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The most clearcut regional distinction between Esperanto speakers that I’m aware of is in the accentuation of compound numerals, such as dudekkvin “twenty-five”. In some countries they are accented as dúdek kvin; in some as dudékkvin. I read somewhere an early Esperantist saying, after a conference in Finland, “the Finns have taught us how to accent numbers”.

Other than that, the unwashed masses of beginners and eternaj komencantoj are no doubt speaking semi-Esperanto with heavy influence from their native languages; but the standard is consistent, and I’m surprised at the examples Philip Newton brings up (though they certainly make sense).

You could argue that the long-drawn-out and tedious debate about verb tense vs aspect was regionally based, with the atistoj mostly based in Germanic-speaking countries. As the argumentation of both parties was based on tedious casuistry over the Zamenhofian corpus, I quickly tuned out of the literature.

The question comes from an exchange Joachim Pense  and I had about irregular verbs. My argument to him was that, if you know something about the history of Greek phonology, and factor in suppletion, the verbs do at least start to make some sense.

Warning: if you don’t already know Ancient Greek, don’t bother reading further.

Why is this verb so damn messy? In particular, as Joachim asked,

For example the reduplication + lengthening in the perfect active. The perfect medium – is the contraction involved regular? And the aspirated labial in the perfect passive? I forgot the details in Greek to know if that is standard. And to boot the future is in the medium.

1. Suppletion.

Lots of old Greek verbs are suppletive. Suppletion means that one tense comes from one root, and another tense comes from a completely different root. The parallel in English is go and went. A less obvious counterpart is be and was.

There is a lot of suppletion in Ancient Greek (and to some extent inherited into Modern Greek). But suppletion isn’t because someone along the line wanted to mess with their descendants’ brains. Suppletion happens because those different tenses, which look like they belong to completely different verbs, actually were completely different verbs. Went is the past tense originally of wend (as in “wend my way”).

The dirty secret of Greek is that what regularity they do have is a fiction. I know there are Greek learners exclaiming “what bloody regularity?!” But if you look at those tables of conjugations in the grammars, you are struck by how neat and patterned they all are.

Well, the neatness is not how it started. The neatness comes from analogy, with generations of Greek speakers trying to make their verbs follow patterns, so they could actually learn the damn things. The future passive, for example, if you look very closely, doesn’t have quite the right suffix. It wouldn’t: it’s a Classical era invention, by analogy with the aorist passive. It didn’t exist in Homeric Greek.

There’s a very boring book on my shelves by Henri van de Laar: Description of the Greek Individual Verbal Systems. It’s a list of every very old Greek verb, and its history. The tl;dr of it is the interesting bit: he’s pretty sure that the mess of ὀράω reflects the original state of the Greek verb system. Where aorists and presents were completely different verbs, which only coincidentally and messily converged into the one pattern.

In this case, we have a merger of no less than three verbs:

ϝοράω, which gives us the present ὁράω and imperfect ἐώρων, and the perfect active  ἑώρακα ~ ἑόρακα

ϝείδω, which gives us the aorist εἶδον

ὄπτομαι, which gives us the future ὄψομαι, the perfect passive ὤμμαι, and the aorist passive ὤφθην.

That’s not the end of course. Let’s keep going.

2. What’s going on with ϝοράω?

Well, for starters, we have an initial digamma. The digamma dropped off in Homeric times (though it stuck around in say Aeolic); but the digamma explains a lot of syllabic augments where you don’t expect them.

If ὁράω was a normal verb, it would get a temporal augment: ὤρων. But it doesn’t: it gets an added syllabic augment instead,  ἐ-, of the kind that you only get when the verb starts with a consonant.

And the digamma is your explanation. The verb *did* start with a consonant, the digamma. The imperfect of ϝοράω was ἐϝόρων, and the perfect active was ἑϝόρακα. The digamma dropped out everywhere, and so we’re left with ἐόρων and ἑόρακα. Simples, right?

Well, not right, because the imperfect is ἐώρων. Why?

Well, one bit of that is irregular magic, and one bit is regular Attic.

