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The relevant monograph is: Greek Forms of Address: From Herodotus to Lucian (Oxford Classical Monographs) (9780198150541): Eleanor Dickey. See review at Bryn Mawr Classical Review 97.11.09 

The male defaults were anax/basileu (king), despota (lord, master), and kyrie (ditto). If you were talking to a king in antiquity, I think you just called them “king”: the familiar circumlocutions of majesties and excellencies are later inventions. LSJ says kyrie is late, and despota is what slaves used. Doing a search on the TLG, up to 2nd century BC, and skipping the Septuagint (which uses kyrie a lot), I find 96 instances of despota, and 9 of kyrie.

Kyrie “Lord” is of course the usual title for Christ in Greek (hence Kyrie eleison, “Lord have mercy”), as well as the usual rendering of Lord in the Septuagint—though despota turns up in Greek hymnography as well. My recollection is that despota was usual for Byzantine emperors.

For feminines, the best default I can think of is despoina, feminine of despota. It is a common title for the Virgin Mary later on.The feminine of kyrios, kyria, also appears to be post-classical.

Abstractions like “majesty” and “excellency” are late, like I said, and certainly in Modern Greek they are not used to address anyone. (Η αυτού μεγαλειότης “his majesty”, but μεγαλειότατε “most majestic one!”.) Which means that, since Greek has always had grammatical gender, there have never been any gender neutral terms.

There have been some changes between Ancient and Modern Greek: τρώγω originally meant “chew” (it’s the same evolution as Latin manducare > French manger). By Attic, πρόβατον meant sheep and not just livestock; the Homeric word is ὄις. And ὁποῖος is “of what sort”, not quite the proverbial “whoever”.

I haven’t studied Classics at university either, but I’d suggest:

ὅστις πρόβατον γίγνεται, λύκος ἐσθίει αὐτόν.

King Tut is famous now, but his memory had been quite effectively erased by his successors.

Manetho wrote a Greek history of Egypt listing pharaohs, whose names only kinda sorta line up with the names we find in Egyptian documents. The pharaoh he lists corresponding to King Tut is Rathotis. See the paper Manetho’s Eighteenth Dynasty by Gary Greenberg for more. Marianne Luban in  The Identity of Manetho’s Rathotis proposes  that Rathotis comes from the Egyptian for “swollen foot” (Oedipus).

In Modern Greek, King Tut is transliterated as Τουταγχαμών.

Greek: ἀνὴρ ὀψιαίτατος ἐν κόσμῳ παλαιοτάτῳ.

I’ll second the request for more context.

No substitute for rote, I’m afraid. But there are patterns and regularities, and you’ll need to make them your friend:

• If anything looks like a preverb (prepositional prefix), strip it off. It’s usually a safe bet that it is in fact a preverb.
• The endings do have patterns (the final vowels/consonants, the thematic vowels, the verb stem endings). The more comprehensive grammars present the patterns as part of their historical approach, but they aren’t just of historical interest: they help you learn the inflections. (And native speakers use these patterns subconsciously.)
• The thematic vowels in particular are your friend, because they help you get to the present form: whether it’s -αω -εω -οω , or  just -ω.
• If it’s athematic, well, that’s a matter of rote memorisation. Good thing there aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be common. Which is after all the story with irregular verbs in language.
• Be on the lookout for second aorists and liquid verbs, they are an added complication
• Think in terms of proto-Greek: it will help the patterns become more obvious. So don’t just learn the tables, but where the inflections came from. Uncontracted verbs, after all, are mostly proto-Greek, and certainly not Attic. The tendency  to drop intervocalic /s/, for example will make 2nd person passives look much more plausible.
• Dialect is indeed harder. It took me three hours to work out what φαῖο means (The tale of φαῖο), and it didn’t help that the form, being dialectal and in a new edition, was not in the standard grammars.
• Byzantine Greek is even worse, because there is a *lot* of fantasy morphology. Much like the Irish monks, Byzantine writers often just made tenses up.
• In the olden days, there were dictionaries of verbs. Lexikon ueber die formen der griechischen verba, Traut, Georg  is one instance; and Greek verbs, irregular and defective, Veitch, William is another. Veitch is comprehensive; the advantage of Traut is that you can actually look up individual inflected verbs in the canonical corpus. (Just remember to strip off the preverbs.)
• There are morphological analysers of Greek, which are hyperlinked in to some online texts. Including Perseus, and the TLG (both the subscription full version, and the free subset). The TLG’s morphological analyser is an ongoing project that I’m working on, and it provides the possible analyses of word forms in texts.

