An unfortunate number of coincidences. The coincidences all ended up converging in Sans Serif Latin script, because a vertical line is a simple thing, and any simplification of glyphs can’t get any simpler than a | .

The letter I started as Phoenecian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodh, which did not look like a |:

But by the time the Greeks were done with it, it did (from: Archaic Greek alphabets):

There was no number 1 or lowercase l back then to cause trouble.

The number 1 actually went a curious journey from Indian to Arabic to European numbers, as summarised in 1 (number):

So: ⼀ to १ to ۱ to 1.

Simplify the Devanagari or Roman serifed glyph, and you get the Arabic and Roman sans serif glyph: a vertical line. The vertical line ended up ambiguous in Arabic with alef, too: ا ۱.

The lowercase l did in fact emerge out of capital L, by shortening the bottom of the L in Rustic capitals. As you can see (source: History of the Latin alphabet), the history of <I> and <l> has been an attempt to fix the resulting ambiguity, including different sizing, serifs, and tittles. The distinction between capitals and lowercase was more pronounced in mediaeval script than after the invention of printing, so I/l wasn’t as much of a problem back then.

Gee, presuppositions in question details much, Anon?

I worked out that A2A wasn’t a special privilege, granted by people who had sought out my expertise judiciously by evaluating people’s expertise. (Pro Tip: Do NOT look at who got the most votes, when requesting answers. Look at who’s answered the most answers.)

No, A2A was being scattergunned at me, more often than not on subtopics that I didn’t have much knowledge about—or interest in.

Once A2A became not as special, I didn’t treat it as special. I restrict “Thx4A2A” to Quora friends, or to people who I can tell have specifically sought me out.

By all means, people of Quora, keep A2A’ing, just try to target them better. Having a vocabulary of three Farsi words, for example, does not make me a Persianist.

Originally Answered:

Why do British/ Irish/ Australians when singing have the same American accent as American singers?

Brian Collins and Robert Charles Lee, I disagree. They do too. And I do have a tin ear, but I’m not the only one to think so:

• Non-American pop singers (e.g. New Zealanders) tend to subconsciously adopt an American accent in singing. Is this observed in languages other than English as well?
• Why do many British singers sound American when they sing?

And I reckon it’s a genre effect. Pop/rock is American, so non-Americans sing like the Americans they’re emulating. John Williamson (singer), by contrast, does Australian Country with some overt Australian nationalism; and his vowels are, well, True Blue Aussie:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cohkaLM3AjQ

TISM were suffused to the gills with in-joke references to Australian culture. I got into them when I left Australia, out of nostalgia. I agree you wouldn’t mistake them for Americans, but those are not Australian vowels either, and there’s more rhotic action there than there should be. Because they were doing genre.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kI-L6vOGkvQ

The two alt-rock bohemian self conscious hippie drongo skip bastard Aussie bands I loathed growing up were Frente! (with exclamation mark!) and Ratcat. The reason I loathed them, apart from being alt-rock bohemian self conscious hippie drongo skip bastards, was that they were among the first Australian acts to make a point of singing pop with an Australian accent:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XdJYrkra0nk

Sod off, alt-rock bohemian self conscious hippie drongo skip bastards. Give me the grunge stylings of Silverchair any day.

With a mumbly Seattle accent: just right for a bunch of teenagers from Newcastle NSW.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qPxL5guYmWw

Greece was affected: in 1800 half the population of Crete was Muslim, and those were converts, not settlers from Turkey.

There’s a very simple answer to why Greece, and much of the Balkans, did not have the same outcome as Syria or Egypt: Greece was conquered by the Ottomans. And the Ottomans had the Rum Millet. As People of the Book under a stable Ottoman realm, the Rum Millet were second-class citizens; but so long as they paid their taxes, they were largely left alone, and they had some degree of autonomy.

The more interesting question (which I don’t know the answer to) is not Why Greece or Serbia were not islamised, but why Albania and Bosnia were.

I suspect, from your other questions, Gabriele, that you’re interested in a non-arbitrary, logical framework for naming things.

If I’m right, anyone that knows anything about language will tell you it’s a chimera. But most interesting things are.

Your question (if I read it right) is reminiscent of the attempts at a Philosophical language and/or Pasigraphy, such as Wilkins’ An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. They rely on an ontology covering everything in existence; and because of AI and Natural Language Processing, Upper ontologies are now a thing.

Your criteria for naming objects and concepts then become the criteria for your ontology of the universe. And even if it’s chimeric, that effort is going to be quite rewarding. More rewarding than a pasigraphy.

