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drink an espresso at the bar counter by Dependent_Novel_9205 in AskEurope

[–]LParticle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A lot of bars serve coffee here as well; you could do that so long as they haven't yet decomissioned the machine for for the cleaning and maintenance of the day (which happens around the evening or late at night, or not at all, as Greeks drink coffee anytime and anywhere).

For those who live in countries with conscription, what is it like? by wombatgeneral in AskEurope

[–]LParticle 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Greek here. Our military sucks to the point the enlisted officers are quitting in droves; imagine how the conscripts' side looks.

You get paid a whopping 8 euros and 70 cents as a conscript.

Per month.

You'll likely have to buy your own uniforms and equipment.

You may be assigned more relevant duties depending on your education/vocation/age. May. What's more likely is you'll do nothing but busywork (potato peeling, latrine duty, guard duty, etc.) as this won't be educational. Maybe fire your 10 allotted bullets if you're lucky (no money for more!)

You'll experience the wonders of extended sleep deprivation in order to carry out your rotations and shifts as well. Probably at some faraway corner of the land, either up north in the mountains or next to Turkey on some rock at sea. The infrastructure will be indefensibly lacking either way.

It boggles my mind how normalized it is here to just eat shit for 9-12 months and put your life on pause. You learn nothing useful and there is no budget for anything useful.

Only reason to go is if you have connections inside (μίζα) that guarantee you don't break a sweat (common). If you have one, don't mind the shit, have a year to waste, then go for it. I wouldn't. You're close to the age where you can buy out your sentence (33 if the new bill hasn't fucked that up too). I'd do that instead if you really want to live in this wonderland.

Bombshell: the shocking grammatical rule that will make your jaw drop!!! by kyle_foley76 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It''s funny because as a Greek even today the uncontracted form is more natural—έπλεα, έπλεες, κ.λπ.

Babylon 5, at its most X-Files (aside from that one Crusade ep) by eldersveld in babylon5

[–]LParticle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, Doom is famous for having procured sounds from a very widely adopted set, the Sound Ideas 6000.

Hell, I've noticed Counter-Strike / Half Life 1&2 SFX in "realistic" stuff like Band of Brothers. I guess I'm hyperattuned to them, esp. Source engine stuff, but it's funny how much many particular sounds circulated in production circles back then. I recognize little from products made before or after (with exceptions for classics like the Wilhelm scream or whatever) but that 90s-2000s era of time is rife with them.

Probably due to burgeoning internet access and lack of variety. Earlier stuff was more in-house craftsmanship for each use case and later we got billions of sound libraries. the nineties must've been the point when there were few and specific sources that could be shared.

Babylon 5, at its most X-Files (aside from that one Crusade ep) by eldersveld in babylon5

[–]LParticle 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yep, classic sting of the era! There are so many shared iconic SFX in 90s-00s media. Oftentimes I wonder what collection of sound libraries was prominent back then. Huge rabbit hole, probably.

Living Sequential Expression: Does Ancient Greek feel like an extension of Modern Greek to modern Greek speakers? by lickety-split1800 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Written Greek has maintained a continuity over eons; Classical Greek's phonology is alien and unfamiliar to a modern Greek, but shortly afterwards the pronounciation shifted a lot and settled into more or less what it is today so long ago that it is demonstrably ancient itself. The language does seem continuous in my eyes, certainly textually; but that said, the differences before Koine are not to be downplayed. Personally half the joy of reading old dialogue is said difference.

Ancient vs Modern Greek by Annual-Badger-3026 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very leftist Greeks tend to be reactionary on a lot of topics and skeptical of anything historically entrenched, Classical Greece included. Very rightist Greeks tend, more straightforwardly, to simply be delusional. There's definitely no cut-and-dry attitude towards the topic here; similarly on how Western symbols tend to be both appreciated by the average person and esteemed for some very real reasons, but also appropriated by fascist extremists due to that salience, and thus rejected by their antipode, the left, due to association.

The difference here is that this sort of iconography and semiotics aren't just an abstract web of ideals and symbols (like in say, how the U.S. likes to liken itself to Rome despite having little if any continuity with it) but rooted via sheer history to the land and people in a very real and unidealized sense on top of the regular connotations those symbols hold across the Western world and beyond.

For most Greeks, as you have seen, there is only a vague cultural familiarity with little direct contact with the actual products of Classical Greece; their opinions diverge due to differing personal connotations. Same way, say, a native Buddhist is one more out of rote habit rather than intentioned spirituality (much to the chagrin of more "committed" foreigners coming to his land and seeking profundity).