I don’t have the answer, but this will help narrow it down:

This is not a proverb as such, but is a quotation from a speech by the orator Isocrates. Nicocles, section 9:

οὐδὲν τῶν φρονίμως πραττομένων εὑρήσομεν ἀλόγως γιγνόμενον

The emphasis out of context is not quite as obvious, because the same word logos is used to mean “the faculty of speech”, “a speech”, and “reason”. In fact the word alogōs normally means not “without speech”, but “irrationally”. But in context, Isocrates is extolling speech as the faculty that both distinguishes us from animals, and that lets us pursue social interaction (including oratory). And ultimately, he is saying that  people who speak for a living (like orators) are pursuing a noble profession:

Nicocles or the Cyprians, 6-9:

But, because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other and to make clear to each other whatever we desire, not only have we escaped the life of wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts; and, generally speaking, there is no institution devised by man which the power of speech has not helped us to establish

For this it is which has laid down laws concerning things just and unjust, and things base and honorable; and if it were not for these ordinances we should not be able to live with one another. It is by this also that we confute the bad and extol the good. Through this we educate the ignorant and appraise the wise; for the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul.

With this faculty we both contend against others on matters which are open to dispute and seek light for ourselves on things which are unknown; for the same arguments which we use in persuading others when we speak in public, we employ also when we deliberate in our own thoughts; and, while we call eloquent those who are able to speak before a crowd, we regard as sage those who most skilfully debate their problems in their own minds.

And, if there is need to speak in brief summary of this power, we shall find that none of the things which are done with intelligence take place without the help of speech, but that in all our actions as well as in all our thoughts speech is our guide, and is most employed by those who have the most wisdom. Therefore, those who dare to speak with disrespect of educators and teachers of philosophy deserve our opprobrium no less than those who profane the sanctuaries of the gods.

The world is full of joke phobias, and bad Greek renderings of joke phobias at that. There is a special place in hell for the mangling of Greek that is Coulrophobia.

If there’s a real phobia associated, it’d be symmetriphobia, fear of matching things in general (though I’m not clear from googling as to whether that is a real phobia).

I can make up a word for the phobia if you’d like. harmostos for “matching”. The Ancient Greeks didn’t wear modern socks, and the Modern word for sock is a borrowing from Italian; but LSJ tells me that podeion was a sock or legging. So harmostopodeiophobia.

To elaborate on the other answers, malakas does indeed mean “masturbator”, but note that it does not have the same connotation as either American jerk < jerk off or Commonwealth wanker. A jerk and a wanker are both obnoxious, presumably because masturbation is narcissistic. A malakas is a fool, a dupe. (Cartoons will often feature J Random Citizen asking themselves whether they are a malakas for voting for party X, or falling for political pledge Y.)

EDIT: by way of illustration (and because this answer, disappointingly, appears to be one of my most popular), here’s a recent instance that popped up on my Facebook feed:

Jerking off makes you blind. [SYRIZA logo.]

The joke is not that voting for SYRIZA makes you a jerk (US slang) or a wanker (Commonwealth slang)—but a fool (Greek slang), for believing that voting for SYRIZA would make any difference.

Because that’s the Modern Greek word for grandmother. 🙂

The Triantafyllidis dictionary gives a shrug for the etymology: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής

λ. νηπιακή: γιάγια και μετακ. τόνου για προσαρμ. στα άλλα ανισοσύλλαβα ουσ.

Baby talk: yáya and accent shift to adapt to other imparisyllabic nouns

Babiniotis’ dictionary gives the same shrug.

The motivation is wrong: yaya didn’t have to be imparisyllabic to begin with (and váya, the Mediaeval word for nurse, wasn’t). The obvious analogy is instead with other child-talk terms: mamá “mum”, babás “dad”, papús “granddad”, dadá “nanny”.

Baby talk has given us mama, papa/baba (hence babás “dad” helped by Turkish), and dada (hence dadá “nanny” again from Turkish). I’m not aware of yaya as an established baby-talk vocable, but I don’t see what else it could be.

Another, now obsolete word for grandmother btw is nené: νενέ – Wiktionary. That’s also from Turkish, and it also fits the baby-talk pattern.

Antiquated now, I’m afraid: relegated to walking stereotypes like the late Steve Irwin, and the news website crikey.com.au . It is an exclamation of surprise, like strewth and stone the crows.