It could be, of course, that I’ve quite misconstrued your question…

I live in Greektown, Melbourne. Which means I see a lot of Greek tats sported by Greeks. And I do plenty of looking down on the cookie cutter nationalism of biceps with inked Molon labe, and Maeanders that look a little too close to swastikas. But of course, I’m a cultural conservative, so I would say that.

You will have something more imaginative than that, right?

Tats aren’t a Greek thing traditionally, so Greeks won’t feel like you’re “culturally appropriating” anything (that’s a peculiarly American thing). And Greeks in the diaspora will think it’s a Frankish (Western) thing to do.

Of course, plenty of off-the-boat Greeks here in Greektown sport tats: unlike the diaspora, Greece itself is now part of Frankia (the West).

Like others have said, Greeks overall, diasporan or not, will tend to be flattered that you like their ancestral culture enough to get it inked. So long as it’s spelled correctly and thought through, of course—because otherwise, it’s just a dis.

I checked LSJ: no γεροκρ- anything. And there wouldn’t be: γερο- for “old” is Modern Greek, the Ancient Greek would be γεροντο-.

I googled γεροκρονοληρος, as Dimitris Sotiropoulos suggested in his exchange with Konstantinos Konstantinides.

The good thing about Google, is that it assumes you misspell things. So it tries taking words apart.

I didn’t guess what κρονόληρος means, which does me no honour, because when you see it in context, it is obvious. (And god knows Dimitris dropped enough hints, in his Quora Jeopardy!)

Κρονόληρος – Βικιλεξικό

Used by Plutarch to refer to an “old twaddler”, a foolish old man. From Kronos, Cronus (Roman Saturn), father of Zeus and a proverbially old god; and λῆρος, (originally) “gaudy”, (eventually) “delirious, silly”. (Modern Greek speakers will recognise it in παραλήρημα, “babbling, nonsense”.)

The etymology of λῆρος is uncertain, but it may derive from a Boeotian word for a gold ornament on women’s tunics.

So: “delirious Saturn”, of a foolish old-timer.

Now. Dimitris reports that:

It was in a phrase with a Description for a neighbor in the village

So what is a modern Greek prefix doing on a word used by Plutarch?

Someone in your village in Greece, Dimitris, had a classical education.

Originally Answered:

Have you ever caught someone talking about you in another language?

A2A. How many gajillion squintillion answers are there here already? No, not reading the thread.

OK, answering to be neighbourly, Sofia Mouratidis.

I was in Crete. I was not on my nice, cosy familiar native easternmost neck of the island, where the people are gentle and placid, and the native instrument is the violin and not the Cretan lyra, and the villagers are so laid back, they got Italians to occupy them during WWII instead of Germans.

No. I was 14 km south of Iraklio, visiting the birthplace of Nikos Kazantzakis. The birthplace of Kazantzakis is now called Myrtia: myrtle-tree.

It wasn’t called Myrtia when Kazantzakis was born. It was called Varvari: Barbarians. (Or Berbers, if you prefer.)

And as far as I’m concerned, it still is. I was waiting in the village cafe for transport back out to Iraklio. There was a sign in the cafe.

The sign said:

GUNFIRE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

There’s two more things we don’t do around Sitia. One is change the pronunciation of original [tj] to [θj]. So the Venetian balota “bullet” (cf. Italian pallottola) + the suffix –ja, meaning a blow or shot of something, would be pronounced balotja in Sitia. In the rest of the island, it is pronounced baloθja.

The second thing we don’t do around Sitia is use the word balotja. Because we in Sitia do not think that SHOOTING GUNS IN THE AIR IN A CONFINED SPACE, to let people know you’re having a good time, IS A PARTICULARLY SMART THING TO DO.

Like I said. Barbarians.

Oh, where was I? I had to wait a couple of hours in the cafe over at Varvari, underneath the GUNFIRE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN sign, because the local cab driver had gone over to the next village, to repair his mother-in-law’s chicken coop.

I had some rather nice chops while waiting. And I wrote a Klingon sonnet.

Eventually the staff shift changed, and I heard some say on the handover, “the foreigner over there is waiting for a cab to take him back to Iraklio.”

(Actually, given where I was, I wouldn’t be surprised if he used one of the older names of Iraklio. Like Kastro. Or Candia. Or Chandax. Or Knossos.)

*Sheepishly and very Australianly puts his hand up*

“Not… a foreigner, actually.”

… In retrospect, as a Sitiakos in Varvari: yes. Yes I was.

Assuming I understood your A2A, Anon (and I’m not sure I did understand “How do i bend those verbs”),

• I am being (which, as a verb tense of be, is redundant, and you will only hear it as an auxiliary)
• I am becoming
• I am beginning

… Have I missed something?

Questionable UX Orchestration, Regressively Administered.