Nick on Quora

Adrian Beale has the right answer. We’re quite used to people with different accents. The divide is more about international students not having the confidence to associate with the locals, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reach out to locals, and they will befriend you; no need for the accent. We do judge, but we judge on demeanour, not on accent.

In my day (early 90s), the International Students numbers were lower—which meant that it was more difficult for international students to segregate. My main social group during Engineering, as it turns out, was East Asian. The group included people with Ocker accents (from the country), people with the East Asian variant of Received Pronunciation, and people with more clearly Chinese accents. In retrospect, I realise that I did not have a clear idea who was just off the boat, who studied here in high school, and who was descended from Chinese who came to the goldfields in the 1850s. (My money was on the Ocker sounding guy.)

It was clear that the group was mainly East Asian, plus one Greek (me) and one Fijian Indian. It was also clear that I wasn’t unwelcome, and that the group was not particularly insular. There was a countergroup of Anglos, who didn’t associate socially with the East Asian group, but certainly didn’t shun them either.

Another unnavigably long trail of Quora answers! Rejoice, rejoice oh ye peoples!

I am old. I am old.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Hendrix was alive when I was born. Stravinsky wasn’t.

One of my earliest memories is the death of Elvis.

PacMan was a diverting novelty to a preteen in country Crete.

Books were my constant companion.

I had a substantial audio cassette collection.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a defining memory in my life.

When I went to uni, people kept their mouths shut in libraries, and libraries had a function other than as a drop-in centre for people to check their Facebook.

“2 MB of RAM on the new Mac?! What are you going to do with it all?!”

I saw a glimpse of the Web when finishing undergrad. I predicted it would never work out. There wasn’t even a tenth of the stuff on the Web that there was on FTP networks.

I amassed a personal library of photocopies of academic texts.

The most recent electronic music I heard was drum ’n’ bass.

I lectured using an Overhead Projector.

I made a Semtex joke at an airport back when you could get away with it.

Twitter was the first technology I didn’t intuitively understand. There have been many others since.

Modern Greek, right? μωρό, moro. And yes it is, though you have to say “my baby”, μωρό μου moro mu.

The ancient Greek term it comes from had a final n. Why yes, the modern Greek word for “baby” is the Ancient Greek word moron. In Bithynian Greek, the word for baby is σαλό salo, which is the word for holy fool—same thing.

Added bonus: the masculine vocative of moron is μωρέ more. This is a Balkan-wide vocative particle, and it just means “hey”; typically, it’s reduced to vre, or in Greek re.

Why yes, everyone in the Balkans is calling everyone else a moron just to get their attention.

The feminine vocative is μωρή mori. Unsurprisingly, the feminine vocative is not neutral like more is.

Added bonus: the Elizabethan English for baby is fool. As Polonius used it in Hamlet.

I will assume that you’ve already been read the riot act about the impossibility of getting an academic position, the need to step on corpses and network, and the imperative to do something fashionable (which historical linguistics is not) in order to get hired.

Why yes, I am jaundiced. Why do you ask? (Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree?)

A history minor is not vital. If you’re doing historical linguistics for languages with well-defined histories, like most of the Indo-European languages… well, that’s even less likely to make you employable. For languages without detailed historical records (or without records from the time when the changes were happening, which is pretty commonplace), there’s not much to learn from history anyway: you may end up providing historians with more information than they provide you.

At any rate, you need some level of understanding of historical changes to contextualise language; but I’m not convinced you need much more than an intelligent layperson can get out of Wikipedia. For a lot of historical linguistics, anthropology would be a more useful adjunct to get formal training in than history.

But do read those Wikipedia pages. Linguists can get pretty bone-headed when trying to do history. Just like computer scientists, when they try to do historical linguistics.

They differ only by nuance. Ας is encouraging, it corresponds to “let’s”. Να is more like “we should”: it lacks the explicit notion of encouragement.

Looked up the Pauly at Wikisource (Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft); alas, that page has not been digitised.

Looked up the Roscher dictionary (Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie – Wikipedia), 1884. After noting the frequent conflation of sirens and harpies, it mentions “The meaning of harpies in nature is clear enough: they are the storm clouds that the winds are married to. That meaning was still present for the older commentators: Eustathius of Thessalonica, Scholia on the Iliad. In Suda they are named as predatory demons. In allegorical treatments of myth they are courtesans who ruin any man they come near.”

So yes, the general answer is that the ancients made the equation elemental danger = female; but there was a particular template behind the harpies of wind = masculine, storm cloud = wife of wind.

EDIT: I looked up Eustathius of Thessalonica’s commentary, Iliad (that’s Saint Eustathius to you, btw); it’s a bit crabbed, but what I saw there was harpies explained as winds—that grab objects when you’re not looking. The scholia to the Iliad likewise just say that harpies are female winds, not wives of winds. So from a very superficial reading, it looks like Harpy = Stormwife is a modern, not an ancient notion.

I don’t have a good answer, as (surprisingly) I have not paid close attention to the genesis of Koine. But let’s separate out the various things that happened, and that other respondents have highlighted.

Eleftherios V. Tserkezis correctly highlights that the koine was a dialect koine before it was anything else. And the dialect koine did what he said: given several options, it would pick the most consistent or easiest to learn.

