Martin Pickering is right. A somewhat more emphatic response you’ll hear occasionally is Alithos o Kyrios, “truly the Lord has”. (It’s in response to Christos Anesti, “Christ is risen”.)
What is the meaning of the Greek word ‘atomos’?
Indivisible; literally, uncut. From the verb temnō, to cut; cf. tomē, a cut.
What is the importance of the Hellenistic culture?
Thx4A2A, Anon. As my fellows have asked, we’ll need more detail on what you’re asking.
I’m going to stab at a related question, which is the legacy of Hellenistic culture. In fact, that might be a good approach to vague questions like this, my fellow respondents: we grab a bit each of the possible answers that we can relate to.
We owe the Hellenistic—under which I’ll conflate Greek culture under the Romans:
- Linguistics, which started in Alexandria (Callimachus and co.) as a way of teaching the now obsolescent language of the Classics.
- Philology and textual criticism, which started in Alexandria (Callimachus and co.) as a way of stabilising the texts of the Classics.
- Library science, ditto, Alexandria.
- The novel, through a circuitous path (including Dictys Cretensis and the Roman de Troie).
- The comedy as we know it, from Menander via the renaissance revival of the Latin comic poets.
- Several influential schools of philosophy, including Stoicism and Neo-Platonism.
- The intellectual wherewithal of Christianity.
- Statues in Buddhism, through Greco-Buddhist art.
If you want to include a word or phrase in Greek in a novel, should you write it in Greek letters or should you transcribe it by pronunciation?
A novel with mass readership, not in Greek, where you don’t want to alienate readers unnecessarily, and you care to give readers some notion of what it sounds like? Use transliteration rather than original script. Same as if you were putting Hindi (or whatever your language happens to be) into a non-Hindi (or whatever) novel.
Yes, I write Greek in Greek characters here, and when I don’t, I use IPA. But I’m not writing a novel.
How difficult will Albanian be to learn if I already speak Modern Greek?
Yes, the vocabulary is completely different—except for the large number of Greek loanwords in Albanian, which is substantial, and the rather smaller number of Albanian loanwords in Greek.
OTOH: Balkan sprachbund. The syntax and inflections are remarkably similar: you can often translate Albanian into Greek and vice versa, word for word.
I’m reminded of what renowned linguist BRIAN D. JOSEPH once told me, when he was encouraging me to learn Macedonian. “It’ll be no trouble at all. You just swap the words.”
Are there really 10 times as many ancient texts written in Ancient Greek as there are ancient texts written in Latin?
It’s kinda true; I’ve certainly seen the number cited multiple times—it was the guess around 1900, for scholars saying there was no point even attempting a dictionary of all of Greek, to rival the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.
I work at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, although it is not a dictionary per se, but an online lemmatised corpus. As I wrote in How much writing from ancient Greece is preserved? , we know how many words there are of Ancient Greek texts—our collection is reasonably complete up to Middle Byzantium.
I think the 10 times as much figure is too much: it means excluding Mediaeval Latin (which you can do), but not excluding Mediaeval Greek (which I would start as early as the Church Fathers).
Some possible reasons:
- Lots of scientific/scholarly texts in Hellenistic Greek. Galen alone accounts for 3 million words.
- Huge amounts of Christian theological works, which the monk copyists preserved assiduously.
- A much longer literary tradition.
- A lot more people writing to begin with, I suspect.
But if you let Mediaeval Latin in, the scores balance.
This is no Fun and Games, this is the Balkans!
Whenever a Greek wants to nod sagely about the mess that is and ever has been the Balkans (and to admit that they too are stuck in the mess), they’ll mutter Εδώ είναι Βαλκάνια δεν είναι παίξε–γέλασε. “This is no Fun and Games, this is the Balkans!”
I was going to cite the bon mot, and I’ve just sought to trace where the bon mot comes from. And I realise that I have am missing some critical context (like a Bachelor of Arts in Greece, or growing up in Greece in the 70s instead of the 80s) to get it. So partly, this is a plea for help. (As we say in Greek, “what is the poet trying to say?”)
The phrase originated in a poem by the Greek Surrealist poet Nikos Engonopoulos. Engonopoulos was unique for being a surrealist in a country full of magic realism. He was also unique for writing in Katharevousa, decades after Katharevousa was discredited as a literary language: he was opting out of the literary consensus.
The poem… I think I get one tenor of the poem (nationalism is bullshit), and it’s pretty daring for a poem written in 1946, right as the Greek Civil War was making the Balkans too close for comfort. But it’s surrealist, and I’m missing a lot.
