Fun with Greek

[MaV]

Reading in the news about the Greek economy, I saw a link to a Greek news site "to vima". Since the links were uniformly written in English, I played a bit, trying to figure out what the Greek word means, then moved the mouse over the links to read the link text. Here's the connections that I found:

παιδεία : has something to do with children (-> pedagogy, pais/paidos means child in old greek) - result: education

ιδέες : easy - ideas

βιβλία : books (-> bible) - since the ending is the same as paideia I assume a singular - something more along the lines of "literature" in meaning, or is the ending -ia actually a plural and paideia a plural word that is translated in the singular?

υγεία: hygiene was what came to my mind. not bad, it actually means "health". hygiene and health do indeed have something in common.

εργασία : to ergon -> old greek for work - link says jobs; veeery close.

περιβάλλον : difficult, "peri" means something like around; the root "ball-" I remember from old Greek ... to throw? - around + throw - the link says "ecology", hm, not quite comprehensible to me.

ταξίδι : I had to pass that word. It means "travel" apparently. You can connect it to "taxi" by the sound of it, but I'd be careful.

οδηγώ : I have no idea - the link tells me about auto-moto :/

εικόνες : should be easy: pictures - not quite: the link says "gallery"

ψυχαγωγία : psyche + gogy - doing something for the psyche - I came to no conclusion what word would be a fitting translation. Ah, "entertainment" - ok, learned something new. Exercising your psyche means entertaining it so as not to turn into a cabbage.

φλας : flas? *facepalm* Flash *g* There's no sh sound in Greek


The main page shows Meryl Streep with a strange hair-do. Let's see what the unterlying text can tell us:

Σιδηρά Κυρία : Kyria - hm, kyrie eleison means "Lord, have mercy!", kyrie vocative of kyrios; therefore kyria -> lady. "sidera" ... no idea (yet), but see below

Μάργκαρετ Θάτσερ: AH, Margaret Thatcher. Sidera kyria -> iron lady.

Now I see: Meryl Streep is acting as Margaret Thatcher, therefore this ... "hair".



Who needs babelfish!

[robcfg]

If I remember correctly, sideros in greek means "iron", so could it be "Iron Lady"?


Edit:


Oh yes! We nailed it XD


[youtube]BFst8wW_V-4[/youtube]

[MaV]

If I remember correctly, sideros in greek means "iron", so could it be "Iron Lady"?

Yes, it is. I figured it out when I read "Margaret Thatcher", as stated in my post.

[Gryzor]

Hahaha - funny thread

I do that, too - mousing over links to see what the url says and trying to understand another language!

Allow me a few remarks:

-Παιδεία, or paedia: a root for encyclopaedia, wikipedia etc. Not as narrow as "education", but also "development" of the child/person.

-βιβλία is the plural form of βιβλίο. The "a" at the end is a coincidence.

-Περιβάλλον: it's a noun for "environment", but derives from a participle - "that being around". Actually, etymologically "environment" means the same thing.

-Taxi actually comes from (IIRC) tax. The modern word is short for tax(i/a)meter, meaning of course the surcharge counter. I think.

-Οδηγώ means to drive. From οδός (street, road) and άγω, to lead (keep this in mind).

-Εικόνες: root for "icons". I have real trouble when I translate software documentation - how do you translate 'icons' and 'thumbnails'? They're both small images!

-Ψυχαγωγία: from psyche and -get this- άγω. So it's the leading of the soul, the development of the soul. Since for ancient Greeks 'entertainment' was inextricably linked to becoming a better person it was the one and same. Similarily, παιδαγωγία, again from παις (child) and άγω means the 'leading' of the child. See pedagogy/pedagogue

-Φλας is, of course, the transliteration of "flash", not a greek word.

-Σιδηρά Κυρία = biatch.

This is fun!

PS Soon there'll be no Greek economy, so Greek lessons while it lasts!

[McKlain]

Hey Gryzor, can you put the latin alphabet transcription of the words like you did with paedia?

I find greek quite amusing, as spanish comes mainly from latin and latin borrowed a lot from greek. To my ear spanish and greek share a lot of phonems.

[MaV]

-Οδηγώ means to drive. From οδός (street, road) and άγω, to lead (keep this in mind).

Ok, when I read άγω I thought first of Latin agere which means more or less to do.

Actually I was expecting Οδηγώ to have άγω at the end, but could not make out the first part. And I wasn't sure what to make of άγω in the first place.

