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Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the most unforgettable food that you have eaten in a foreign country?

Because, for better or worse, damn is what God does, and condemn is what a judge does. So damn picked up the religious and then blasphemous connotations which condemn never had, which made it much more eligible as a profanity. Profanity is all about the current taboos in society.

There is one major similarity between the Old Cyrillic and Greek alphabets: originally, both were (mostly) phonemic, but several of the distinct sounds represented by different letters merged later on, so that there was two or more ways of representing the same phoneme with different letters. So the letter Yat seems to have originally represented /æ/; its sound merged with /e/ in Russian, so that /e/ was written as both <Ѣ> and <е>.

In the same way, Greek for instance, used to have different pronunciations for <ω> and <ο>, /ɔː/ and /o/; Greek lost its quantity and quality distinctions, so to this day there are two ways of writing /o/: <ω> and <ο>.

On the other hand, the two different ways of writing /i/ in Old Cyrillic, <и> and <і>, were not comparable to Greek—they were inherited from Greek, where <η> and <ι> had already merged in pronunciation. Old Russian orthography had worked out rules for when to use one and when to use the other (Dotted I (Cyrillic) – Wikipedia); but those rules were artificial:

In the early Cyrillic alphabet, there was little or no distinction between the Cyrillic letter i (И и), derived from the Greek letter eta, and the soft-dotted letter i. They both remained in the alphabetical repertoire since they represented different numbers in the Cyrillic numeral system, eight and ten, respectively. They are, therefore, sometimes referred to as octal I and decimal I.

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.

I think you’re thinking of Liutprand of Cremona, not-too-diplomatic diplomat to Constantinople, who spent a fair while under lock and key:

His reception at Constantinople was humiliating and ultimately futile after the subject of Otto’s claim to the title [Holy Roman] Emperor caused friction, triggered by a letter from Pope John XIII which offensively addressed Nicephorus as “the emperor of the Greeks”.

(Otto I had just launched or revived the Holy Roman Empire, depending on whether Charlemagne counts as the same empire.)

…

On his second mission to Constantinople, for instance, after his purple purchases are confiscated, he tells the imperial party that at home whores and conjurers wear purple.

As other answers have said, the Byzantines never ceased considering themselves the true Roman Empire, and they referred to themselves as Romans, not Greeks; they were careful to use the term rēx ‘king’ and not basileus ‘emperor’ for the rulers of the West.

Tom deems me a popular Quoran. Thank you, Tom. So here goes:

Nick Nicholas: What’s the most unforgettable food that you have eaten in a foreign country? by Nick Nicholas on The Quora Lectionary

(Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the most unforgettable food that you have eaten in a foreign country?)

And for an added bonus:

Nick Nicholas: Was ist Quora? by Nick Nicholas on The Quora Lectionary

(Antwort von Nick Nicholas auf Was ist Quora?)

What? The Quora Lectionary? Why yes, a blog that is now open for anyone to submit a post…

2017–05–27 by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue

My account has now been completely deleted. I don’t know why, and I don’t know how. All I know is that starting 2:04 pm 5/25/2017 (a few hours before my edit-block was supposed to be lifted), a mass deletion of my profile’s contents began. I couldn’t log in because my email wasn’t associated with my Quora profile anymore, apparently.

This morning, I could only watch as 2 years of my writing was being deleted in massive chunks. What’s more, I hadn’t received any emails from Quora notifying me of any changes to my Quora account. I’m not banned. Something isn’t right here.

I sent multiple emails to multiple Quora support emails. I sent Facebook messages to @Tatiana Estevez and @Jay Wacker as a last resort. I told my friends to contact anyone working at Quora. I searched all morning for a customer support number I could call.

No replies.

I don’t think I was hacked; the sheer speed at which my contents were being deleted is inhuman. This is the work of a bot. One of your bots have gone haywire. One of your bugs have crossed the line. Or, one of your employees is holding a grudge against me and locking me out of my profile/deleting my contents without notifying me.

I’m desperately pleading right now for someone to tell me what the fuck is going on. I’m already quite tempted to storm into Quora HQ and give a nice long lecture to the receptionist (whoever they may be).

Note: I have notified account services at Quora on Alexander’s behalf, at Jay Wacker’s suggestion.