Category: Uncategorized

Per Nick Nicholas’ answer to How is souvlaki prepared differently in different countries?

In Greece, Souvlaki properly is a skewer of meat, typically pork, and often served in pita. Gyros, which involves shaved rotisserie meat (again, typically pork) is distinct from souvlaki. Either are served in small pita bread wraps, with mustard, salad, and fries.

[…]

The Australian version diverged early, and it’s a gyros, not a skewer: you will see gyros (or yeeros) as a name as well, but souvlaki is the usual name here. […] The gyros is traditionally lamb, and pork is unheard of. Chicken is the alternative meat in both Greece and Australia. The pita is twice the size. Tzatziki instead of mustard, salad, and no fries.

Döner kebab, as prepared by Turks in Australia, is not as common; it is beef or chicken instead of lamb or chicken. The beef, in my experience, is relatively bland compared to Greek gyros lamb.

From what we can work out, including the evidence from the ancients, and as consolidated on Ancient Greek accent – Wikipedia:

• If the syllable was short: an acute meant High pitch, and a grave meant Low pitch. (In reality, it meant neutral pitch.)
• If the syllable was long, break the syllable up into two Morae. An acute meant Low pitch on the first mora, and High pitch on the second. A circumflex meant High pitch on the first mora, and Low pitch on the second. A grave is still neutral pitch.

When accents were first invented, graves were written on every syllable that was not accented: ἄνθρὼποὶ ántʰrɔ̀ːpoì. That’s the evidence that the grave was in reality a neutral pitch.

Chinese as a tonal language has a tone on every syllable. Greek was a Pitch accent language, the way Serbian and Swedish is now: a polysyllabic word has one accent, but that accent involves different levels of pitch, as well as different levels of loudness. The other syllables in the word are unstressed, and have neutral pitch.

That means that the tone contours of Ancient Greek would not have sounded as up-and-down as Chinese: there’s a lot more neutral syllables than in Chinese. Moreover, a single mora was either high or low; it wasn’t rising or falling. The rises and falls were there on long syllables, but they were spread out over the two morae. Which means that pitch changes were slightly more gradual than in Chinese.

The four tones of Mandarin don’t quite match:

• Acute, short: High pitch — corresponds to First (high–level) tone.
• Grave, short or long: Low pitch — corresponds to Neutral tone. Maybe Third (low, dipping) tone, without the dipping.
• Acute, long: Low-to-High pitch — close to Second (rising) tone, maybe slower rise.
• Circumflex, long: High-to-Low pitch — not close to Fourth (high–falling) tone, which falls quickly; more like First then Third (low, dipping) tone.

So if I were to transliterate “But welcome, O wise people”:

καλῶς δὲ ἤλθατε, ὦ σοφοὶ ἄνθρωποι
kalɔ̂ːs dè ɛ́ːltʰate, ɔ̂ː sopʰoì ántʰrɔːpoi

into Mandarin, it’d be something like this:

galōǒs dě eéltade, ōǒ sopǒy āntroboy

I looked up Dr. W. PAPE’s Woerterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen. Dritte Auflage neu bearbeitet von Dr. Gustav Eduard BENSELER. Vierter Abdruck. Braunschweig, 1911, the big old Greek dictionary of proper names. It brings up the Byzantine authorities’ guesses, and they lean towards ‘wheat’. The Etymologicum Magnum says that the river Pyramus was so called διὰ τὸ πολὺ πυρὸν περιποιεῖν τοῖς ἐν τῇ Κιλικίᾳ οἰκοῦσιν “because it provides those who dwell in Cilicia with much wheat”. Eustathius of Thessalonica interprets it as a variant of πυράμινος ‘wheaten’.

I looked up Dr. W. PAPE’s Woerterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen. Dritte Auflage neu bearbeitet von Dr. Gustav Eduard BENSELER. Vierter Abdruck. Braunschweig, 1911, the big old Greek dictionary of proper names. The best it had to offer is Suda’s gloss of the noun thisbē as ‘funerary urn’ (σορός): SOL Search.

The Thisbe mentioned by Ovid (Pyramus and Thisbe) was supposed to be from Babylon, which makes one suspect an Eastern origin for the name; but Thisbe was already used in ancient Greek, to refer to a nymph, and a town named after the nymph in Boeotia: Boeotian Naiad Nymph of Greek Mythology (town mentioned in Iliad 2.502). That makes it likelier that something like “urn” was the origin of the town name, and the nymph name was retconned.