Περιβάλλον - in German it is Umwelt which back to Greek would probably be "Perikosmos"

To vima again (article headline) - that's much more difficult now:
Αριστούχοι εκτός ΑΕΙ από λάθος στην κατάθεση του μηχανογραφικού

aristouxoi = aristos means the best, -oi is plural (aristocracy = rule of the best ... right, as if! )
ektos = my first guess was hekto- hundred, but it is not. Ghostbuster! Ektoplasma! Hm, but I don't really know what to make of Ektoplasma. Ekstase ... something like "out"
AEI = ?
lathos = ok, I looked that one up: mistake; I further read that it is from Old Greek lethe ... forget or forgotten ... it sounds familiar ... wasn't there a river named lethe in Greek mythology?
sten = ?
katathese = Ah, a nice one, synthesis means placing something together (molding?). The opposite of synthesis is analysis, so katathesis must mean something a bit different. Kata ...catacombs, catastrophe, cataract ...I bet it's meaning is "down", so the act of "placing down" I guess.

mexanographikos = machine + graphik ... could it be a printer?

Right, my translation:

the best out if AEI by (from?) mistake xxx ... I'm giving up.

PS Soon there'll be no Greek economy, so Greek lessons while it lasts!

Any news we don't know yet?

[MacDeath]

παιδεία : has something to do with children (-> pedagogy, pais/paidos means child in old greek) - result: education

like, pederasty
In French this is more Homosexually related nowaday...

[TFM]

like, pederasty
In French this is more Homosexually related nowaday...

Haha, that remember me at the days when I met some French scener at meetings looong ago. We offerd them some PD software. Well, it for us PD did mean "Public Domain", but in French it is PeDerast. So the've been pretty much shocked. Well after solving the language barriers we all have been laughing about it.
I hope that one day I will see all this Freaks again, Eliot, Madram, Hicks, Toms and all the guys I never met.
(Sorry for the offtopic)
A Spanish meeting would be cool too. There must be hundreds of sceners, I heart. Or a greek meeting? Optimus can you give some information?
 

[Gryzor]

I missed this thread's latest posts, sorry.

@McKlain: apologies which words do you mean?
   
I'm not sure how much Latin borrowed from Greek, to be honest. To me, as a Greek (being rather fluid in French), Italian, French and Spanish are the three sides of a coin; maybe closer to Greek than German or Finnish, say, but still quite different. But you should hear the dialects in Sicily, where there are still contained communities coming from the ancient Greek colonies, and it's an amazing mix of Latin, Italian and a separate progression of ancient Greek. Quite moving, too.

@Mav: 'environment' as a word scheme/meaning appears to be the same in German, Engish/French and Greek

About the Vima headline... this is ladden with cultural references. Aristouchos (Αριστούχος) is indeed the one who is the best student, getting straight A's.
AEI stands for Ανώτατο Εκπαιδευτικό Ίδρυμα, Higher Educational Foundation. University, to be exact.
   
About λάθος, hmmmm very interesting; I hadn't thought of it before! Yeah, λάθος comes from λήθη, forgtefulness. As you forget, you make mistakes (also worth noting, α and η are related and often substituted in combination with different accents).

Στην= εις την, "in the".

Κατάθεση=putting down, as in submitting (hey, same word synthesis there!).

What happens is this: in Greece one has to take some exams to get into the University. Before doing that candidates (oh, those were the days...) have to sumbit a μηχανογραφικο which is a form that is scanned in computers; this form contains the schools the candidate wants to enter in preference order. Now, because of course some schools are more popular than others (marketing, medical school etc), these have higher entry levels. So once all the results come out a process starts to determine who gets where. This year, because of a huge screwup students with really good grades didn't manage entry to their (or even any!) preferred schools. Another sign of paralysis and decomposition in Greece...

As for news, not really; except that, sooner or later we're gonna default, that our prime minister's brother has huge stakes in Greece's default through his CDS-dealing company and other niceties. Oh, also we're gonna get poorer. But this is hardly news...

@MacDeath: how is pederasty linked to homosexuality??

And, according to TFM, PD collections are illegal in Frane? What is PD called there?

[MacDeath]

when you do Raster interrupt but with only male to male action, we call this pederasters.

[Gryzor]

when you do Raster interrupt but with only male to male action, we call this pederasters.

Erm... what is wrong with this picture?

[TFM]

Well, one on them is usually a child.

[Gryzor]

Well, one on them is usually a child.

Since when??!

Man, I surely don't want to know how they practice sex in these countries...

[MacDeath]

Sadly for us, we know how you ancestors did...

[Gryzor]

Not really. This has grown out of all proportion over the ages. Actually I was reading, a couple of weeks back, that in the gymnasia no adult could enter but the teacher and his wife on the penalty of death precisely to protect the children.

