Closest I can think of is Hermes, who was a trickster and patron of Thieves. Ground zero for Hermes the trickster (Dolios) seems to have been the myth of how he stole Apollo’s oxen: The Little Rascal: Hermes

Three candidates.

Lexical aspect: the distinction between achievement, accomplishment, activity and state it took from Vendler. It’s not inherently inscrutable, but rattling off Vendler’s nomenclature is not the way to make people understand it.

The shades of difference between abstractors: nu, du’u, sedu’u, ka, su’u. The distinctions are real, but they are more confusing, and natural languages occult those distinctions behind the matrix predicate class or less granular complement markers.

And the articles. They were confusing before; they got revised; they’re still confusing. They may not be wrong, but they are quite alien.

A2A by Pegah Esmaili, who is Iranian. And not Persian. So I’m not going to say “Persian”.

Iranian #1: I am an avid follower of Pegah Esmaili, and her combat boots. And of course I am going to say nice things about Iranians, and Azeri Iranians in particular, because when Pegah starts wiping out all men, I want her to get to Lyonel Perabo before she gets to me.

Pegah and Lyonel’s mutually assured destruction by Nick Nicholas on Gallery of Awesomery

Iranian #2: I have a crush on Somi Arian, and really, do you blame me?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Do6nh6SPSH8

Fierce! (The lyrics are somewhat unsophisticated, but that’s the curse of Metal in general.)

If I am to judge on the basis of Ms Esmaili and Ms Arian, Iranians are proud, independent, intelligent, fierce, and very very scary.

Of course I would not generalise about all Iranians on the basis of two people. That would be silly.

Iranians #3, #4, #5: I hanged out with some Iranian linguistics students while doing my Master’s, 20 years ago.

They were very different to each other. Like, crazy different. Like, every time I got together with them, it was like

From right to left, the Iranian linguists of Melbourne in the mid 90s: Mohammed, Hussein, Ghodrat…

… hang on, there was noone choleric in the group.

Oh yeah, silly me:

Though Ms Arian’s thesis on Kant & Nietzsche was a decade later.

(I could start adding photos from Pegah Esmaili’s answer to Can the wonderful people of Quora upload a picture or two of themselves?, but then she’d kill me before Lyonel.)

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So, Iranians are different from each other. What else?

Well, Nick Nicholas’ answer to What comes to your mind when someone mentions Turkey (the country)? was: “the neighbour”.

Iranians? They’re the neighbour’s friend. Or the neighbour’s mentor. Or the neighbour’s coach. Or something.

Which means there’s some things about them that are familiar, and they come as a pleasant surprise. Azeris have an unfair advantage over other Iranians, because they actually speak the neighbour’s language. Persians have an unfair advantage, because they’re Indo-Europeans, and I actually learned two or three words.

Eh, خُدا حافِظ? Did I copy paste that right?

Their vast pride in their history is something I understand, at least intellectually, as a Greek. And they have a majestic culture; they were worthy adversaries to have had 25 centuries ago,

and it’s pretty cool that Greeks (via Ottoman Turkish) use farsi to mean “speak a language fluently”. The Shahnameh is the only epic poem I’ve been able to read all the way through. Their drawings have a filigree delicacy, even if they look strangely Chinese.

There are some things that are alien about them too, sure. The theocracy is scary to me. The mandatory hijab ditto, although the clear halfheartedness with which it is worn in Tehran is a source of ongoing mirth.

Skater Girls Seen in Vanak Sq. in Tehran, Iran

Their kabobs can be amazing—but they seem to think that poultry and pomegranate syrup work together (Fesenjān).

(Pomengranate on poultry? Really?)

Even more scary is the whole open necked shirt thing, which they horrifyingly have in common with the Greek ruling party: Why did neither Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, nor most of his entourage, wear ties during his recent visit to Iran? Is it fashion or politics?

But OP did say “not politicians”.

So here’s a non-political shoutout, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr… , to the non-politicians of Iran:

So! Dostānam! We can use raki/arak for the toast, right?

Geez, it was just a suggestion, Ms Arian…

Thx4A2A, Sofia. No idea why you asked, which makes it all the more flattering.

I have a high tolerance of repetition in music in general.

OTOH, I am old, I am old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled; so I know very little of music after 1995. You are young, Sofia; one day you will understand.

(You know that horrifying moment when you realise you’ve turned into your dad? Yeah. «Έχεις πολλάάάάά να μάθεις ακόμα»: “Son, you’ve got a lot to learn…”)

But of recent songs, I think Uptown Funk counts as something I could listen to on loop for hours. Mostly, of course, because it sounds like the music I grew up with.

Make a dragon wanna retire, man.

In fact, I think I’ll put it on loop now…

What I’ve used is “OP here” or “I’m the OP”. I want to use a succinct rather than a discursive form.

McKayla Kennedy says you don’t need to signal that you’ve answered your own question, because the question is community property.

But I do signal, at least some times, that I’ve answered my question, because it pertains to the answer (which is mine) not the question. It flags to readers that my answer is a self-answer, because:

• at least for some people it can make them wary of the answer (it contains unexpressed presuppositions, it’s self-promotion)
• I’m flagging that the answer is intended as a conversation-starter—I actually am pushing along a request for people to disagree with me.

That’s just me, of course.

Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”.

Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark.

You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between Turkey and Nigeria, sure, but this was a specifically Ottoman title, and the cultural traffic just wasn’t there.

Besides, when a woman wants to flatter her mate in Greece, and call him “boss” and bring him his slippers and fulfil his patriarchal fantasies, she doesn’t call him “my agha”.

She calls him “my Pasha”. Pashas outranked aghas, after all.

What’s that I hear? Pshaw?

Why yes. Bashaw was an early English rendering of Pasha.

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And, as a desultory attempt to answer the question as stated:

Here in Australia, I get hubbo from my wife. Partaking in the age-old tension between the two Australian hypocoristics, –o and –ie. Hubby is far more widespread throughout English.

Qo’noS, the Klingon home planet, uses loDnal. We know loD is ‘man’.

In Esperantujo, it’s edzo. A back formation from edzino “wife”, itself a reanalysis of the Litvak Yiddish pronounciation of the the suffix in Prinz-essin.

In Lojbanistan, it’s speni “spouse”. You can specify the gender as nakspe “male spouse”; I doubt most Lojbanists bother.

Originally Answered:

How can you describe the personality of the Greeks?

Noone’s biting?

InB4 “You can’t stereotype all Greeks”, &c &c

Mercurial. Impulsive.

There’s an apocryphal Turkish saying (which in fact, I’ve only found in Greek sources—but then again, I haven’t asked Quora): Gâvurun/Yunanın akili sonradan geliyor. Του Ρωμιού η γνώση ύστερα έρχεται. A Greek’s common sense comes later.

Passionate. Like to yell at each other as a performance piece. Like to disagree for the fun of it. The saying goes “Where there are two Greeks, there are three opinions”. (It’s a saying that Jews also lay claim to.)

Their sense of honour (amour propre: How do I translate the Greek word filotimo?) is a double-edged sword: it makes them generous to a fault, but also very touchy.

Very much about the collective and the social ritual, like many recently traditional societies. Operate through positive politeness (What are the negative and positive politeness strategies?) No interest in “personal space”.

Nationalistic, but mistrustful of authority and of notions of the common good. Enterprising and street-smart (or at least, they used to be). Blame malicious outside forces by default, rather than admit problems closer to home.

*shrug* That’s a start.

Christos (Christ) is the Greek translation of the Hebrew mashiach (Messiah), and both mean “the anointed one”. Initially it referred to anyone or anything consecrated with holy oil; for example, King David, unleavened bread, or King Cyrus.

For what a 1st century Jew would have understood as “the messiah”, see Messiah and Messiah in Judaism:

In Jewish eschatology, the term came to refer to a future Jewish king from the Davidic line, who will be “anointed” with holy anointing oil, to be king of God’s kingdom, and rule the Jewish people during the Messianic Age. In Judaism, the Messiah is not considered to be God or a pre-existent divine Son of God. He is considered to be a great political leader that has descended from King David. That is why he is referred to as Messiah ben David, which means “Messiah, son of David”. The messiah, in Judaism, is considered to be a great, charismatic leader that is well oriented with the laws that are followed in Judaism. He will be the one who will not “judge by what his eyes see” or “decide by what his ears hear”.

Thx4A2A, Linda.

I’ll go with the painting too. Even if I’m not a visual arts kind of guy.

I won’t do a long justification of that; others have, pro and con, mostly jocular.

Some have been less jocular. But you know what? Doodles do matter.

And even though Tom Groves meant it jocularly, well, when he says:

People die all the time, You can’t save ’em all. The real world is not like Pokemon.

… he’s not wrong.

It’s from a very different context, but see Yannis Makriyannis quote from Nick Nicholas’ answer to Did Greeks in the Ottoman age feel Greek or Roman? Why was Greek identity chosen and not Roman when fighting for independence?

I had two fine statues, a woman and a prince, intact—you could see the veins on them, that’s how perfect they were. Some soldiers had taken them and they were going to sell them to some Europeans, for a thousand thalers. I went over, I took the soldiers aside, and spoke to them. “These statues, even if they give you ten thousand thalers, don’t you stoop to letting them be taken out of our country. These are what we fought for.”

EDIT: Oh, and to encapsulate some other points made by Tom and Linda?

How many people now mourn Morosini blowing up the Parthenon?

How many people now mourn the soldiers Morosini blew up along with the Parthenon?

People pretty universally say the 7th is crap. I think the reason is only the last movement.

The first four movements are great. They are quite not as great as the 5th or 6th, which seems to say what they say better. In fact, each of the first three movements seems to be quite close to the corresponding movement in the 6th symphony, and to be outdone by it. But the middle movements are still all wonderful, and the 4th movement has a delightful urbane wistfulness about it, much more human-scaled than the Adagietto of the 5th. (It is after all meant to be scene-painting a night stroll around Vienna.)

It falls down in the last movement. Exegetes say that it’s deliberately meant to be bathetic, that Mahler is poking fun at the carefree style of the Strausses, just as Shakespeare made the problem comedies problematic, and Mahler himself made the finale of the 5th a study in anticlimax.

I buy it for the 5th. I don’t buy it for the 7th. It does sound to me like someone who’s trying to have a happy ending and failing; it does not sound to me like someone who’s doing that on purpose, to make a larger point.