Thisbe – Meaning of Thisbe says that the name means “where the dove lives”. This is a misunderstanding of πολυτρήρωνά τε Θίσβην “Thisbe of the many doves”, the description of the town in the Iliad.

Thisbe is the Septuagint transliteration of the town of Tishbe in Israel; a term which in Hebrew means ‘captivity’.

Blocking anonymous comments other than OP? I mildly approve of.

Blocking anonymous comments by OP themselves? Ludicrous, and likely done because it’s been too hard to implement a better alternative. If a writer is allowed to write, they should be allowed to further their argument and negotiate clarification with readers through comments. If the OP’s comments is taken to be a cesspool, then so is the OP’s original writing: a distinction between the two is artificial. Removing the ability to follow up on your writing is a disincentive to writing anonymously at all. (Something I’m sure Quora didn’t mind.)

For those who say “Yeah, and that’s a good thing”, I can only say, well, why not remove anonymous answers too?

And for those who say “Yeah, how about we do!!!”, I say, there but for the grace of God go you.

Removing anonymous comments were not the real issue to be fixed; comments are a secondary part of people’s experience of Quora anyway. The real issue to be fixed was the careful vetting of anonymous content we were promised by Riley Patterson’s announcement, which clearly has not materialised. Quora should be careful about making public undertakings they can’t follow through on.

It’s a pillar of semiotics that you can’t: Ferdinand de Saussure’s renowned Arbitrariness of the Sign (Arbitraire du Signe).

Sound symbolism is an exception to the Arbitrariness of the Sign, and it’s an exception that Saussure was aware of, and addressed (see http://personal.bgsu.edu/~dcalle… quoting his Course): it’s a marginal exception, and as signs become conventional in a language, they become more and more arbitrary. (Pipe used to sound like peep, and be a sound that birds make. That sound connection is now broken.)

So some words’ sounds, like onomatopoeias, have an overt iconic connection to word meaning, and some clusters of word sounds have greater than average correlation with particular attributes (the vowels in words for big and small, for example, or Phonesthemes). But the correlation is language-specific, mutable, and not very reliable.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which language is older, Persian or Arabic?

There’s no such thing as an older language.

Similarly, there is no such thing as an older dialect. Sure, for example, the English of England has been spoken in the same place for 1500 years. But the English of America retains a bunch of features that have died out in the English of England; the subjunctive, for instance, or faucet, or gotten.

So what is your metric for archaism? Linguists usually aren’t bothered much, for languages or dialects, so they just make the occasional impressionistic judgement, mostly based on phonological conservatism.

If you’re going to be more rigorous about it, you formulate as rules the major phonological shifts from the common ancestor to each of the two dialects, and you count the rules up; and you do the same with morphological shifts, syntactic shifts, and lexicon (somehow—believe me, there’s a lot more to count). But noone bothers to: the impressionistic judgement is good enough most of the time.

The one time someone did go to the bother of counting up all the phonological shifts from Middle Chinese to Cantonese and Mandarin respectively, and modelling them as two different state machines, http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/…, they came up with the conclusion that Cantonese is phonologically more archaic than Mandarin. Mandarin has half the tones and none of the final oral stops of Cantonese; I could have told you that impressionistically, based on those two factors alone.

My command of quantitative metre is non existent, but to my knowledge a particular instance of α, ι, υ in a particular word was almost always either long or short: it was a property of the phonology of the word, and not an artefact of the metre.

The quantity of α, ι, υ in word roots is given in larger Ancient Greek dictionaries such as LSJ or DGE. If you scroll through, you will see entries where​ there are exceptions (hence the “almost” above), where one poet once will have used a different quantity for one of those vowels in the stem. Linguists to my knowledge have not treated that as metrical licence, but as linguistic variation: if a poet used the “wrong” length for a vowel, the assumption is that some speakers really were pronouncing it like that.

Again: that’s my outsider linguist impression. Specialists in metre may know better.

I *think* I read this in

• Signes-Codoñer, J. 2005. The definitions of the Greek middle voice between Apollonius Dyscolus and Constantinus Lascaris. Historiographia Linguistica 32: 1-33.

The Ancient Greek authorities (actually Roman-era) came up with something like 60 declensions for Greek, because they were not trying to do internal reconstruction or look for regularities. (I don’t know much about the Sanskrit grammarians, but what little I know tells me they were centuries ahead of the Greeks.)