1. Phonetic simplification. Arguably underway in some dialects before Koine—Boeotian I think came up with some iotacism way before, for example. The phonetic simplifications were natural trends, of the kinds that Steve Rapaport investigates. Any tendency to simplify the phonemes foreigners had to learn was welcome; but that tendency was likelier to prevail if it was already underway in at least some speakers. So iotacism was likely already underway, and the foreign language learners may have just encouraged it.

The typologically more commonplace changes, like fricatives for aspirates, may have been more a foreigner thing, or just a natural thing nothing to do with Koineisation. The vowel meltdown seems to have been quick; the consonant meltdown was not.

2. Morphological simplification. Here the role of dialect was important, because different dialects offered different options, which foreigners would not have just invented. Hence the abandonment of Attic peculiarities (and they really were peculiar), such as the Attic declension -εώς in favour of Doric -αός, or of -ις -εως in favour of the Ionic -ις -ιος. (Surprised by that? -ις -εως came back in learnèd Greek.)

So foreigners mattered, and there’s a parallel for that kind of scenario in what happened to Old English when the Vikings came to town—the differences in inflection were smoothed over.

But more critical was the increased mobility of Greeks of different dialect backgrounds, outside the city states, and without clear dominance of one group over the other. Ok, the basis was still Attic, but it was an Attic that could pick Ionic and Doric alternatives when they were easier. The dialects only died out around the first century AD.

There’s one parallel in Modern Greek to koineisation: what happened in Athens in the 19th century. The basis is Peloponnesian, but there’s other bits, which randomly came in via prestige (Constantinopolitan, we suspect, for the northern Greek -οῦσα imperfect, and the Northern accusative indirect objects could have been adopted as well); and if a dialect happened to resemble Puristic Greek, its form was boosted (there’s some Heptanesian forms in the standard—I forget which—which are better explained by their similarity to Puristic).

There’s another parallel in Modern Greek, to “contact with non-Greek speaking people”, which is a lot closer to the Koine story, though less well studied. In fact the only statement of it was a throwaway line in paper by Richard MacGillivray Dawkins in… 1940?

Islander Greek and Mainland Greek are different. Islander Greek is more uneven, has more archaisms, has more exceptions all round. Mainland Greek has a smoother, simpler grammar.

There was lots more use of Greek as a second language on the mainland.

Which sounds like another discussion we’ve been having, Dimitra Triantafyllidou.

Ioannis Manomenidis has tackled Modern Greek. Let me summarise:

• Téknon gets used by priests to their spiritual children, their congregation. There, it means neither offspring, nor child: it’s a metaphorical extension of the “child of God” or “child that I mentor” notion. But that’s an ancient Greek expression, limited to the ecclesiastical register.
• Evangelos Lolos delicately alluded to the mis-accented variant teknó. That means “toyboy”. It sounds like it comes from Kaliarda, the Greek gay cant (Καλιαρντά – Βικιπαίδεια). The thing is, you expect Romany vocabulary in Kaliarda, or “wrong” genders (Gender bender); but misaccentuation is not supposed to be part of Kaliarda’s repertoire.

  Well, as it turns out, teknó is Romany, from tiknó: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής. It just sounded so similar to téknon, that the vowel was switched to match.

That was fun.

But I strongly suspect, OP, that you’re after the Ancient Greek meanings of téknon (when it was a current word), and likely you’re wanting some New Testament exegesis out of it.

Etymologically, téknon is derived from tíktō, “to give birth”. So it does originally mean son/daughter, not child.

Was it ever used for generic “child”? Let’s turn to Liddell-Scott, the canonical big dictionary of Ancient Greek, and BDAG, the New Testament dictionary. The other dictionaries don’t have the same kind of coverage, and are later anyway. (Trapp has only new words, and is late Byzantine; Lampe does Church Fathers, and spends more time on theology than generic semantics.)

LSJ. The definition is not that explicit, but in Odyssey 2.363, it is used to address Telemachus, not by his mother, but by his nurse Eurycleia. I’ve looked at several Attic instances, without finding a clear instance where it does not mean offspring. But LSJ itself treats παῖς “child” and τέκνον as interchangeable, and says that Attic tended to use παῖς instead.

Bauer asserts as definition 3 of téknon “one who is dear to another but without genetic relationship and without distinction in age”. That’s the “my spiritual child” meaning.

My fellow respondents should be aware the question asks about Broad Australian (= ocker), not General Australian (= “neutral”).

I would like to think I’m General not Broad (as would any would-be member of the middle classes). People in California did have occasional difficulty with my accent; e.g. my pronunciation of Apple Cider coming across as Apple Soda. But I was pronouncing my r’s more often than not within a year (and whenever I’m on a teleconference with Americans since).

Can’t report any issues in Europe. Apart from my aunt in Athens, banning me from speaking English around her 7-year-old, so he wouldn’t grow up sounding like a hillbilly…

I assume you are asking about Ancient Greek. IGNORE all the Greeks that are about to say ἄρωμα arōma. The ancient meaning of that word, per the Liddell–Scott dictionary, is aromatic herb or spice; not fragrance.

Going through Liddell–Scott, I find, in descending order of fit to what you want:

• εὐοσμία euosmia, “fragrance, perfume”. Literally, ‘good smell’.
• μύρον myron, “sweet oil, unguent, perfume”
• ἀυτμή aytmē, “breath; scent, fragrance” (Homeric)