Category: Uncategorized

I’ve already addressed a narrower version of the same question: Nick Nicholas’ answer to In the traditional British public school system, why is (or was) it believed that knowledge of “the classics” was necessary?

In the Renaissance, when Roman and Greek literature were rediscovered, that literature was treated as the source and reference point of all culture. To know that literature was to be cultured. […]

And the point of a liberal arts education back then, as it was in Ancient Greece, was not to get you a job. You didn’t go to uni for that; you went out as an apprentice, and people looked down on you as a mechanical. The point of a liberal arts education was to be cultured. To appreciate good literature. To form good judgement. To have good character. […]

And everyone doing science or literature read Latin, because that’s what intellectuals wrote in. And because they now had access to the classics, they would try to speak it more like the Romans did, and less like the mediaeval clerks did. Doing science and reading Cicero were part of the same package. It was all part of being cultured.

In the 16th and 17th and 18th century, the English developed their own literature. Gradually more and more science was written outside of Latin. So you didn’t need just Latin to appreciate good literature or do science. But the public school system stuck with it, because their ancestors did, and because Classical literature was still felt to be awesome, and because old habits died hard. And because you didn’t get a public school education to get a job. You got one to be cultured. Besides, any job you were likely to get as an aristocrat would be tied up with being cultured anyway.

Things have changed. Riff-raff […] get to go to high school and university. And we need to keep getting a job in mind, because we are riff-raff and not cashed up members of the aristocracy. And the Classics are only one option among many, and hardly the most prestigious one even among the liberal arts.

Yes. Using tools from Online Etymology Dictionary:

Humilis is Latin for humble. Humble is Old French humble < *humle < *humile < humilis.

Humility is from Latin humilitas “humbleness”, which comes from humilis.

Humiliate is to make someone feel like crap: you’re humbling them, you’re making them feel low (which is actually what humilis originally means: lowly). Humiliate is a back formation from humiliation, humiliatio in Latin, which is derived from the verb humiliare “to make humble”, which comes from humilis.

It turns out Middle English used to have a verb derived straight from humiliare: to humily “humble oneself”.

Surname – Wikipedia

Surnames seems to have been invented independentishly in Europe at a similar time: they were reintroduced after the Roman three-way names fell out of use in the West. From Wikipedia, I see it’s a messy web of transmission. Wikipedia suggests (not very loudly) that the Modern Western notion of surnames was transmitted from Armenia to Byzantium (from the 7th century on) to the West, though I wonder whether the West came up with them independently. Ireland had them in the 10th century, and England in the 11th; they only became common in the West in the 14th century.

Now, other cultures independently came up with surnames, as distinct from patronymics; the Chinese did, and so did the Japanese nobility. But how did a Western notion become globalised?

… Do you really have to ask?

During the modern era, many cultures around the world adopted family names, particularly for administrative reasons, especially during the age of European expansion and particularly since 1600. Notable examples include the Netherlands (1811), Japan (1870s), Thailand (1920), and Turkey (1934). Nonetheless, their use is not universal: Icelanders, Tibetans, Burmese, Javanese, and many people groups in East Africa do not use family names.

Surnames were put forward not just because of European influence, but because the emergence of big bureaucracies with nationwide scope saw the benefit in the European convention of surnames: that explains Meiji Japan, for instance. And of course surnames were still transmitted as a cultural meme, and not just a bureaucratic convenience. As pointed out in Kutluk Ozguven’s answer to Why do some Greek surnames end with “oğlu” which means “son of” in Turkish?, Christians in Turkey had surnames a lot longer than Muslims did, because Greeks and Armenians invented surnames to begin with.

You strategically name drop or link to your blog in an answer. If you don’t set a topic for each and every blog post you write (because Quora decided you don’t need topics to apply to an entire blog after all), that’s going to be the main mechanism of getting your blog into people’s feeds.

Less gamified motivation to write on topics that I was just outside of MVW status for (like I dunno, Language or Etymology or Latin). Slightly less motivation to write as a result, although the A2As keep coming in.

Slightly less motivation to follow users, because I can’t tell from a mouseover what they are into.

There was never any indication of MVW on the Request menu listing of users anyway, so that has little impact.

Much less of a feeling of community with other MVWs in a topic (that I have to hunt to find), which did give me added motivation to write.

Jenny!

Jenny, I know you’re in chronic pain and rather silly about your own pain management. When you get those Zydax® – Injections to Reduce Arthritis in Dogs? That’s not a cue for you to start running berserk in the doggie park again. Or to jump all over the doggie chiro.

