History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VI

Kyriakos · Feb 4, 2014

Traitorfish said:
My understanding is that modern Greek is a 19th century construction, not a 1st century survival. It resembles Classical dialects because it was designed to.

Your understanding is entirely wrong, then

Any highschooler here can read the NT from the original Attic Greek, cause it is pretty much all part of the current language. You may confuse things with Israel's resurrection of ancient language to substitute the yiddish one developed entirely by the european jewish diaspora.

You might also (not sure, cause it is not that known outside of this country for non-linguists) refer to the Kathareuousa vs Demotike affair, which ended in the late 1960s with the pitiful establishment of the latter, as a supposedly "more accessible" version of Greek. In reality the language is near enough Byzantine documents from more than 1000 years ago, to allow most to read those with some second-guessing or a dictionary of obsolete terms.

Of course if one compares current Greek to Homeric Greek...it is a different issue, cause then there are many more changes, including grammatical changes. For example i was never good in "ancient Greek" in highschool, and it was quite different grammatically, despite many elements remaining in current Greek

(the gospel's attic Greek was very very simple, though, i suppose so as to allow more people to read it).

Krajzen · Feb 4, 2014

Dachs said:
It didn't used to be. Although there are scattered examples of crescent symbology in the early part of the second millennium, the first Muslim polity to really popularize the use of the star-and-crescent was the Ottoman Empire. It's not totally clear why this was a special Ottoman thing; some people have guessed about a connection to steppe iconography, specifically Tengriist, but that's not incredibly convincing to me.

Anyway, due to the Ottoman sultan's double-hat as khalifa, the symbol slowly became associated with Sunni Islam generally over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the Ottoman Empire broke up, and after various forms of pan-Islam became more popular in the 1950s and 1960s, the star-and-crescent was a ready-made symbol for new nationalist organizations to adopt, and so they did.

I always believed that this is, for some reason, holy symbol of Islam like Cross :lol:

Joecoolyo · Feb 4, 2014

Dachs said:
It didn't used to be. Although there are scattered examples of crescent symbology in the early part of the second millennium, the first Muslim polity to really popularize the use of the star-and-crescent was the Ottoman Empire. It's not totally clear why this was a special Ottoman thing; some people have guessed about a connection to steppe iconography, specifically Tengriist, but that's not incredibly convincing to me.

Anyway, due to the Ottoman sultan's double-hat as khalifa, the symbol slowly became associated with Sunni Islam generally over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the Ottoman Empire broke up, and after various forms of pan-Islam became more popular in the 1950s and 1960s, the star-and-crescent was a ready-made symbol for new nationalist organizations to adopt, and so they did.

I always thought it was based on the fact that they, like us Jews, use a lunar calendar in place of a solar one.

Traitorfish · Feb 4, 2014

Kyriakos said:
Your understanding is entirely wrong, then

Perhaps. I suspect it's neither quite right nor entirely wrong; usually how it goes.

Flying Pig · Feb 4, 2014

Kyriakos said:
Your understanding is entirely wrong, then

Any highschooler here can read the NT from the original Attic Greek, cause it is pretty much all part of the current language. You may confuse things with Israel's resurrection of ancient language to substitute the yiddish one developed entirely by the european jewish diaspora.

You might also (not sure, cause it is not that known outside of this country for non-linguists) refer to the Kathareuousa vs Demotike affair, which ended in the late 1960s with the pitiful establishment of the latter, as a supposedly "more accessible" version of Greek. In reality the language is near enough Byzantine documents from more than 1000 years ago, to allow most to read those with some second-guessing or a dictionary of obsolete terms.

Of course if one compares current Greek to Homeric Greek...it is a different issue, cause then there are many more changes, including grammatical changes. For example i was never good in "ancient Greek" in highschool, and it was quite different grammatically, despite many elements remaining in current Greek (the gospel's attic Greek was very very simple, though, i suppose so as to allow more people to read it).

TF's argument isn't that modern Greek is different to ancient Greek, but rather that it is intentionally - and artificially - designed to be so.

Domen · Feb 4, 2014

Languages simply tend to evolve over time. Claims about "artificial and intentional designs" seem to be conspiracy theories.

Traitorfish · Feb 4, 2014

The propagation of "pure" Greek- that is, Greek stripped of Turkic, Albanian and Slavic influences- was state policy for like a century and a half. It's not a "conspiracy theory", it's just a thing which happened.

