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I refer you to The Still-Alive Poets Society blog here.

Here’s a cycle from me, from 2010.

While I was away

I: May

As if I was the first
To sail beyond the west,
Fall off the end of Earth,
Sink, swim, and gasp for breath.

As if no man knew thirst,
Before I stopped to rest
Beside the spring; or birth,
Before I heard of death.

Beyond the west: each day
A year, each step a road.
Winding to the unknown.

Roads trod by mortal clay
A thousandfold. A ride
I’ve hitched now. By your side.

II: May

This fulsomeness, this loveliness, this care,
This playfulness, this trust and troth laid bare,
This passion, this impulsiveness, this shock,
This pressing—this inexorable lock,

These waves and curves, this storm of skin and hair,
This push and pull and pause, this fear and dare,
These shades, dim monochrome, that sway and rock,
This stillness, lulled at by the ticking clock,

All this you teach me. All of this you hold.
All this I witness with you. Watch it flow,
Like mercury, like phlogiston, like gold.

This Here-and-Now, this Hence, this Old Made New,
This secret that not even we can know,
This you and I have claimed.
 It’s half past two.

III: May

So, there’s this girl. Unruly, quite the knave.
Will not stay put. Does what she damn well will.
Frets that she’ll fall asleep if she stands still.
Makes mirth of solemn stuff. Derides the grave.

So there’s this girl. Can’t take her anyplace.
Won’t talk on tragedy. Will not wear frills.
Talk French cuisine, she’s running for the hills.
And laughs at me about it to my face.

So there’s this girl, who’s got me all worked out,
piercing my artifices and my doubt.
And still stays put, and won’t go anywhere.

What do I do with her? What has she done,
To make my reason and my pomp go dumb?
How have I come to earn reproof so fair?

IV: August

Grace pooling from above. Grace trickling down.
Grace mingling with the common and the base,
Granted unbidden, and divulged unbound.
Grace that suffuses all, for gain or waste.

Grace filling puddles, muddying the ground,
In which the errant wretch begrudged his haste:
Splashed past his shins, only to end up drowned
In startling, blinding, and uncalled for Grace.

Thy grace, thy charm, thy steadfastness, thy blithe
And easy gait: I, far from thee and these
Behold and cannot fathom. Where these thrive,

Where thou hast joy, I hear of now and then:
Reports of floods and mud that boil and freeze
And thaw, and bring this world to grace, and mend.

V: October

Each year Adonis dies, pierced by the boar.
Each year the maidens bear him, singing dirges,
To a tomb. Adonis each new year emerges
To live again, eager to hunt once more.

Each year the black earth, bound in snow, and sore
With grief, bewails its loss in crystal churches.
Each year, Lent breaks: up from the ground life surges
Anew, to bloom, to fade, to exult, to mourn.

Each week, each day, we dance, and draw apart,
And back again; we stop, we spin, we start,
We try anew. It works, it fails, it muddles.

Each time, we don’t know that the Spring will come.
Each time, we know that soon the frost will numb
Our hands. Yet still a flame glows, where we’ve huddled.

VI: November

The cold has come. The stony showers flood
Blurred memories of one-time warmth, as brusque
As Melbourne weather. Now a bleary dusk
Alone recalls the sun, in faded blood,

Soon to grow dark. These feet pass through the mud,
Their pace agnostic, doubting. A boar’s tusk,
They’d wailed, has struck. But pilfered myths won’t mask
That chill that numbs its prey, and binds it shut.

Now stories leech away. I never sailed
Beyond the west; the storm at half past two
Was merely rain, and bore no grace. I failed

To hear their music. Now they’ve fallen dumb,
Too drained to praise a summer that was due
To pass. And so it sets.

The cold has come.

Lee Mason

I am going to take a break starting in a couple days and for the duration of 5 days to a week. I need to get off my phone and go outside for the beginning of summer, so that is what I’m doing.

Another data point:

• Routinely served to tourists, as an exotic offering. Like crocodile is.
• Available in gourmet restaurants on occasion, as an exotic offering.
• I’ve had it two or three times. The last time, in an Ethiopian tagine.
• Available in supermarkets, but not plentiful in supermarkets.
• Very plentiful as pet food.
• Very lean meat, so very easy to overcook.
• Has not captured the people’s imagination, it must be said. Australians have changed their staple meats (from rabbit to chicken), and Australians pride themselves on being foodies; but there has not been a groundswell of enthusiasm about roo meat.

Our guesses for Ancient Greek are that it was /u/ in most ancient dialects of Greek, and /y/ (German ü) in Attic.

Upsilon was the last letter to change pronunciation in Modern Greek, to /i/. <oi> had also come to be pronounced as /y/ in late Antiquity (they are routinely confused, only with each other, in the proto-Bulgarian inscriptions); it too went to /i/.