The irregular magic is that sometimes, randomly, some verbs don’t get augmented once, they get augmented twice. They take a η- augment instead of an ε- augment, as if the ε- augment was augmented again. That’s not impossible to understand: people assumed the ε- form wasn’t already augmented already for whatever reason, and they augmented it again. The best known ancient case is βο­ύλομαι > ἠβουλήθην, not ἐβουλήθην. In Modern Eastern Cretan dialect, in fact, η- is the default augment.

OK, that gets us from ἐόρων to ἠόρων. That doesn’t get us ἐώρων.

And this is where the regular Attic bit comes in. Think: do you ever see ηο together in Attic? No. But, if you know your Herodotus,  you do see lots of ηο in Ionic.

Where you see ηο in Ionic, you see εω in Attic, in lots of places where εω makes no sense. The accentuation of εω as a suffix makes no sense for example: τάξεως is accented as if its final syllable is short. But ω isn’t short. Attic has this bizarre -εως declension, where Doric has the far more sensible -αος ending (which is what the Koine went with). So Doric λᾱός, Attic λεώς.

And Ionic  ληός.

The change of Ionic ηο to Attic εω was regular. And it applied to starts of verbs too. So. ἐϝόρων > ἐόρων > ἠόρων > ἐώρων. And similarly, ἑϝόρακα > ἑόρακα > ἠόρακα > ἐώρακα.

3. What’s going on with ϝείδω?

It’s an old verb, which is why εἶδον is a second aorist, not a first aorist. It’s so old that its perfect tense has ended up as a completely different verb.

That verb is (ϝ)οἶδα, to know.

And what is the Germanic cognate of ϝοἶδα?

German wissen, and English wit.

4. What’s going on with ὄπτομαι?

Why, simplicity itself.

The present is unattested, and may never have been used, but you should recognise the stem from the related nouns and adjectives. As in ὀπτικός, optical. And as in ὄμμα, eye.

(Oh, you don’t see ὄμμα? We’ll get to that.)

-pt- is a lot of consonants for a Greek verb root to end in. Tense suffixes involve even more consonants. And not all those consonants are going to survive the merger.

[EDIT: In his comment, Gabriel Bertilson points out I’m overcomplicating things: the -t- itself is an insertion before the present stem (which isn’t attested anyway), and the root is just op-. So ignore the -t- in the following.]

So for example the Aorist Passive you would regularly get would be ὤπτθην, /ɔ́ːpttʰɛːn/. Not even Ancient Greeks could pronounce  /ɔ́ːpttʰɛːn/. But with the aspiration shared between the /p/ and the /t/, and dropping the ttʰ back to /tʰ/, they could pronounce /ɔ́ːpʰtʰɛːn/: ὤφθην. That’s completely regular.

[EDIT: make that ɔ́ːptʰɛːn > ɔ́ːpʰtʰɛːn]

Same goes for the Perfect Passive. ὤπτμαι /ɔ́ːptmai/ is smoothed out, again regularly, to /ɔ́ːmmai/: ὤμμαι: labial followed (eventually) by an /m/ gets smoothed out as /mm/. We’ve seen the same smoothing in ὄμμα. ὄμμα is just the verbal noun of ὄπτομαι, just as γράμμα is the verbal noun of γράφω.

[EDIT: make that ɔ́ːpmai > ɔ́ːmmai]

As for ὄψομαι, that’s just ὄπτσομαι /óptsomai/ made pronouncable: drop the /t/, and you’ve got /ópsomai/. You’ve got a middle, because it’s an old verb, and the future was first introduced as a middle voice notion. The future tense wasn’t originally something you were going to do; it was something you wanted to do. Which is consistent with middle voice. The proto-Greek future ending is –sy-, which is cognate with the desiderative suffix -σείω that survived into Aristophanes: χέζω “I shit”, χεσείω “I want to take a shit”.

The active future came later: it was more attempts by later Greek speakers to smooth out the jumble of forms they had inherited into something learnable.