Just relax, Jen. Take it easy.

Well, maybe not that easy.

And Jenny, I am going to have to carry you up and down the stairs now, because you don’t want to be in even more pain.

No, don’t run!

Oh for Chrissake.

So, Jenny, you are a fricking pain in the arse, and you plopped into my life as a package deal with Tamar, and I gave you a hard time when you were younger and even more of a pain in the arse; but you are a gooooood doggie, gooooood doggie, and—

Jenny? Jenny?

Fricking dog.

To corroborate John Simpson’s answer to In “whosoever looks upon a woman to lust after her,” might that ‘to’ indicate a purpose clause?:

The Greek literally says Ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι πᾶς ὁ βλέπων γυναῖκα πρὸς τὸ ἐπιθυμῆσαι αὐτῆς, ἤδη ἐμοίχευσεν αὐτὴν ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὑτοῦ, “towards the desiring of her”. That “towards” is indeed purposive, and it’s also not particularly Classical in taking an infinitive (though Classical Greek did use it as a purposive preposition: πρὸς τί “to what end?”, literally “towards what?”)

Classical usage of the infinitive with πρός is more literal: πῶς ἔχεις πρὸς τὸ ἐθέλειν ἂν ἰέναι ἄκλητος ἐπὶ δεῖπνον; “what is your attitude towards going to dinner uninvited?” But in this context, it looks clearly purposive to me.

I’ve wanted to know the answer to this question bad enough, that I want to spend time in Corfu or Zante next time I’m in Greece.

Though as a friend has justly pointed out to me, there’s no way I’d grok the cultural differences between the Ionian Islands and the rest of Greece as a tourist within a couple of days at a resort hotel.

The music is Italianate: mandolins and barbershop quarters. There’s less Turkish in the dialect. But from the stories written by Konstantinos Theotokis | Greek author in the early 1900s, the peasantry was as patriarchal and closeminded in Corfu as they were in Thessaly or Crete. My suspicion is, not massively different. The peasantry were the peasantry, and whether the local overlord was a nobleman in the Libro d’Oro or the local ağa didn’t impact their daily life.

I hope someone else can tell more!

As others have said—many of them not even from God’s Own Country (but certainly honorary Aussies, one and all): Vegemite is ace.

I’ll add a couple of observations:

There are certainly cultural predilections in what food you end up eating by default: what a culture happens to have come up with in cuisine determines what food you’re likelier to be exposed to within that culture, and it takes a conscious effort to snap out of that predisposition. Americans like their bread sweet, and they like sweet things on bread. So they aren’t brought up to eat lightly umami/salty spreads on their bread, like Aussies are.

And Aussies are, because Brits were: Vegemite was an answer to Marmite, as many have pointed out. In fact, the original branding of Vegemite was Parwill: “Ma might, but Pa will!”

Not that Aussies are immune to ludicrously sweet toppings on bread: Fairy bread is actually a thing.

So what is it about Marmite that’s appealing culturally to British culture? Dunno, but I suspect the precedent of chutney had something to do with it.

The other thing is that Vegemite is not universal in Australia, treasonous though it be. My parents being immigrants, they wouldn’t go near the stuff, so I was not brought up with it. (I had Taramasalata on bread instead. Also savoury.) In fact it was only in my late twenties that I tried the stuff; some acquaintance had friendly advice about visualising oysters when I ate it (for the saltiness, I guess).

It is now my default breakfast out.

Straya!

From harrumphing, get-your-hippy-names-away-from-me answers such as Why do English-speaking people often have strange first names? and Is Khalisi a weird name for a baby?, you will have surmised correctly that I would only go with ancient names that have survived in modern times.

Or been revived in modern times. Ιn Greece, the difference matters: Helen had survived as a saint’s name, Achilles or Odysseus were revived.

So I can’t answer the question as requested in details—

I don’t mean lists of ancient names which have ‘survived’ in modern times (Jason, Helen, etc), I mean unusual ones — from any culture!

—because I wouldn’t do that myself.

But cool names from antiquity, which is what the question details are asking for?

I learned Greek Mythology from the humorist Nikos Tsiforos, as I’ve mentioned a dozen times; and when he was going through the pantheon of minor sea deities, he pointed out one name in particular as lovely. And I agreed with him then as now.

Benthesicyme. Βενθεσικύμη. “Wave of the sea depths.”

Actually, pretend you don’t know the etymology. (And I didn’t know about Benthos until a lot later in life.)

Benthesicyme.

Utterly impractical as a name. (I mean, what would you nickname her? Bennie?)

And utterly lovely. Like an invocation.