JohannaK · Feb 4, 2014

That is, for a century and a half there was an effort to nullify the evolution you mention, Domen.

Kyriakos · Feb 5, 2014

Traitorfish said:
The propagation of "pure" Greek- that is, Greek stripped of Turkic, Albanian and Slavic influences- was state policy for like a century and a half. It's not a "conspiracy theory", it's just a thing which happened.

While this is (despite the hyperbole) indeed correct, i am not sure why you think it means much in regards to Greek being obviously the continuation of the same language it was in Byzantine times or before (?).

For what it's worth, those terms are very easy to stand out in Greek, cause they sound pretty alien despite their partial transformation in this language. Sometimes people like the tones of the actual language more, you know. For example i have nothing against Rome, but i don't like latin terms in Greek much (which, by the way, are more than all those other 'influences' you mentioned, and still are in the 20K number at most, in a language with more than a million main nouns and names). So i prefer to use the purely Greek terms in my work or speech, unless the latin word is way more too common.

For example, i never use the purely Greek "oikos" for "house", cause the latin "spiti" is virtually the only term used, despite oikos existing in other terms (eg ecology, oikologia, etc).

Plotinus · Feb 5, 2014

Kyriakos said:
Of course if one compares current Greek to Homeric Greek...it is a different issue, cause then there are many more changes, including grammatical changes.

Even in late antiquity, school children had to learn Homeric Greek in order to read Homer; too many words had become obsolete even by then.

Kyriakos said:
For example i was never good in "ancient Greek" in highschool, and it was quite different grammatically, despite many elements remaining in current Greek (the gospel's attic Greek was very very simple, though, i suppose so as to allow more people to read it).

The Gospels are written in Koine Greek, not Attic Greek, though obviously these dialects are closely related. Koine is thought today to have been derived mainly from Attic but with some elements of other dialects, notably Ionic. If you can read Attic Greek you can read Koine, though not necessarily vice versa.

Kyriakos · Feb 5, 2014

^

I suppose i am always too eager to identify 'Attic' with 'common(er)'=koine :mischief:

Traitorfish · Feb 5, 2014

Kyriakos said:
While this is (despite the hyperbole) indeed correct, i am not sure why you think it means much in regards to Greek being obviously the continuation of the same language it was in Byzantine times or before (?).

Nobody's denying continuity. But continuity isn't identity. Modern English is in continuity with Old English, but I can no more easily make my way through Beowulf than I could through a contemporary Dutch text. Most English-speakers struggle even to make it through a modern Scots text, which is closer to modern English even than Chaucer. Proximity is only that, proximity.

Even modern Greek, with its deliberate classicisations and expunging of "foreign" elements, is still far from identical to Classical Greek, whatever degree of mutual intelligibility they've achieved. Announcing that they are one and the same, that they have persisted in some essential way, that the changes are superficial, is just myth-making, as much as imagining that Arminius spoke "German", Alfred of Wessex "English" or Boudica "Welsh". It's just bad history.

Louis XXIV · Feb 5, 2014

Plotinus said:
Even in late antiquity, school children had to learn Homeric Greek in order to read Homer; too many words had become obsolete even by then.

The Gospels are written in Koine Greek, not Attic Greek, though obviously these dialects are closely related. Koine is thought today to have been derived mainly from Attic but with some elements of other dialects, notably Ionic. If you can read Attic Greek you can read Koine, though not necessarily vice versa.

Yeah, I was going to point this out. It's my understanding that Attic Greek actually has far more noticeable differences in pronunciation than Koine Greek when it comes to comparing it to modern Greek.

Cheezy the Wiz · Feb 5, 2014

Traitorfish said:
Nobody's denying continuity. But continuity isn't identity. Modern English is in continuity with Old English, but I can no more easily make my way through Beowulf than I could through a contemporary Dutch text. Most English-speakers struggle even to make it through a modern Scots text, which is closer to modern English even than Chaucer. Proximity is only that, proximity.

Even modern Greek, with its deliberate classicisations and expunging of "foreign" elements, is still far from identical to Classical Greek, whatever degree of mutual intelligibility they've achieved. Announcing that they are one and the same, that they have persisted in some essential way, that the changes are superficial, is just myth-making, as much as imagining that Arminius spoke "German", Alfred of Wessex "English" or Boudica "Welsh". It's just bad history.