Well, let me put it this way (answering the related question, “how do I feel about Iconoclasm”.)

The town of Agios Nikolaos, Crete is named after an old church of St Nicholas. The church is still around, now built into the grounds of a hotel: Byzantine Temple of Agios Nikolaos – Travel Guide for Island Crete, Greece

The church was built in iconoclastic times. The church is full of 14th century standard frescos, and 17th century graffitos; but the plaster has fallen off in places, and reveals the original iconoclastic wall designs.

Circles and flowers; and no representation of humans.

It felt eerie. It felt like I’d stumbled into a mosque…

The reference is to the Lernaean Hydra, a legendary monster in Greek Mythology that Hercules killed.  The Hydra was a snake-like monster with many heads; and if you cut off one head, two more would grow in its place.

As Nikos Tsiforos‘ humorous retelling of Greek Mythology put it, Hercules’ reaction when he observed this was:

Dammit, this monster’s just like the Tax Department during an audit.

And indeed, the Hydra is a good metaphor for a situation where many things are going bad (lots of heads), and where trying to make things better only makes things worse (chop one head off, get two more heads).

Johnston St Carlton in Melbourne is not where Spaniards and Latin Americans live (it’s hipsterville), but it is where there is a critical mass of Spanish and Latin American restaurants is—along with salsa dancing classes, and a yearly street festival.

http://www.hispanicfiesta.com.au/

Ahah. Let’s not bugger flies, you say? Follow me, Quorans, into the scatological riches of Greek adages, and some rather disturbing insights into traditional Greek notions of sex, power, and bodily functions.

You’ve been warned.

• Έκανε η μύγα κώλο, κι έχεσε τον κόσμο όλο.  “The fly has produced an arse, and has shat on the entire world.” Referring to impudence above one’s station.
• Έκλασε η νύφη, σκόλασε ο γάμος. “The bride’s farted: the wedding’s over.” Cf. Horace, if you will: The Mountain in Labour
• Δώσε θάρρος στο χωριάτη, να σου ανέβει στο κρεβάτι. “Give the peasant encouragement, and he’ll climb into bed with you.” Meaning don’t encourage those who will take advantage of you. Especially if they are peasants.
• Έκανε το σκατό παξιμάδι. “He’s turned his shit into rusks.” Bread was conserved as rusks, for those who could not afford fresh bread. The adage suggests a more advanced state of penury.
• Όπου αγαπάς νυχόκοψε, κι όπου μισάς κατούρα. “Cut your nails where you love, piss where you hate.” As far as I know, it doesn’t mean any more than what it says: using someone’s toilet is a bad omen, cutting your nails there is (somehow) a good omen.
• Κατούρα και λίγο. “Do take a break to piss.” A sarcastic riposte to someone boasting about his power and manliness. The silent presupposition is that since the referent is being so manly and macho, it is reasonable to suggest that he take a break, and use his penis for a secondary purpose.
• As a corollary, a non-sarcastic expression of a man’s control over a situation is: γαμάει και δέρνει. “He fucks and beats up.” Apparently, that’s what masters did to apprentices as an expression of power. And as US mass media will tell you, the practice remains endemic in prisons.
• Δε μας χέζεις ρε Νταλάρα. “Why don’t you shit on us, Dalaras”.

That last one needs some exegesis.

• George Dalaras is a very very earnest, serious, sincere singer. Who sings very very weighty serious songs.
• To “shit on someone” in Greek is to express contempt for someone.
• If you “shit on someone”, they will be beneath your notice, and you will cease associating with them.
• If you ask someone to “shit on you”, you’re asking them to consider you beneath their notice—which will lead to them ceasing associating with you.
• So the roundabout meaning of the adage is: “stop bugging me”.  It’d be kind of saying to I dunno, Rush Limbaugh or Bob Dylan or someone like that: “Dude? Seriously. I’m not. Worth. Your time.”

The worst, I leave for last.

• Θα μου κλάσεις τ’ αρχίδια. “You will fart on my balls.” The meaning of this is: your threats to me are meaningless, as I am in a position of complete dominance over you.

