Hey, I qualify for that answer. January 2015, on my honeymoon. Was last in Greece 2008.

Kinda sullen.  My home town (Sitia, Eastern Crete): visibly a lot of shuttered shops. Noone in my extended family gave a crap about politics any more. Still a healthy nightlife and buzz in Salonica; in fact I had a much better impression of Salonica than the previous time, when I decided it was no longer “the Queen of Cities”. I saw more of Athens than usual, including much more of Plaka; also found that enjoyable to my surprise. The bookstores had clearly shrunk in both Athens and Salonica—hard for me to imagine a world without Eleftheroudakis Bookstore. Noone cared about the smoking ban.

So much for the socioeconomics. The personal perspective:  it’s no longer home, which is always painful to realise; I felt especially dislocated in Sitia. I found what I thought was a deep lack of curiosity about the outside world (including Australia and my wife)—which I found dispiriting.

Greek.

Ζήτω! Zito!

Now, have I ever written a Quora post on how you say something in Greek, without a detailed disquisition on etymology and alternate expressions?

I won’t this time either.

Zito! is a third person imperative of zo, “to live”: so “may he live!” The third person imperative would certainly have died out by 1000 AD. And “may he live!” looks suspiciously like German Es lebe!

Yes. Like any number of other Modern Greek formulaic expressions, Zito! is a German expression, translated into Ancient Greek. Just like εντάξει endaxi = “OK” is the Ancient Greek translation of In Ordnung.

The Byzantine equivalent, which doesn’t have as much to do with German, is Εἰς πολλὰ ἔτη Is polla eti, “For many years!” That expression survived into modern Greek dialect—and Bulgarian—as Σπολλάτη! Spolati!

What they all said. In the modern-day context it doesn’t matter all that much; in terms of historical reconstruction, you’re trying to pin down jelly, since the pronunciation was in flux during the period, though it seems to have been closer to Modern than Attic (though far from identical).

The reconstructions in Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers, 2nd Edition, I think, allowed that there were different pronunciations depending on social stratum.

One thing a friend pointed out to me (hi Fiona, following us via Facebook): Anglo Christians  pronouncing Koine seem to forget it’s a human language, and put lots of awkward stops between syllables (exaggerated hiatus). Like ParOuSi. A and Agatho. Poi. E. O. I guess that works for them; but Koine was not spoken by robots, just like Homeric Greek wasn’t spoken by yodelling Martians.

See also:

• Is the modern pronunciation of Greek accurate for koine?
• What are the pros and cons of the Erasmian pronunciation?

It’s a genuinely difficult phoneme to articulate. Back in the 80s, when the Guinness Book of Records was more than a picture book, it was listed as the most difficult to acquire—kids are supposed not to pick it up until they’re 7, and our own Zeibura S. Kathau says they have cram schools for it.

So what’s the deal with [r̝]? (See: Dental, alveolar and postalveolar trills)

• Trills are hard to articulate to begin with. As witnessed by questions here on Quora.
• There’s two articulations going on at the same time: both fricative and trill. That’s a much harder task. Much harder.
• And bugger me if I can hear anything but [rʒ] in the Wikipedia recording. Like any learner of Czech. Though I’m notorious for having a tin ear.
• It’s a complicated articulation, and (cause–and–effect) it’s very infrequent in human language, so it’s not like lots of people get exposed to it outside of Czechia. Kobon language has it as well, but it’s only one of like eight allophones of /r/; so if ever you have to learn Kobon (10000 speakers, which is huge for Papua New Guinea), you could get away with mangling it. Whereas in Czech, ržát [rʒaːt] (‘to neigh’) and řád [r̝aːt] (‘order’) are a minimal pair. Nice one, people of Czechia.

I am from Australia. In Australia, we truncate names. For this is the way of the Australians.

I had a colleague named Lucien. Anglo Australian, so Lucien was pronounced “loose-ee-yun”. But this is not the way of the Australians. The way of the Australians, including his 15 year girlfriend, was to pronounce it “loose”. Spelled, I daresay, Luce.

Australians would have no problem with a woman named thus. But the spelling would be Luce there too.

Hate typing answers on the phone: no IPA.

There was a taboo on saying YHWH out loud in Hebrew, and that extended to other languages; so yes, the Septuagint rendered YHWH as Kyrios, the Lord, just as Jehovah (when Christians rediscovered YHWH) comes from YHWH with the vowels of Adonai.

Now, Jehovah has come into Modern Greek as Ιεχωβάς, /iexovas/. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, are Μάρτυρες του Ιεχωβά. But Jehovah is a Renaissance coinage in western languages.

Did any Greek writings render YHWH?

Well, some Greek theologians discussed YHWH as YHWH. The Hebrew יהוה looks like the Greek ΠΙΠΙ. Hence the work spuriously attributed to Evagrius Ponticus “About PIPI”—although if you read it, pseudo-Evagrius knows perfectly well what a yod and a he is.

