I… don’t actually like opera, with the following exceptions. So my answers are (a) not representative, and (b) damn good, if they got past my “I don’t like opera” filter.
Need a fifth, OK:
Thirty years ago, but I remember liking it at the time.
EDIT: Strike that. I meant to say
What made Roman script suited for adoption?
The fact it was adopted a lot. Latin on its own is not particularly suited for a lot of phonemes, but it was the only game in town in Western and Central Europe, and that meant there was a long, long tradition of workarounds—both digraphs and diacritics. So another digraph or diacritic for another language was not a big deal. Only Vietnamese really stretched that.
Ultimately, hegemony came first: it was the script of the Catholic Church and the mediaeval intelligentsia—if you want to write down your barbaric dialect, deal with it.
What made Greek script suited?
Hegemony of Greek culture and the Orthodox Church, meaning it was a target for Bactrian and Cyrillic, and Balkan languages and Turkish. On Cyrillic see below.
But it wasn’t repurposed that often, the languages it was repurposed for were usually not mainstream languages (or it was not the mainstream spelling of a mainstream language). And while there are traditions of both digraphs and diacritics in Greek, they have never become mainstream themselves: a little digraph work in Greek dialect (Cypriot, Tsakonian), diacritics limited to Greek dialectology. That means that it was not a very good fit for other languages most of the time.
What made Cyrillic script suited?
Hegemony of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Communist Church. There was a merry-go-round of scripts from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic to Latin.
A broader phonetic repertoire than Greek or Latin, which helped.
The broader phonetic repertoire was because Cyril was not afraid to add new letters. Greek did it only once or twice. Outside of the IPA, and the IPA-inspired African alphabets, Latin only did it once or twice. Through the precedence of Glagolitic, Cyril added a dozen.
And Cyrillic kept adding new letters (typically as variants of old letters) whenever a new language’s inventory showed up; there’s more new letters than digraphs and diacritics (though you get those too). Just as well they did: they have the languages of the Caucasus to deal with.
Why did they keep adding new letters? As with Roman and diacritics: precedent. That’s how Cyrillic, as distinct from Roman, started adapting to new languages.
What made Arabic script suited?
An OK consonant repertoire, and diacritics meaning that you can add more consonants as variants (three dots for Farsi, four dots for Shina language, as well as digraphs for Urdu). OTOH, avoiding vowels outside of matres lectionis. Doesn’t work well outside Semitic.
And Hegemony of Islam.
What made Hebrew script suited?
I don’t know if Hegemony and Judaism go together, but that. And as for Arabic: some diacritics and digraphs, though not common enough outside of Yiddish to be a fine-tuned instrument; and only matres lectionis for vowels.
Don’t know enough about other scripts.
An Islamic nation, no; but bits of it have been majority Muslim, including Crete (9th century, and again 17th century); and the bits that weren’t majority Muslim were substantial minority Muslim in Ottoman times.
Uncontroversially: from the Greek εις την Πόλιν [is tim polin], “to the City”—The City being the informal name of Constantinople in Greek, to this day. There is at least one similar Turkish placename: İstanköy is the Turkish for Kos (εις την Κω /is tin ko/).
There are some uncertainties about why it ended up as İstanbul instead of İstinbul. In fact there’s a paper I stumbled on in academia.edu, quoting me to support a Tsakonian origin for the /a/. (Impossible, the Tsakonians wouldn’t have shown up next to Erdek until 1700, and we’re talking two villages. But it’s nice to be quoted.)
I referred to my wrong answer in Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it like to be able to fluently speak Klingon?. The oddity is also commented on in Pedro Alvarez’s answer to What English word is pronounced the most differently from the way it is spelled?
Here’s the deal, from the appendix to Vox Graeca
Greek had a diphthong ει. It was a diphthong in Homeric Greek, /ei/, but by Attic it was /eː/, and had merged with what was in Homeric Greek /e.e/, εε. By Roman times, it was pretty much /i/, and it is transliterated into Latin as <i>. So Εἰρήνη Irene, εἰδύλλιον idyll, συμπάθεια sympathia > sympathy.