Pederasty can be found in all places and throughout history. There happened to be a few notorious cases in ancient Greece (like Alkiviades) but do bear in mind that it wasn't in the context it exists today; rather, a young man (certainly not a child though) was the protégé of a mentor and this, sometimes, might entail sexual relationships. Even same-sex relationships were quite frowned upon, as is evidenced by  swear words ("fag" had the same meaning back then, for instance). It was maybe tolerated more than it was up until a few years back in our world, but still not that common. And for every amphora that depicted gay sex there were a gazillion others depicting straight sex...

[MaV]

I'm not sure how much Latin borrowed from Greek, to be honest.

About 9000 words in Latin are from Greek, and there are various morphological borrowings, the most obvious being -ismos -> ismus. Educated Romans were crazy about Greek. When Cesar crossed the river Rubicon, he uttered "alea iacta est" in Latin but the rest of his speech supposedly was in Greek. Greek influcence subsided in the 4th/5th century AD at about the time of Rome's first sackings by Germanic tribes. When you have to fear for life itself, you don't invest time in proper education.

To me, as a Greek (being rather fluid in French), Italian, French and Spanish are the three sides of a coin; maybe closer to Greek than German or Finnish, say, but still quite different.

Ouch! It's wrong to put the Romance languages with Greek and to put German and Finnish in contrast to these. Finnish is a finno-ugric language, so that'll be ok as an example. But German belongs to the same family of languages as Greek and the Romance languages, the indoeuropean languages. Greek has been influenced heavily by the language of the original inhabitants of the Greek lands, which is called Pelasgian by the Greeks themselves. Words such as Thalassa and Nesos are not indoeuropean by heritage. Since those two examples and a lot of other words are close in semantic to the sea life, it is assumed that the Proto-Greek did not know about large body of waters. All indoeuropean languages are the same in this regard (das Meer (the sea) and das Moor (the moor) in German for example points to the same fact).

Old Greek ἔργον (ergon) was originally written with a digamma as first letter Fergon (the F being the digamma and sounded like englisch "w"). Compare that to Englisch "work" and German "Werk". I don't know of other language families within Indoeuropean where this word survived. Digamma itself is a relict even in Old Greek, and existed only in some dialects, but Mycenean Greek still uses it profusely (the most popular comparison is Mycenean wa-na-ka, Homeric Greek ἄναξ for prince).

About λάθος, hmmmm very interesting; I hadn't thought of it before! Yeah, λάθος comes from λήθη, forgtefulness. As you forget, you make mistakes (also worth noting, α and η are related and often substituted in combination with different accents).

I recalled that (Old) Greek made quite heavy use of the 'Ablaut' in word composition. Though in that case, it may well be a matter of different Greek dialects, like selene (Attic) and selanna (Lesbian dialect, Sappho).

Στην= εις την, "in the".

Another thing Greek has in common with German (though by chance in this case). in das -> ins / in dem -> im



I will look for another text example which we can analyze next week.

[Bryce]

And for every amphora that depicted gay sex there were a gazillion others depicting straight sex...

Ooooo, a bit like an ancient version of the internet then?

Bryce.

[Gryzor]

@Mav: Boy, was I "fluid" in French? Darn...

The fact that Latin (and then, modern languages) borrowed words doesn't really make them cousins with the Greek language... there's so much more to it!

The Pelasgians are an interesting case; IIRC there's no real "pelasgian" population, although they were said to be descendants of Pelasgos (if there's afterlife, he must be very proud at reading this now). But the name was used for all sorts of proto-hellenic populations all over the Greek world. Given how much these diferred, both in language and culture, it's easy to see that you can't really classify them. Speaking of languages, however, the Attica dialect (what most people have in mind when they think of ancient Greece) is surprisingly near the modern language - as a matter of fact it's quite easy to understand...

Had to loon Ablaut up, but yes, it's very interesting. η-ε-α is a classic (pun not intended ) example, though they were pronounced differently (or at least that's what we believe). Those differences were expressed through the polytonic system we used up until less than 30 years ago.

@Bryce: next week" TwogirlsOneamphora.

[MacDeath]

sideros in greek means "iron"

in france we talk about siderurgie for the Iron-steel industry.


Yeah, most of our modern vocabulary is Greek based... or Latin too (Latin was also very Greek influenced).


Actually in France we may know a lot of greek words just by analising most of those Franch "modern" vocabulary...

by modern I mean all those neologisms created by new technologies and science...


But the main problem is we suck at Greek AlphaBet.

I math lessons, we often used greek letters (epsilon, and so on) but no techer gave me a kool ready to use list of said letters.
"Just look into a dictionnary" one told me when i asked him, which i never did of course...

Quite sad that as a Greek-Latin langage we are not teached spontanuously Italian and Greek (be it modern) Alphabets, be it only partial initiation.

Because this could be fairly usable in French lessons and Math or even science.
Would be a multi-matters educational tool.

