Category: Uncategorized

As Dimitrios Michmizos says, “worthy” is the best translation; “worthy” is not about one’s worth, “valuable”, but about one’s merit. It certainly isn’t idiomatic in English as an acclamation, though.

Konstantinos Konstantinides points to the added gloss “deserved”; and while it is not a common expression in English, you will occasionally see the exclamation “Well deserved!”

Seth’s Blog: “Well deserved”

“Congratulations” is fine for winning the lottery, but “well deserved” is reserved for people who put in the effort and the time and took the risk to get somewhere.

Half of Greece (the islands) was a colonial outpost for various Italian republics—mostly Venice and Genoa. But that was a very, very long time ago, and Greeks have forgotten that, for example, Cretan villagers welcomed the Ottomans as relief from Venetian feudalism. What was left behind was significant cultural transmission from Italy to Greece: a lot of vocabulary, and some material culture, again particularly in the islands.

For example,

Crete is famous for its small cheese or herb pies, called Kalitsounia. They resemble a common cheese or stuffed pie with the principal difference of its filling and serving variations.

I only worked out last year where the word comes from.

Calzone. And, Wikipedia tells me, Calisson.

So there is cultural familiarity. There’s some shared vocabulary. There’s physical similarities. And as Konstantinos Konstantinides points out, there’s no recent border hostilities, apart from WWII. (And when Griko-speaking Italians were part of the occupying forces, Greeks were delighted to meet them: “You can’t be fascisti! You’re our brothers!”)

Parea παρέα in Greek. Cool because it’s the only word in Greek with an Iberian origin. It comes from either Ladino parea or Catalan parella, cognate with Spanish pareja.

The Catalan derivation is probably too good to be true: it refers to the Catalan Company, mercenaries who ran bits of Greece (including Athens) in the 14th century. The parea is a social group of people who hang out together, including having coffee or entertainment together; it would be cute to derive the word from marauding bands of mercenaries, terrorising the countryside of Attica.

You’ve linked to (and read) the English language Wikipedia article in the Question Details. From the English and German Wikipedia articles, we actually don’t know anything else about scaphism: it was described once in Plutarch, and then recapitulated in Eunapius and Zonaras, Byzantine sources. We don’t even know if it was something the Persians actually did, or something Ctesias (the source Plutarch likely cited) made up as a tall tale.

We know that the incident Plutarch cited was the murder of Mithridates (soldier) for killing Artaxerxes II of Persia’s brother Cyrus the Younger (even though Mithridates killed Cyrus accidentally, while the Cyrus was fighting to depose Artaxerxes). Given how spectacular the execution was, it’s reasonable to assume that, if real, it was reserved for the crime the king found most offensive: regicide (or at least, murder of a member of the royal family). Regicide does tend to attract spectacular executions, as occurred in France—and indeed, post mortem punishment, as occurred with Cromwell.

I know nothing about Armenian, Old or New, apart from vosp, ’cause I like lentil soup.

I stared for half an hour at:

• A Grammatical Sketch of Classical Armenian,
• Damme, Dirk Van – a Short Classical Armenian Grammar
• Grammaire armenienne : M. Lauer and A. Carriere .

I think I have the answer.

Old Armenian does not have nouns whose nominatives end in a vowel. So the a-declension, those nouns that in Latin and Greek ended in -a, end in a consonant. Greek gynē corresponds to OArm kin. It seems that final unstressed vowels were systematically chopped off in Proto-Armenian.

So, if a Greek word like plateia comes into Armenian (via Syriac plāṭīā), “square, public street”, Old Armenian could not deal with it as a nominative: it wouldn’t fit the patterns. (I don’t know how are supposed to work when your plural ending is -kʿ: I mean, sg.nom. azg, pl.nom azgkʿ ? Seriously?)

In Old Armenian, plāṭīā ends up as połotay.

Account #1. To make it fit, the word has to end in a consonant. Chopping off the vowels wouldn’t work well, you’d end up with plat, which doesn’t sound close enough to plāṭīā. So the safe thing to do is to add a consonant to the foreign word. And –y is the best consonant to add, because it’s a glide: the result still has a similar syllable structure to the original.

