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There’s a lot of Franks here with unimpressive, scrawled, beginner Arabic writing.

Like me.

Inspired by Pegah Esmaili’s answer to What does your Greek handwriting look like?

Where are the Seleucid Greeks?

(InB4 Kalash people. We’re pretty sure they’re not Greeks.)

One can only presume, they assimilated. The ruling class would have been Greek for a fair while; royalty certainly was. But there’s no reason to think the majority of Greeks didn’t intermarry. Not that we’d know much about it, because the contemporaries didn’t pay that much attention to ethnic difference. Lucian of Samosata is quite happy to tell us he’s “Assyrian”, and wrote a book on the religious history of Syria; but everything he wrote was firmly enmeshed in Greek literary culture.

What did they leave behind? The architecture of places like Palmyra. The tradition of human-looking statues in India, including statues of the Buddha. A Greco-Bactrian letter in Unicode: Sho (letter). Awe of Greek learning, inherited by the Arabs. Lucian himself. The koine of the New Testament (although the vehicle of Eastern Orthodoxy was Syriac, not Greek). And lots of stories about Alexander, including those involving Dhul-Qarnayn.

Wiktionary is your friend:

calx is probably from χάλιξ chalix: “pebble”:

Unknown, perhaps Pre-Greek. Probably cognate, ancestor, or descendant of Latin calx ‎(“limestone, chalk”)

χαλκός “copper”:

Uncertain. Has been compared to Proto-Slavic *želězo ‎(“iron”), Latin ferrum, and Hittite [script needed] ‎(ḫapalki-). Perhaps related to κάλχη ‎(kálkhē, “purple”). Ultimately, Proto-Indo-European origin seems unlikely and the word is probably a borrowing.

… So if calx is indeed from Greek, we have a non-Hellenic chalik– stem for “pebble”, and a non-Hellenic chalk– stem for “copper”.

We can’t rule out that they’re related somehow; and copper and limestone are both, um, minerals. But… probably not.

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.

A magnificent resource I have just stumbled on, in seeing if someone has already answered this question (do I look like a Turcologist to you?) is tourkika.com. An online Turkish grammar resource for Greek learners of the language, with lots of etymology for loan words into Greek.

The etymology… is enlightening.

Χαβαλές – havale. From Arabic حوالة (ḥawāla), meaning “transfer”. The phrase havale etmek in Turkish means to refer someone, to delegate someone to do something, to transfer responsibility to someone else.

What do Greeks do when they’ve been entrusted a task, and they’ve successfully delegated it to someone else?

They sit around a café, talk shit, play backgammon, crack jokes, have an ouzo.

You know.

Κάνουν χαβαλέ. “Doing havale”. Having fun.

EDIT: The related adverb χαβαλέ (Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής) means “doing something without serious effort”: Δε διάβασα· έδωσα εξετάσεις χαβαλέ “I didn’t study; I sat the exams havale”. Meaning “as if I delegated it to someone else, without taking responsibility for it”.

I’m going to continue with James Cottam’s coinage, done in comments to James Cottam’s answer to Does this made up Latin/Greek word, Vitaemedology, make sense for the following phrase “The study of careers for doctors.”

iatrurgology ἰατρουργολογία. Doctor work-ology.

But let’s see what others have to say…

A socially marginalised group will not have access to the normal institutional advantages of members of the host society—connections, class privilege, leisure time, cultural familiarity etc. etc. Members of that group will be more highly driven to succeed, to redress those disadvantages.

They will be more strongly motivated to succeed, if they see exemplars of success around them—if some members of the diaspora have already succeeded despite social marginalisation, or if they are intermixed with the host society (not ghettoised), so that they are exposed to paradigms of success from within the host society.

If OTOH they’re ghettoised, and if the diaspora society is insular, so that they are not exposed to paradigms of success—then, not so much. There is less incentive to succeed, if the only experience you have is of failure.

And if the diaspora knows what success looks like, they will use whatever levers the host society does not expressly or implicitly block them from using. Such as public education.

That, btw, is why I did not know any Greeks in Australia doing linguistics when I went to uni. That’s a luxury of established ethnicities. I only started seeing Greeks in linguistics classes when I was lecturing.

… Another episode of Quora Jeopardy!

A clearing is a lea.

A court can be a royal Castle.

… Courtleigh?

EDIT: Kimberly (given name)

A dune is a heap of sand. We can track it to Gaulish *dunom. Maybe.

A θίς can be a heap of several things, including sand.

A relation between the two has been suggested, but it’s not certain. To quote Frisk:

No satisfactory explanation. Wackernagel compares Old Indic dhíṣṇya– ‘situated on a knoll’, ‘knoll strewn with sand’, which could go back to an IE *dhisen-, *dhisn-. Often compared to German Düne ‘dune’ and related words, either as *θινϝ- related to Old Indic dhánvan– ‘dry land, mainland, beach’ (Fick; but that does not account for the /i/), or as *θϝιν- related to Lithuanian dujà ‘particle of dust’, cf. θύω ‘to storm in’. According to Osthoff, from Old Indic –dh-i in ni-dh-í ‘putting down, keeping’ (see τίθημι).

So… definite maybe.