Boy, was I "fluid" in French? Darn...

I phobos  you are not.

fun : Oxi = OK
well not... classikos false friend.


I middle age, when Français was set properly as a "différent" language and got its rules defined in written language...

The Kings of France wanted it to take a few steps aside the LAtin so they tried to include some Greek stuffs...

As a result we have the Y in our alphabet, we call it "I-grec" (ee-greek) while Italian is not supposed to have it.

Classic Italian alphabet is :
A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, Z...

in France we also have additional J, K, X, Y to reflect Germanic and Greek influences.

J is quite used, K is not...

alea iacta est

in France and in Astérix, it is spelled Jacta...

it gave a word-verb : Jacter (to talk...)
Jacter, jactance...
Not used a lot, at "jacter" mean talk a lot... italian way ? perhaps...
when someone is told being  "jacter" (jacting ? sound like Acting, lol) it is slightly vulgar and means talking to much, useless noise and so on...

"Arrète de jacter" (shut up).
"quand auraient vous finis de Jacter ?" = when will you stop talking uselessly
"tu jactes mais ne fait rien" = lots of talks, no action.

Interesting.

Archetype Italian are a lot into this IMO.

but southern French too...



Anyway we must also know that many proto european langages originated from the same root...
Aryan ?

Calt and Latin weren't that much different probably on some vocabularies, but the major changes came from isolation and different grammar.

Rex : king (Latin)
Rix : King (Gaul)


"terminaisons" also...

Greek : -os
Latin: -us
Gaul... -is, -ix ?

Brennus and Brennos.

2 Celts-Gaul warchiefs with the same name... (Brenn-xx = chief in Gaul, sort of) but you can difference them by the one you raped Roma (-us) and the one who raped "Delphe" (-os).

hell why Caelts had no proper use of written langage..?

(g)Welsh
Goidels
Gauls
Gallics
Gaulois
Kelts
Celts
galicians
Caledonia

in French we pronounce this like "Selt" ut we should inddeed call them "Gelts" or "Kelts".

only 2 alphabet (1 and half actually) but no european population managed to use them the same.

And I don't even tell about Slavian influences (quite low here in France, but my grandmother is Polka... so I guess, at least genetically...)



No wonder the Hellenistic area with it's "macedonian salad" political and ethnical display gave birth to modern Europe...

And for every amphora that depicted gay sex there were a gazillion others depicting straight sex...

Logographic Egyptian influance perhaps...

Gay sex : this wine/oil is for pederatos : low alcohol or well lubricating oil.
Straight sex : go on, this one is a real man's stuff, not for quiche eaters... Good strong Alcohol or dense Oil, or spicy-hot product (which would otherwise inflict pain on haemorrhoids...) .


 

[redbox]

Hey Gryzor, considering you are fluent in English, do you ever think in English...?


And if so, is it at certain times?

[Bryce]

@MacDeath: As I was brought up speaking Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic), I can assure you that we have a fully developed written language (teangacha) and alphabet (aibítir), although we also leave out a few letters that aren't used.

@Redbox: Interesting question. I think in English, but I dream in German.

Bryce.

[MacDeath]

Sorry but irish are late Celts...

They managed to get some writtings because they were Chritianised (=convinced almost peacefully to grew a modern culture, sort of)) while their culture still alive and strong...
but mainland celts (=Gaul per exemple) got romanised (=raped into a foreign culture, their own ancient one going to oblivion because not written so no trace would remain, Druid being exterminated or "convinced" to abandon their old stuff...) before being christianised so only a few fragments of the 500year long culture (La Tène or Hallstatt ? I never remember) remained.


Also the "Celtic" term actually includes quite different cultures...

Ireland having their specific Pantheon and mythic cycles...


A sad part is that Celtic culture was a great part of today's europe (Western mostly), a lot of genetic Europeans have Celt blood...
but concerning culture, they clearly not stayed influancial yet somewhat strange nostalgia errupt from this almost unknown past...
Of course folklore and popular culture may have some remnants, dilluted in Roman and Christian blur.

[Gryzor]

@redbox: interesting question indeed. No, I don't think in english except for when I know an important conversation in english is coming up; like an interview, a presentation I must give, such stuff - then I'll rehearse it in my head in english.

But I'd dare say that you don't necessarily think in a specific language; sure, it influences your way of thinking through the structure and all (λόγος...), but do you actually think in words?

That said, me and Maritina do tend to sprinkle our everyday talk with English phrases; we both work for multinationals, read english-language books, watch english-language movies and series (with english or no subtitles), so it's quite often that we find it faster and easier to say something with a short, English phrase. I think we're being americanized to some extend. And, actually, we were discussing this the other day, deciding we must stick to the more difficult, Greek language...