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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.

In the case of Ancient Greek, it’s actually quite straightforward:

• We know that words had accents, because the ancients made up signs for accents. Words having accents is the norm in language anyway.
• We know that normally only one syllable per word had an accent, because that’s how the ancients wrote their accents. At the very beginning of the invention of accent diacritics, a grave would be used for every unaccented syllable; that eventually went away, and it indicates that the grave was a neutral (unaccented) accent marker.
• The fact that a word normally had only one accent indicates this was an accentual, not a tonal system.
• We know that pitch was involved, because accent systems in the world’s languages are split between stress-based and pitch-based systems. Stress-based systems are normally only stressed/unstressed; pitch-based systems allow for pitch contours and multiple levels of pitch, both of which are represented in Ancient Greek with its acute/circumflex/grave.
• Vedic also had clearly high and low pitch in its accentuation, with regular correspondences with Greek accent, which makes it likelier that the related Greek had the same accentual system.
• For the evidence from Greek writers themselves, I’m going to quote from Allen, W. Sidney. Vox Graeca. the Pronunciation of Classical Greek, Chapter 6:
• Plato in Cratylus 399a differentiates between ‘sharp’ and ‘heavy’ accent (oxys, barys); if it was a stress-based system, barys would have to mean ‘quiet’. which it does not. Plato in Phaedrus 268d uses the same terms to refer to high and low pitch in music.
• The Greek word for accent, tonos, means ‘tension’, and is likely related to the tension of a string in an instrument: the more taut the string, the higher its note. The word is of course our tone.
• The early names for the circumflex were ditonos, oxybarys, symplektos, perispōmenos, “two-toned, high–low, complex, and broken-either-side = circumflex”.
• Dionysius Thrax says that “of course not every word is spoken with the same pitch-pattern (tasis, another word for ‘tension’), but one on the high (oxys) tone, another on the low (barys), and another on both. Of those which have both, some have the low combined with the high in one syllable, and these we call circumflex; whereas others have each of them on different syllables and mantaining their own quality.”

We know that stress accentuation was in use by the late 4th century AD, since Gregory Nazianzen uses stress-based metres in his poetry, and there are hints of stress-based metre in the early 3rd century AD hymns of Clement of Alexandria. Outside of metre, Allen gives no other evidence, and short of contemporary phonetic description, we would be unlikely to get any.

The Esperanta antologio: the anthology of Esperanto poetry. Get hold of the first edition, rather than the second; yes, the first edition stops at 1957, but it has commentary, which is very useful, and the 1984 edition inexcusably got rid of it.

Lingvo kaj vivo: 1959 collection of essays by Gaston Waringhien, Esperanto lexicographer and grammarian, with a lot of good insights into the history and structure of the language.

Proverbaro Esperanta: Zamenhof’s collection of multilingual proverbs, complete with earworm rhymes in the Esperanto versions. Instant culture for the language, and lamentably not used much in Esperanto (with the exception of the translation of Asterix the Gaul).

Memkritiko [‘Self-Criticism’] by Victor Sadler: the best poems in the language. Yes, it’s a big call. Very postmodern (especially for 1967) with the “editor” putting down all the poems, in a tense dialogue; exquisite miniatures, that have passed unremarked because people are looking for “greatness” instead of quality. This 2014 review doesn’t quite get it, but it does indicate that there are plenty of copies still available for sale at €2.70.

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’.

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.