Whose [child] are you?

Εζού έννι τα μάτη μι, τ’αφεγκη μι τσαί του παπού μι εγγόνι.
I’m my mothers, my father’s, and my grandfather’s grandchild.

Καλημέρα μαμού, τσ’ εσ’ ποία; Εσ’ θέα να ντι ποίου κανένα θέλημα;
Good morning grandmother, how are you? Do you want me to do you any bidding? [Hopefully by now you’ve worked out they’re using the ancient word for “do”]

Καώς το, το καλέ καμπζί, όνι θέα τσίπτα καμάρζι μι.
Welcome, such a fine child! I want nothing, my pride. [You might have even worked out that they’re deleting all their lambdas before back vowels.]

Έα όρκο μι, να ντι δίου κάτσι.
Come my oath [darling], I’ll give you something.

Χάγγε τθο καλέ, να έσι κά.
Go to the good, be well. [That’s not a vocative! o > e after coronals]

Ευχαριστού πάσου, καλέ να ’χερε.
Thank you very much, may you have goodness.

Ούρα κά, άι α πορεία ντι.
A happy hour, may your road be smooth as oil.

Να ζάρε τθο καλέ, τθαν ευτζή του Χρζιστού τσαί τα Δεσποίνη.
May you go to the good, to the blessing of Christ and Our Lady.

Αγακητέ μουσαφίρη καούρ εκάνερε τθα χώρα νάμου.
Dear guest, welcome to our village.

Οι τσακώνοι είνοι περήφανοι αθροίποι.
Tsakonians are proud people.

Είνοι αγαπούντε του γραφτοί τσαί τουρ άγραφτοι νόμοι.
They love written and unwritten laws. [As soon as we go into speech making, the words are recognisable.]

Έσι καοδεχούμενε σου χωρζίς να ντι κολαντσέγγωι.
You are welcome by them without them flattering you.

Είνοι αγαπούντε πρεσσού τα πάστρα.
They love cleanliness a lot.

Άμα τθα πορεία ντι θα ρέσερε βρωμίλε ούνοι έχουντε σι ποιτέ Τσακώνοι.
If on your road you find filth, Tsakonians have not done it.

Κά να περάρε εκιού τσαί οι κολέγοι ντι, για να μόλετε ταν άβα χρονία κίσου.
Have a good time, you and your friends, and come back next year again.

… So. Greek-speaking Quorans. How did you go?

---

Update, cc Dimitra Triantafyllidou Lara Novakov Dimitris Sotiropoulos

You know what the very definition of badass is?

Let me tell you what the very definition of badass is.

Maxim L. Kisilier. Born in Russia. Bred in Russia. Learned Ancient Greek in Uni. Lecturer in Greek at St Petersburg State University. Has done some fieldwork oin Tsakonia.

Seen here, delivering the welcoming address to the Annual Tsakonian conference in 2013. With lots of grammatical examples.

IN TSAKONIAN.

For twelve minutes straight. (He then has to summarise in standard Greek.)

And, incidentally, with a Russian accent.

This man is badass.

Pity there is no way on earth the locals will accept his proposed orthography…

(I feel badass, myself, for almost understanding three quarters of what he’s saying.)

See Punctuation on Wikipedia. David Crystal has a lovely book out on the history of punctuation: Making a Point.

As Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer indicated, there were anticipations of punctuation for a while; the notion of systematically indicating pauses (period, comma) was a Hellenistic Greek invention, which became systematic in the late Empire.

Punctuation as we know it is a mediaeval Latin thing, and it kept evolving up until after the invention of printing; parentheses for example are a 16th century thing. The question mark is 8th century; quote marks as we know them (as opposed to quote marks the way email does them) is 12th century.

But the main written language of Western Europe was Latin up until at least the 16th century, and that’s the language for which most punctuation we are familiar with was introduced

And to add to Kelsey McLeod’s answer, the notion of decision, choice came first. The notion of surreptitiousness comes later: it’s using your capability of making good decisions, in order not to divulge that much, considering the social factors at play. It’s being discerning (which is in fact the same verb).

From OED, it all happened in Late Latin:

(ii) classical Latin discrētiōn- , discrētiō separation, division, distinction, discrimination, in post-classical Latin also discernment (Vulgate; early 3rd cent. in Tertullian), prudence (5th cent.), caution, circumspection (5th or 6th cent.), as a form of address [“your discretion!”, towards a cleric] (8th cent.; frequently from 12th cent. in British sources) < discrēt– , past participial stem of discernere discern v. + –iō -ion suffix1.

< (i) Anglo-Norman and Middle French discrecion, discretion (French discrétion) discernment, wisdom, sound judgement (c1165 in Old French), freedom to decide as one sees fit (15th cent.), separation, distinction, discontinuity (c1400), in Anglo-Norman also disparity (1139), interval, distance (15th cent.), also used with a possessive adjective as a form of address to a person in authority (15th cent.),

The first really obvious example I see in the OED of “choosing not to speak” and not just “being thoughtful in what you speak” is:

1597 Bacon Ess. f. 3, Discretion of Speech is more than eloquence.

Proper nouns in English are not normally qualified by adjectives; the adjective would be taken to be part of the proper noun (This is Lucky Phil).