Because most Greek loans came into English via Latin—or were spelled as if they did—we rarely get a Greek word in English spelled with an <ei>.
But there are exceptions. Such as deixis and seismic.
So. How to pronounce those?
If you pronounced ει in your Greek like Modern Greek, or even like the Romans did, you would be pronouncing it as an /i/. It would end up [sɪzmɪk, dɪksɪs].
That’s not what happened. Greek was being taught in England with Erasmian pronunciation: an attempt to approach the original pronunciation. Because Greek spelling is conservative, that would end up as a diphthong. And the diphthong that ει looks like (and indeed was in Homeric times) was /ei/.
That’s fine. English has an /ei/ diphthong, so that won’t be a problem. We can just tell people to say δεῖξις as in “day-xis”, σεισμικός as in “say-smi-koss”.
So what happened?
Well what happened is that the [eɪ] pronunciation of long a in English is recent. Like, 18th century recent. Which is why in Scots long a still has its older pronunciation of /eː/.
So if you’re teaching Ancient Greek in England in the 17th century, you have a problem. You know that ει sounds like [eɪ], but if you’re teaching it in 17th century English, there is no English sound corresponding to [eɪ]! Certainly not long a.
So they did the next best thing. (For some bizarre notion of “next best”.) They picked the nearest diphthong available in the English of the time.
They picked long i.
And when English did pick up the [eɪ] sound, it was too late. The teaching of Greek in England was stuck on [aɪ] as the pronunciation of ει. And when Greek words were borrowed afresh into English, with the <ei> spelling, they took the 17th century teaching pronunciation with them. σεισμικός was taught as [saismikos], so seismic was pronounced as [saɪzmɪk].
Language. You can’t make this shit up.
Without getting into the issue of how much of Genesis is historical and how much is wishful thinking:
The Babylonian captivity, which can be independently verified from archaeology, was 580 to 530 BC. That’s when the Hebrew Scriptures as we know them were consolidated.
Omri is the first independently verified King of Israel, and he was around 880 BC.
Our first historical evidence of the Greeks is in Linear B, which goes up to 1200 BC; but the era of the Ancient Greeks as we know them starts with Greek writing, around 770 BC. Any Greek you’ve heard of by name, other than Homer, is 7th century BC or later.
So the era of the ancient Greeks starts two to three centuries after David (if there was a David), and a lot longer than that after the Flood (if there was a Flood).
What my betters have said, with both the pros and cons from Don Grushkin’s answer.
Be aware of the following constraints:
Don’t let this talk you out of it. At all. Just be aware—even more so than anyone considering a career in linguistics in general. Be prepared for some disillusionment.
And from what I gather from those I know that have stuck with it: be prepared for some life-changing, life-long friendships too.
νόστιμος, /nostimos/.
The etymology (yes, that’s what I do) is odd. The primary meaning of nostos, the word that nostimos is derived from, is “return”: it’s the word for Odysseus’ return to Ithaca.
Wheat gives a rich return on investment, so nostos also means the yield of ground grain. Hence the adjective means “abundant”, referring to foodstuff; and from there, “wholesome, succulent, nutritious” by Roman times.
As Liddell–Scott tells you.
Sometimes, I ask for clarification in comments. Much more rarely, I’ll answer after the clarification. (Questions aren’t the asker’s, they’re the community’s. They aren’t mine either.)
Sometimes—more often than some, possibly: I answer anyway. On occasional, I even answer a question related to the question answered.
Hey, ask a broad question, get all sorts of answers.
I can’t find online corroboration of this, probably because I read this on a tourist placard somewhere. But apparently when Prince Alfred came to visit Australia in 1868, the streets of Bendigo (or was it Ballarat?) were paved with silver.
Gold was too plentiful.