I see that Greek hylē is borrowed as հիւղէ (hiwłē). But Wiktionary also notes the variants hiłeay hiwł and hiwłay, so there was a strong trend to go with -ay.

Account #2. But it may be that this is just a trick of orthography. Lauer & Carriere say that final –ay is pronounced –ā. So this could just be that plāṭīā was pronounced połotā in Armenian, and –ay was how Armenian wrote down the new-fangled long final a.

In any case, this looks like stuff internal to Armenian.

Again, this is all extrapolated guesswork from a couple of sketch grammars.

See Can you upload audio files as part of your Quora question?.

Vocaroo | Online voice recorder has become popular here lately in answers on “what does your accent sound like”.

I reluctantly agree with Konstantinos that the question should not be a “what sound is this”: not exactly googleable, and I have seen questions like this torpedoed. If the sound *illustrates* what you’re asking about, that’s different.

Greeks (OK, Byzantines) gave the Russians Orthodoxy, and feel a bond with them out of that. During Ottoman rule, the Russians saw themselves as the Third Rome—the successor state to Byzantium, which the Greeks felt was their lost empire. The Greeks in turn longed to be rescued by the Russians:

Ακόμη τούτην άνοιξη (ραγιάδες, ραγιάδες)
τούτο το καλοκαίρι (Μωρηά και Ρούμελη),
Οσο νάρθει ο Μόσκοβος (ραγιάδες ραγιάδες)
να φέρει το σεφέρι (Μωρηά και Ρούμελη)!

Just one more spring (ye slaves, ye slaves),
just one more summertime (Morea and Rumeli),
Till Moscow comes
bringing the army down.

The Greeks certainly remember the Orlov Revolt of 1770 a lot more clearly than the Russians do.

It’s an old surname: a scribe Niketas Mavronis is recorded in 1285: Σημειώματα-Κώδικες – View Simeioma

The stem is pretty clearly μαύρος “black, swarthy”; the -vr- is something of a giveaway, and the name doesn’t particularly look Slavonic or Aromanian. (1285 is too early for Arvanite or Turkish.) The -ώνης could mean the surname is derived from μαυρώνω “to blacken”, but that looks forced.

Most plausibly, -ώνης is some sort of diminutive or name suffix. This site ΤΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΕΠΩΝΥΜΑ‏ μια μελέτη και η Ιστορία τους. explains the suffix of Κοτσώνης Kotsonis as a diminutive of Kotsos < Kostas, adducing the colloquial diminutive (neuter) κλεφτρόνι “little thief”, and the surnames Γεωργιώνης, Γιαννακαρώνης, Διακώνης, Δροσώνης (from George, Big Little John, Deacon, Fresh [proper name]).

Yes: Sparta was an Ancient Greek city, and the inhabitants of Sparta spoke a dialect of Greek and participated in the Olympic games. So Spartans were ancient Greek people, in the same way Persepolitans were ancient Iranian people. The more usual ancient designation of those people, though, was Laconians or Lacedaemonians, referring to the region that Sparta controlled. (Hence Laconic wit, referring to the stereotypical terseness of Spartans.)

Sparta was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece. In antiquity the city-state was known as Lacedaemon, while the name Sparta referred to its main settlement on the banks of the Eurotas River in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese.

The town of Sparta (modern) was rebuilt in 1834, and “Spartan” is a surname that Greeks have adopted. (cc Kelley Spartiatis). So Spartans are also Modern Greek people.

Quora wants academics to promote their bios, in order to enhance the credibility of their answers, and thence of Quora answers as a whole. So while they can participate as just another user, the intent is that not all answers are equal.

When it comes to popular opinion, of course, all answers are equal, because kitty cats get more upvotes than three page screeds.

By the same token, no question is owed an answer by anyone, whether the question is posed by “an original researcher” or a layperson or a crackpot. Anyone is allowed to dismiss questions for whatever reason, and an academic is allowed to dismiss questions which the discipline as a whole would dismiss as crackpot. (That, after all, was the real motivation behind the “original research” requirement in Wikipedia.) That’s not an equity matter, that’s a matter of people being free to choose how to engage with questions.

You can object that this is groupthink and inflexibility. But just at Wikipedia, this is not the forum where you get to persuade an entire discipline that they’ve got etymology all wrong.