Among numerous other elements which make The Eagle a tragedy of a movie is the fact that the Picts speak Gaelic. :cringe:

Plotinus · Feb 5, 2014

Traitorfish said:
Nobody's denying continuity. But continuity isn't identity. Modern English is in continuity with Old English, but I can no more easily make my way through Beowulf than I could through a contemporary Dutch text. Most English-speakers struggle even to make it through a modern Scots text, which is closer to modern English even than Chaucer. Proximity is only that, proximity.

This may be a tangent, but would you really classify Scots as a distinct language from English (or "standard English", assuming that there is such a thing)? I think the degree of mutual comprehension of written texts is higher than you think; at least I can understand Scots poetry without any difficulty and my familiarity with it basically extends no further than having watched Rab C. Nesbitt.

I know this is a controversial subject but it seems to me that if a speaker of language A can understand a text of language B with no great difficulty beyond unfamiliar spelling or pronunciation then really they're different dialects rather than different languages. Scots is surely closer to "standard English" (i.e. whatever I personally happen to speak) than, say, some versions of Singlish, which I think has more non-standard vocabulary and more divergent grammar - not to mention even more divergent pronunciation - and so surely has more claim to be considered a distinct language. (This is particularly so when you hear people who speak both Singlish and standard English, and who switch between them in different contexts - the difference is much more than just accent and a bit of slang.)

Mouthwash · Feb 5, 2014

What were Arab perceptions of Jews generally like before Zionism?

Kyriakos · Feb 5, 2014

Traitorfish said:
Nobody's denying continuity. But continuity isn't identity. Modern English is in continuity with Old English, but I can no more easily make my way through Beowulf than I could through a contemporary Dutch text. Most English-speakers struggle even to make it through a modern Scots text, which is closer to modern English even than Chaucer. Proximity is only that, proximity.

Even modern Greek, with its deliberate classicisations and expunging of "foreign" elements, is still far from identical to Classical Greek, whatever degree of mutual intelligibility they've achieved. Announcing that they are one and the same, that they have persisted in some essential way, that the changes are superficial, is just myth-making, as much as imagining that Arminius spoke "German", Alfred of Wessex "English" or Boudica "Welsh". It's just bad history.

I have come across some old english (which i could not understand at all) and a bit of the Canterbury Tales (which iirc i had many problems to read, but it was very long ago). And even Shakespeare has scores of obsolete terms.

However the difference between current Greek and Byzantine Greek (eg Greek in the Biblioteca of Photios, or the Suda encyclopedia) is nowhere near what exists between current English and Old English.
I can read most Byzantine passages, assuming they don't use myriads of obsolete nouns. The grammar doesn't seem different either (contrary to Homeric texts, or Classical Era Drama, which has very difficult to follow grammar if you have not actively studied ancient Greek grammar).

So claiming that current Greek is clearly the same language, as evolved in time, with prctically identical grammar to the Byzantine times, without massive changes (eg Old English vs current English) is not at all an absurd position.

Phrossack · Feb 5, 2014

Cheezy the Wiz said:
Among numerous other elements which make The Eagle a tragedy of a movie is the fact that the Picts speak Gaelic.

Do we even know what Pictish was like? If not, Gaelic's the closest thing.

Mouthwash · Feb 5, 2014

And while we're on the subject, how related is biblical Hebrew to modern Hebrew? Are they mutually intelligible? I know that modern Hebrew has absorbed lots of spoken or literal English words (and I'm against it- why can't they just invent a perfectly good Hebrew word for that stuff?).

Ajidica · Feb 5, 2014

Mouthwash said:
And while we're on the subject, how related is biblical Hebrew to modern Hebrew? Are they mutually intelligible? I know that modern Hebrew has absorbed lots of spoken or literal English words (and I'm against it- why can't they just invent a perfectly good Hebrew word for that stuff?).

IIRC, it is relatively close because outside of the priesthood, Hebrew was a dead language during the Diaspora. It only began to be reconstituted as a daily-use language during the 19th century as part of nationalist movements.

History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VI

Creator

Deity

99% Lightspeed

The Tighnahulish Kid

Utrinque Paratus

Misico dux Vandalorum

The Tighnahulish Kid

Heroically Clueless

Creator

Philosopher

Creator

The Tighnahulish Kid

Le Roi Soleil

Socialist In A Hurry

Philosopher

Escaped Lunatic

Creator

Armored Fish and Armored Men

Escaped Lunatic

High Quality Person

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