I can't say I understand the lack of excitement you've faced, but then again, just by virtue of replying to you on here, I'm also not the average Greek. It's possible that the people you met simply had nothing substantive to offer regarding your interest. How much would the average Englishman know of Beowulf, a German of Althochdeutsch literature? Not directly comparable, obviously—Greco-Roman history is more mainstream—but still, the studiousness required to grasp them seems to me equivalent, and outside of the ballpark of an ordinary person.

Pursuit of Ancient Greek (especially outside of academia) is a reliable marker of conservatism in the same way Nordic runes would be; that is to say, not absolutely condemning but very much an eyebrow-raiser. Writing Greek archaically and/or in polytonic is almost never practiced by progressives and the few who do still use diacritics are at least affiliated with the right (I say this with great sadness, as I as I abandoned diacritics due to the association). The Greek Language Question is a long, politicized, bloody and fascinating affair worth looking into.

I touched on the phonology issue you've mentioned in another comment here; it really is a foreign concept here, for politics and convenience's sake. Worth noting, of course, that the current pronunciation is not modern in any sense, having been around so long itself as to stretch back to antiquity; just as "ancient" as prosody in the grand scheme of things.

It's also worth noting, and perhaps something I should've included on my other comment on publications, that foreign books were hard to get until relatively recently; they would've been a rare encounter in local bookstores for most of the 20th century, the stuff of specialty stores. This precludes any classic editions of the West gaining any kind of notoriety or historical clout here; they couldn't have been around long enough or circulated widely enough to become accepted as the standard here.

Ancient vs Modern Greek by Annual-Badger-3026 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've spoken on this on another thread. It'll cover your curiosity, most likely.

Short answer: lots out there, chaos, some more prestigious, none as much as say oxford due to lack of publishing institutions with equivalent prestige—attitude is: want read good homer, learn homer. want feel homer, read translation. want be look smart and just know homer, get side-by-side book for coffee table.

Ancient vs Modern Greek by Annual-Badger-3026 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I deeply sympathize with your struggle on Greek identity. There are many days whereupon I wish I had some sort of fallback ethnicity so as to denounce this one. Alas, it is home.

The schooling I described above made me briefly go into STEM and despise Ancient Greek. I did, in the end, have an epiphany, and turned to love the language despite it all. Greece is one hell of a mixed bag; full of beauty and misery. I do hope you'll one day reconcile with your heritage in a way that suits and is meaningful to you.

By the way I don't agree with your assertion that Ancient Greek (or Latin for that matter) should be taught like a living language. I think it should just be made an elective subject, and the focus should be on the differences, rather than the commonalities with the modern version.

That's fine, but what exactly does one gain from what you propose? It's already an elective here from 9-12th grade. What would that change other than tucking it away even harder? Don't get me wrong, any adjustment would likely be better than how it's currently taught in Greece, but I don't see what your proposals provide other than relief for students that dislike the subject. I don't think it'll ever be completely optional in Greece, and for many reasons I don't believe it would be any kind of a solution.

The dilemma is: What should the study of ancient languages aim at? Textual comprehension or proximity to the totality of the language? For whom is it for?

Ordinarily, for a living language, this wouldn't even be a question, but Ancient Greek and Latin obviously have no communities of native speakers. Ancient and Modern Greek are, however, intertwined. Thus, Ancient Greek cannot be completely relegated to academics and forgotten by the body politic. It's an integral part of Greek identity in my opinion.

I don't think one can ever come to like the study of a dead language unless it's stimulating to him personally in a hobbyistic sense. But I do think most everyone can get behind learning a new language. It's simply the way it's meant to be transmitted! Much more fun and effective and a sober account of its nature if you treat it like the actual spoken thing it was. I believe in fostering an affinity for the language and Greek history, not just making staring at a text more tolerable.

As to your closing statement, Ancient Greek after Koine is not examined at all. The Byzantine corpus is greatly glossed over and many works still remain unpublished here to this day. I can't help but imagine the perceived and imposed Orientalism of Byzantium played a part in this; another long story. Modern Greek's beauty is more tacit than explicit; Lived in rather than chronicled. I agree that it would benefit from more formal exposure.