Some authors do qualify proper nouns with adjectives, although as this discussion notes (Adjective with proper noun), it is stylistically quite marked (“Stylistically, attributively modifying a proper noun isn’t something people do in normal conversation. It strikes me as newspaper-ese”.)

When that does happen, the proper noun is considered to be acting more like a common noun: it’s as if the adjective is being used to narrow down which of the avatars of the person is being considered. (A bewildered Elliot, as opposed to a contented Elliot; The Amazing Mr Fox, as opposed to The Humdrum Mr Fox.) Hence the use of the article.

… The only wide-ranging influence of Hebrew I can think of is

• In the variants of languages that are spoken by Jews: Yiddish, Ladino, Judaeo-Greek, Judaeo-Persian, Judaeo-Arabic… for all I know, Judaeo-Chinese.
• In the church register of languages impacted by Christianity. And not a lot of words there. Amen, Satan and Sabbath are probably the most wide-ranging ones.

Be careful not to conflate Hebrew with other Semitic languages. In Greek, arrabōn for “pledge; (later) engagement” dates from Classical times; that means it’s not Hebrew, it’s Phoenecian. The same is likely true for camel, which was used by Herodotus.

Both Jews and Christianity spread widely, but the lexical impact of Hebrew, I’d say, is surprisingly superficial. English, Greek and Latin have gotten around a lot more.

Pontic Greek is still spoken in the Of valley, Turkey by Muslims who remained after the population exchanges.

Their Pontic Greek is distinctive in retaining Ancient Greek /uk/ for “not”; Christian Pontic had truncated it to /kʰ/.

Originally Answered:

Is there an ideal answer length on Quora?

This is a topic Laura Hale has had much to say about. Here’s a dump:

• The 1,000+ upvoted answer and its word count by Laura Hale on quora numbers
• Writing longer content for upvotes by Laura Hale on quora numbers
• Super brief look at wordcount and upvotes correlation by Laura Hale on quora numbers
• With your endorsement, I will boldy write long answers for top ranked answer placement by Laura Hale on quora numbers
• How, Is, What, Why my answers!: A think on length and other variables and how I’d do Quora’s ranking algorithm by Laura Hale on quora numbers

Procopius, de Bellis I xx:

At about the time of this war Hellestheaeus, the king of the Aethiopians, who was a Christian and a most devoted adherent of this faith, discovered that a number of the Homeritae on the opposite mainland were oppressing the Christians there outrageously; many of these rascals were Jews, and many of them held in reverence the old faith which men of the present day call Hellenic. He therefore collected a fleet of ships and an army and came against them, and he conquered them in battle and slew both the king and many of the Homeritae. He then set up in his stead a Christian king, a Homerite by birth, by name Esimiphaeus, and, after ordaining that he should pay a tribute to the Aethiopians every year, he returned to his home.

Hellestheaeus was Kaleb of Axum, king of Axum (northern Ethiopia) in 520.

The Homeritae are the Himyarite kingdom, around Yemen, which fell to Axum in 525.

Esimiphaeus (Sumuafa’ Ashawa’) was the Christian Himyarite viceroy appointed by Kaléb.

The Himyarite kings adopted Judaism around 380, probably for reasons of political neutrality. Per Wikipedia,

From the 380s, temples were abandoned and dedications to the old gods ceased, replaced by references to Rahmanan, “the Lord of Heaven” or “Lord of Heaven and Earth”

…

During this period, references to pagan gods disappeared from royal inscriptions and texts on public buildings, and were replaced by references to a single deity. Inscriptions in the Sabean language, and sometimes Hebrew, called this deity Rahman (the Merciful), “Lord of the Heavens and Earth,” the “God of Israel” and “Lord of the Jews.” Prayers invoking Rahman’s blessings on the “people of Israel” often ended with the Hebrew words shalom and amen.

Now, Procopius is claiming that paganism continued in Himyar, despite Judaism being the state religion. Paganism certainly wasn’t extinguished immediately. In telling of the early Jewish king Abu-Kariba (390–420), Wikipedia recounts:

Initially, there was great resistance, but after an ordeal had justified the king’s demand and confirmed the truth of the Jewish faith, many Himyarites embraced Judaism.

Yet

After Abu-Kariba’s demise (420), a pagan named Dhū-Shanatir seized the throne.

I know nothing of the history of the Himyarites, or of Yemeni archaeology. Yet, even if paganism was no longer the official religion, I see no problem with some Himyarites continuing to be pagan.

Motivated by discussion with Dimitra Triantafyllidou at Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are major languages which declined/extinct during Turkification of Anatolia?

Citing from discussion there:

The received wisdom, from:

• Vryonis, Speros, Jr. The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

is that the bulk of Asia Minor was islamised and turkicised relatively quickly after the movement of the Turks into the region.

It seems that the substantial Greek populations in the Western Asia Minor coast date from Ottoman times, with Greeks settling the coast from the nearby islands. The dialects of the coast are certainly close to those of the Aegean islands. Dawkins concurs, speaking of both settlement from the islands, and a wave of migration out of Greece in the 18th century.

• Dawkins, Richard McGillivray. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor; a study of the dialects of Siĺli, Cappadocia and Phárasa, with grammar, texts, translations and glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

We know that Bithynia was resettled by both Greeks (from Epirus) and Bulgarians in the 1500s–1600s. In fact, there was even a Tsakonian colony on the mouth of the Gönen river, which probably dates from the 1700s.