• We have a poem from 1030 AD making fun of the new pronunciation (Michael the Grammarian’s irony about hypsilon: a step towards reconstructing byzantine pronunciation): a rustic priest is ridiculed for pronouncing <xylon> the modern way.
• We have evidence from placenames indicating the old pronunciation was around in the 1100s and 1200s (Koryfoi > Old French Corfu, Oinoe > Turkish Ünye).
• We have archaic dialects of Greek—Old Athenian, Tsakonian—in which the reflex of upsilon is [ju], just as French /y/ went to English [ju] (pure).
• And most sensationally, Nikos Pantelidis has recently published a paper unearthing evidence he finds persuasive, that the /y/ pronunciation survived in Old Athenian (the original dialect of Athens, before it was overwhelmed by Peloponnesian settlers in the new Greek state) until the 1840s: https://www.researchgate.net/pub…

Constantly. I take pride in them, and reread them, and I get some measure of satisfaction out of them.

Yeah, maybe I should get out more…

Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller from Spain, visited Greece around 1170, when the Jews of Greece were all Romaniotes (Greek-speaking). Benjamin’s fellow Sephardic Jews only moved to Greece when they were expelled from Spain, three hundred years later. So whatever was going on, it was not because of any linguistic kinship between the Vlachs’ Aromanian language and any Greek Jews’ Ladino language.

Might it have been an appeal to Benjamin’s Ladino? No; language does not come up at all. The sum total of what Benjamin writes about them is:

From there it is a day’s journey to Sinon Potamo, where there are about fifty Jews, at their head being R. Solomon and R. Jacob. The city is situated at the foot of the hills of Wallachia. The nation called Wallachians live in those mountains. They are as swift as hinds, and they sweep down from the mountains to despoil and ravage the land of Greece. No man can go up and do battle against them, and no king can rule over them. They do not hold fast to the faith of the Nazarenes, but give themselves Jewish names. p.18Some people say that they are Jews, and, in fact, they call the Jews their brethren, and when they meet with them, though they rob them, they refrain from killing them as they kill the Greeks. They are altogether lawless. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Itinerary Of Benjamin Of Tudela

Wherever Sinon Potamo is, it is two days walk from Gardiki, Trikala; so Benjamin was in Thessaly, where there is a substantial Vlach population.

As you can well imagine, historians have found this intriguing. That doesn’t mean it’s true; Benjamin of Tudela also claimed a Jewish Kingdom in Ethiopia, which recent scholarship is sceptical about (Desperately seeking the Jewish Kingdom of Ethiopia: Benjamin of Tudela and the Horn of Africa (twelfth century)).

The Vlachs in the area openly rebelled against Byzantium two decades later, and may not have been willing to accept Byzantine religious suzerainty, so Greek priests may have been in short supply in Vlach Thessaly. While most Greeks don’t use Old Testament given names, Cypriots do, Bulgarians did, and maybe Vlachs did too; a credulous Benjamin could well have run with that as evidence of something.

I think what’s likeliest is, the Thessaly Vlachs welcomed Benjamin as a non-Greek, were intrigued by his background, and told him some tall tales to impress him.

At a stretch, you could use Pokorny’s Indo-European dictionary to move forward, although it won’t move terribly much forward: you’d have to do the work of getting from Old English to Modern English yourself.

I’m not aware of such dictionaries myself, though I’d be surprised if someone hasn’t done one. These days, your best bet would be the text of an English Dictionary that allowed its etymologies to be searchable. Or, as Lotte Meester has pointed out, Wiktionary.

I’m wondering how the old Greeko-roman culture of Byzantine, perhaps the most sophisticated in the middle ages, just collapsed and replaced by language and culture of tribal immigrant Turks who hardly had any written tradition?

For the specifics of what happened in Anatolia, see When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia? (where I’m about to post an answer).

For the general principle: people don’t adopt a different language and culture because they’re choosing between Cyril of Alexandria and Avicenna, or between Michael Psellos and Ibn Tufail. People adopt a different language and culture because it will bring them direct benefit in their daily life, in the regime they happen to find themselves. And we’re talking a lot of peasants in Anatolia, who had never heard of Psellos or Cyril.

Not to my knowledge. The late Larry Trask, preeminent vasconist of his time, spent a lot of leisure time refuting inane claims about Basque being related to every language on earth, and part of his armoury as a historical linguist was that such inane efforts made use of modern Basque dictionaries, whereas​ both what we have reconstructed of proto-Basque, and what little we know of Aquitanian, the ancestor of Basque, are phonologically different.

Bit of a misunderstanding here. The proper name Arsenius, Greek Arsenios (as in Arsenio Hall) is derived from the Greek word for ‘man’, arsen. But it was not the normal word for “masculine”, and LSJ records arsenios meaning “masculine” only once in a third century AD papyrus. The normal word for masculine was arsenikos (seemingly as in arsenic; in fact arsenic is from the Arabic al-zarnīq, which Greeks noticed sounded just like the Greek for “masculine”).

OP wonders, if the word for ‘masculine’ in Greek ended up in Latin, did the Greek word for ‘feminine’, thēlykos, end up in Latin as well? The Greek word for ‘masculine’ didn’t really end up in Latin, though, except as a name, and Google returns no hits whatsoever for +thelycus. So I’d be surprised if it did.