A particular positioning of bodies is presupposed by this adage, as an expression of traditional male dominance (stereotypically associated with Greeks by non-Greeks, and with Ottomans by Greeks themselves). In such a positioning of bodies, the phrase content would be a plausible if impotent expression of repudiation of such dominance.

If you have no idea what I am alluding to, you are a better human being than I.

As Sokratis Di said, κουκουβάγια [kukuvaʝa] in Modern Greek. The proposed etymology is that it’s onomatopoeic, with kukuvau! the Modern Greek for “hoot! hoot!”, and Aristophanes’ ancient equivalent being kikkabaû! (“cry in imitation of the screech-owl’s note”).

The Ancient Greek is γλαύξ, /glaúks/. The ancients guessed that it was derived from glaukos, “blue”, because of the owl’s sparkling eyes (?!) Chantraine’s Etymological Dictionary just mutters “no definite etymology”.

What made Roman script suited for adoption?

The fact it was adopted a lot. Latin on its own is not particularly suited for a lot of phonemes, but it was the only game in town in Western and Central Europe, and that meant there was a long, long tradition of workarounds—both digraphs and diacritics. So another digraph or diacritic for another language was not a big deal. Only Vietnamese really stretched that.

Ultimately, hegemony came first: it was the script of the Catholic Church and the mediaeval intelligentsia—if you want to write down your barbaric dialect, deal with it.

What made Greek script suited?

Hegemony of Greek culture and the Orthodox Church, meaning it was a target for Bactrian and Cyrillic, and Balkan languages and Turkish. On Cyrillic see below.

But it wasn’t repurposed that often, the languages it was repurposed for were usually not mainstream languages (or it was not the mainstream spelling of a mainstream language). And while there are traditions of both digraphs and diacritics in Greek, they have never become mainstream themselves: a little digraph work in Greek dialect (Cypriot, Tsakonian), diacritics limited to Greek dialectology. That means that it was not a very good fit for other languages most of the time.

What made Cyrillic script suited?

Hegemony of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Communist Church. There was a merry-go-round of scripts from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic to Latin.

A broader phonetic repertoire than Greek or Latin, which helped.

The broader phonetic repertoire was because Cyril was not afraid to add new letters. Greek did it only once or twice. Outside of the  IPA, and the IPA-inspired African alphabets, Latin only did it once or twice. Through the precedence of Glagolitic, Cyril added a dozen.

And Cyrillic kept adding new letters (typically as variants of old letters) whenever a new language’s inventory showed up; there’s more new letters than digraphs and diacritics (though you get those too). Just as well they did: they have the languages of the Caucasus to deal with.

Why did they keep adding new letters? As with Roman and diacritics: precedent. That’s how Cyrillic, as distinct from Roman, started adapting to new languages.

What made Arabic script suited?

An OK consonant repertoire, and diacritics meaning that you can add more consonants as variants (three dots for Farsi, four dots for Shina language, as well as digraphs for Urdu). OTOH, avoiding vowels outside of matres lectionis. Doesn’t work well outside Semitic.

And Hegemony of Islam.

What made Hebrew script suited?

I don’t know if Hegemony and Judaism go together, but that. And as for Arabic: some diacritics and digraphs, though not common enough outside of Yiddish to be a fine-tuned instrument; and only matres lectionis for vowels.

Don’t know enough about other scripts.

I… don’t actually like opera, with the following exceptions. So my answers are (a) not representative, and (b) damn good, if they got past my “I don’t like opera” filter.

• John Adams, Nixon in China.
• Alban Berg, Wozzeck.
• Wolfgang Mozart, Don Giovanni.
• Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier.

Need a fifth, OK:

• Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes.

Thirty years ago, but I remember liking it at the time.

EDIT: Strike that. I meant to say

• Philip Glass, Akhnaten.

Not aware of one in Greek folklore. Lots of Arapis in Greek fairy tales, filling the same niche as ogres and giants—sometimes benevolent, sometimes malicious, but always exotic. But not aware of White Arapis.