The Latin grammarians did do internal reconstruction and looked for regularities. They got the Latin declensions down to five.

When the Greeks rediscovered Latin grammars in the Renaissance, they did a double take. Then, they took another, embarrassed look at their own grammar.

They worked out that with some pushing, they could get it down to ten.

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With a lot more linguistics and reconstruction, we now have Greek declensions down to three; and if you’re aware of proto-Greek, the three make a lot of sense.

You can come up with more vowels, splitting off the contracted first and second declensions, and differentiating the third declension with vowel stems, which don’t look close to the consonant stems. If you do that, I’d be getting closer to 10 than 6: I’d want to break up several third declensions that don’t look obviously similar. (See Appendix:Ancient Greek third declension.)

If it makes you happier to think of βασιλεύς, -εως and τέλος, -ους as a completely different declension from πτέρυξ, -γος, because you don’t want to go via proto-Greek and Attic sound rules, well, you can *shrug*. People don’t do that, because Koine grammar teaching derives from Classical Greek grammar teaching: they use the same declensions, and just treat those odd forms as subclasses.

The rule really is y, not u, for Greek upsilon. That really *really* surprised me.

I went to the OED, and it didn’t tell me much:

Etymology: First formed as French glucose (Dumas 1838, in Compt. Rend. VII. 109); compare Greek γλυκύς sweet and -ose suffix.

The English Wikipedia didn’t tell me much more.

But you know, there are other Wikipedias, and they often say things the English Wikipedia doesn’t. And since the word was coined in French, I took a chance that it might have said what was on Dumas’ mind. My translations.

Glucose — Wikipédia

En 1838, un comité de l’Académie des sciences composé des chimistes et physiciens français Thénard, Gay-Lussac, Biot et Dumas, décide d’appeler le sucre se trouvant dans le raisin, dans l’amidon, et dans le miel du nom de glucose, en fournissant comme étymologie le grec τὸ γλεῦκος / gleukos, vin doux. Émile Littré ayant donné une autre étymologie, l’adjectif γλυκύς / glukus (« de saveur douce »), la racine habituelle est devenue glyc-(l’upsilon grec donnant un y), comme dans glycémie et glycogène.

“In 1838, a committee of the Academy of Sciences, composed of the French chemists and physicists Thénard, Gay-Lussac, Biot and Dumas, decided to call the sugar found in grapes, starch and honey with the name glucose, providing its etymology as the Greek gleukos ‘sweet new wine’. Émile Littré had provided an alternative etymology, the adjective glykys ‘sweet’, so the usual root in derivations is glyc-, as in glycaemia and glycogen.”

And the French Wikipedia adds a footnote with the actual 1838 article derivation:

Louis Jacques Thénard, Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac, Jean-Baptiste Biot et Jean-Baptiste Dumas, « Rapport sur un mémoire de M. Péligiot, intitulé: Recherches sur la nature et les propriétés chimiques des sucres », Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences,‎ 2 juillet 1838, p. 106-113 (lire en ligne [archive]) :

« Il résulte des comparaisons faites par M. Péligot, que le sucre de raisin, celui d’amidon, celui de diabètes et celui de miel ont parfaitement la même composition et les mêmes propriétés, et constituent un seul corps que nous proposons d’appeler Glucose(γλευϰος, moût, vin doux). »

“From comparisons made by Mr Péligot, it turns out that the sugar in graps, starch, diabetics and honey have the identical composition and properties, and involve a single constituent which we propose to call glucose (γλεῦκος, ‘must, sweet wine’).”

The transliteration of Greek <ευ> as <u> is also irregular; it is conventionally <eu>, as in leucocyte or rheumatism. But there is a tendency to transliterate <ευ> as <u> in French: cf. leucocyte, but rhumatisme.

(Why yes, I have found an error in the OED. I’ve emailed them.)

Btw, noone told the Greeks the word is derived from gleukos; in Greek the word is γλυκόζη glykozē.

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EDIT: Thanks, Chad Turner. Some Greek upsilons are spelled in English as <u>; notable instances are kudos and hubris. Per both Merriam-Webster’s Manual for Writers and Editors and The History of English Spelling (9781405190237): Christopher Upward, George Davidson (PDF draft chapter here: http://www.aston.ac.uk/EasysiteW…), the <u> is a 19th–20th century convention, subsequent to the obligatory latinisation of Greek loans. Notice that it’s Hellenising kudos, not Latinising cydus.