Language register always matters in Modern Greek, and this poem vacillates between the detachment and ersatz classicism of Katharevousa, and the Volkisch diction and heroics of folk song. It’s like Cavafy, only more.
The bon mot was popularised in a quotation in the 1971 song Ballos (a couples dance) by Dionysis Savvopoulos. I guess the Wikipedia article hits it on the head: he’s a Greek Frank Zappa, relapsing into Greek folk instead of Doo Wop. Because Savvopoulos required a bit of sophistication to understand, I paid him no attention when I was in Greece and 8 years old, and I’m not sure I can understand him now.
I’m going to translate the song, and then the poem, for my Balkan peeps, especially Lara Novakov, Aziz Dida, and Dimitra Triantafyllidou. Who knows. They live there, they may get more out of it than I can.
stixoi.info: Μπάλλος. Dionysis Savvopoulos: Ballos. 1971.
IV. In these here Balkans. (14m20 in YouTube vid)
In these here Balkans, in this here age,
I met my friends one winter night.
They sat all silent on some rocks;
their eyes bulged as they saw me coming.
For all this time they thought me dead,
and drank sweet wine and wheaten bread.
They welcomed me; they tired of me;
they worked out my joke on them, and they denied me.
“Drop your miracles, throw off your mask.
This is the Balkans, this is no fun and games.”
I share my bread, I give you my flask.
I look you in the eyes, and I sing a song.
And the song says that I’ll take the blame,
that I’ll be the leader in this festival.
Εγγονόπουλος – Ορνεο 1748. Nikos Engonopoulos. Vulture 1748. 1946.
Vulture 1748. (Interpretation of the painters.)
Was it a yearning good or ill that has led
the gloaming of the young shield-bearers
onto the untrod forests of the night,
amidst the wild woods of Orthodoxy,
the thick clumps of cypress trees of panic,
the moral projection
of a harsh Fate through colonnades of daybreak and lethargy?
Who might have been the frontman
of the rebellion?
Of the rumour?
Of the lust?
The orator?
Were they faithful to the demands of—
who else?—the demanders:
fine parricides and pedophiles,
with only the syllabary of necrophilia
to justify them
against the successive, incredibly fierce attacks
of eulogists?
Might perchance the metaphysical city—as you hearken, O ye youths—
of the industrious painters lie hidden in the hanged paintings?
And as the warlike adzes
fall upon heads,
and the ravines buzz
with the ruin of war
and the hymns
of warrior saints,
a voice is head.
“Kral Mirko, what do you want?
This is no fun and games:
This is the Balkans.”
How is “attention” said in different languages?
The following poster for tram safety in Melbourne includes a suite of languages.
I had nothing to do with the entry on the second column, third row.
… which is Klingon: qIm.
How can Novak Djokovic speaks so many languages?
I think you’re asking the wrong question.
Historical Dictionary of Tennis:
One interesting aspect of the international quality of the sport is the fact that most of its top players are bilingual as a minimum and often multilingual. Serbian Novak Djoković, for example, upon winning a tournament in Italy, addressed the crowd in fluent Italian and then switched to near-perfect English for a television interview. Djoković, in addition to his native Serbian, is also fluent in German and Croatian. In fact, virtually the only players who are not multilingual are the American and British native-English speakers.
Emphasis added. With extreme prejudice.
Djoka the polyglot:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bMfJqLoUeSI
Djoka en Français:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=q-g22UD01jw
Djoka auf Deutsch:
Djoka en Español:
Does Australia have regional accents, like in Canada or the USA?
As others have said, Australian regional variation is nowhere near as great as even the US, let alone Britain.
(You mean Canada has regional accents?)
The main variation in Australia historically has been class-based (Cultivated, General, Broad), with less well-studied variation between rural and urban, and with an interesting in-group variant among 2nd generation immigrants (Barbara Horvath had studied it in the 80s (Variation in Australian English), and a bunch of Greek-Australian comedians made a career of it in the 90s; impressionistically, it was more about centralisation of vowels than nasalisation.)
People keep saying there is a Queenslander accent (a drawl), but I don’t hang around enough Queenslanders to know if that is something different from the urban–rural split, ay.
(OK, that was a joke: the “ay” is a Queenslander thing, but it’s not an accent thing.)
There *is* a regional phonetic difference that has crept up in the past twenty years: Victoria has a celery–salary merger, although you’ll find no Victorian admitting that New Zealand had it first. So celery here is pronounced /sæləri/, and Melbourne is pronounced /mælbɪn/. Bizarrely when linguists noticed it, they called it Melbourne raising, even though it’s always sounded to me like the /ɛ/ lowering, not the /æ/ raising.