We also know that Theodoret (Quaestiones in Octateuchum p. 112) said that the Samaritans pronounced YHWH as Ἰαβέ, /iaβe/. He says that Jews instead pronounce “I am that I am” as Ἰά /ia/, which is of course just Yah. Epiphanius of Salamis‘ Panarion also mentions Ἰαβέ “He who was and who will forever be” as one of the many Jewish names for God

The Greek Magical Papyri are full of referenced to all manner of deities, including Yahweh, but only once or twice as Ἰαβέ. Their usual way of alluding to YHWH was Ἰαώ /iaɔː/(Iao – The Encyclopedia of Ancient History – Pleŝe – Wiley Online Library ).

Originally Answered:

What does Turkish sound like to foreigners?

Like French with a /ɯ/ in it.

I was about to say “and without the annoying mumbling”; but, having been to Istanbul:

Like French with a /ɯ/ in it.

I do actually like the sound of it. (Although as a Greek I’m not allowed to say that.) And vowel harmony is cute.

I no longer follow Greek politics for the same reason I stopped following US politics: too depressing.

I refer you however to the Greek version of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”, as I have illustrated here:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does the Greek word “malaka” mean?

I also look forward to hearing about Tsipras what I heard about Andreas Papandreou during recent visits: “A demagogue! A deceiver!” And that it doesn’t take twenty years and an economic collapse for people to see through this instance of populism.

EDIT: the question photo, btw, is why the Greek people shouldn’t give Tsipras a second chance. It’s from the Thessalonica International Fair, and it was where Tsipras the candidate, in September 2014, announced all the things he was going to do—the notorious “Thessaloniki Programme“.

We campaign in poetry, we govern in prose. But it’s handy as a politician not to get too surrealist in your poetry.

I’m not going to do this question justice.

Phonological differences in the dialect that carry across to the accent:

• Lots of /n/s that have dropped off in standard Greek, and longer [n]s than in standard Greek. So it sounds nasal: not French, nasal vowel nasal, but lots of nnnns nasal.
• The Greek counterpart of the Onion has an article on a tech upgrade to RIK (Cypriot TV) eliminating their Cypriot accents. The title of the  piece is Χωρίς κυπριακή προφορά τα ελληνικά στο ανανεωμένο ΡΙΚ HD • Το Κουλούρι  (“No Cypriot accent in the Greek of the rejuvenated RIK HD”). The web page file name is more direct: rik_without_ni, “RIK with no n’s”.
• Different stop contrasts. Standard Greek contrasts voiceless [t] and prenasalised [ⁿd], which increasingly ends up as [d]. Cypriot contrasts [tʰ] (initial geminate t), geminate [tː], and prenasalised [ⁿd]. That means that in the dialect, there are unfamiliar geminates and aspirates; and when speaking standard Greek, the stops sound wrong.

More singsong than Standard Greek (which isn’t hard, Standard Greek is pretty rat-tat-tat). Because of the geminates and the long [n]s, somewhat slower and more deliberate sounding (again, in contrast to  Standard Greek rat-tat-tat).

Brian Collins says “Probably because the protolanguage did not distinguish between those forms.”

Actually, Brian has sketched the answer in his response, but the foregoing isn’t quite it.

Indo-European languages often use notions of “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early” interchangably. The Ancient Greek for “tomorrow”, aurion,  is cognate to the Lithuanian aušrà “dawn”; and the Ancient Greek for “morning”, prōi, is transparently related to the word for “before”, pro. So it’s tempting to say “‘coz Proto–Indo-European”.

But (a) that doesn’t tell you why Proto–Indo-European conflated the two notions. And (b) it doesn’t tell you why Polish turned the word for “early” into the word for “morning”, as Brian reports. The Poles didn’t speak Proto–Indo-European.

Neither did Mediaeval Greeks, when they ditched both aurion and  prōi, and instead started suing forms of taxia to mean both “tomorrow” and “morning”. Unsurprisingly, taxia comes from the ancient Greek word for “fast”, takhy… which in this context means “soon”, as in “early”: Remember: “morning”, “tomorrow”, and “early”.

If the same meaning shifts keep happening again and again, it’s not because  Proto–Indo-European: it’s because those shifts make sense.

So: why conflate morning and early? Because morning is the early part of the day, duh.

So, more interestingly: why conflate morning and tomorrow?

If you don’t do something by COB today, what do you tell your boss?

“I’ll do it in the morning.”

What does that mean?

That you’ll do it tomorrow.

It’s even more true if you’re a peasant, like most speakers of most languages have been. When do you think of tomorrow? Not first thing in the morning; but in the evening, when you’re planning what you’re going to do the next day. What do you think of tomorrow as, in the evening when you’re planning your work? Not as tomorrow evening—that’s when you’re meant to have finished the stuff you’re going to do the next day. But as tomorrow morning, when the next day’s work starts.

So a lot of people would say a lot of times “I’ll do it in the morning.”  In that common context, morning is ambiguous with tomorrow. So morning ends up standing in for tomorrow, as a more vivid or concrete way of referring to it.

And not because people have forgotten how to say “tomorrow”. Words rarely change to fill a gap: they change to make communication more vivid.