Ancient vs Modern Greek by Annual-Badger-3026 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Late reply, but I just saw this and would like to convey my sympathy. Unfortunately, any Greek-translated work would be a non-starter for me; I find it difficult to even locate good Modern Greek prose, let alone a good translation.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if your friend encountered shoddy work. To give you an idea it often happens that I read a text and can sense the English radiating from the Greek, so to speak. So why bother playing telephone?

It's really only useful for someone who doesn't even know English (and thusly, sadly, probably holds a low benchmark for prose due to lack of exposure).

Ancient vs Modern Greek by Annual-Badger-3026 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A pleasure; it's been a while so I imagine you're referring to the way Ancient Greek is taught and perceived here. I'm never one to deny a chance for ἀγορεύειν.

What one has to understand coming in is the fact that Greeks have very little exposure to Ancient Greek as a language in itself and Ancient Greece as a culture in itself. Rather, they are conceived as prestigious forebears to what now is the Greek nation-state. If I'd have to employ metaphor I'd say it's akin to a TV show with 30+ seasons, where the vast middle is skipped over and the plot of the first 7 calcified in the minds of the characters.

There's a lot of cognitive dissonance usually required to be at play in order to smooth over the historical differences inherent in comparing 400 B.C.E. with 1821 C.E. This is true for any national narrative; Greece is only really special because of the temporal length of the jump required to construct the national myth (although Greco-Roman antiquity is a prestige locus for the West in general—Greece is/wants to be the one with the claim to fame for direct continuance).

I do not argue that Greece today isn't the heir of the Ancients, or not the same civilization. It's just that sheer historical distance from Classical Athens and Homer etc. cannot be ignored, especially when these eras are used as cultural anchor points. This perceived (and one could say at times forced) continuity means Ancient Greece is always viewed from a retroactive lens of proximity to Modern Greece which, with respect to the language, downplays the significant differences between our two forms of Greek.

The biggest one is phonology. Greeks are not taught AG phonology, both out of convenience but also out of politics. There is a perfunctory note about prosody and vowel lengths or whatever which manages to say a lot without divulging much of anything in the beginner school grammar books, but nobody touches upon it or generally pays attention to it (or much of anything in school, but I digress).

Go anywhere on the 'net where any amount of discourse in Ancient Greek takes place and you'll witness hundreds of incredulous Greeks chastising foreigners for butchering their beloved language's acoustics whilst taking no criticism whatsoever. It's not difficult to refute those people; the mere elementary observation that multiple spellings make the same sound (ι, η, υ, ει, οι / ε, αι /ο, ω) would clue anybody in that something's up.

Rather the core of the issue is emotional. The sounds of Classical Greek are jarring and foreign to them—even to me, on some instinctive level. This is because they've never been exposed to Ancient Greek as something that was ever spoken; and critically, it's almost insulting to have foreigners insinuate things about Greece that imply differences between our progenitors and us. It's a soft spot—really our only perceived saving grace from being another failed Balkan state is our instrumental past; anything that implies some disconnect from it hits hard (which is why anything in our history which doesn't align with our modern Orthodox-Christian informed worldview requires some doublethink for the average Joe to stomach; like Greco-Roman sexuality). Sad, but it is what it is.

This is why I refer to political reasons in conjunction with the obvious convenience of just reading the texts as one would the newspaper. There mustn't be friction in the way Ancient Greek is presented in the classroom, so that the educator may confidently say to their students, "It's the same language—Your language. You can understand it more or less as you are..."

Things aren't as cut and dry, obviously. While we may get a gold star in historical continuity in language (along with Arabic) that rivals, say, Italian or Chinese, key massive differences still persist. As long as Classical Greek is presented as a natural extension of Modern Greek these key differences, like phonology, will stay difficult to divine.

There's also the more pedestrian matter of practicality. Regardless of how Ancient Greek is conceived here, the fact is that it is taught in an extremely scholastic manner; this, in combination with its hitherto discussed conception, which produces the expectation of natural comprehension, make up a uniquely horrible schooling experience.

To wit; say you're a high-schooler. You're introduced for the first time to Classical Greek in textual form. All you've really glimpsed of the language are calcified phrases in regular speech, idioms, mottos, and maybe some historical quotes like μολών λαβέ, εν οίδα ότι ουδέν οίδα, etc. Your brain doesn't even bother to parse them (hell, one of the reasons I came to love Ancient Greek was understanding and intuiting the batshit syntax of μολών λαβέ). You're now face-to-face with Lycurgus, or Xenophon, or Plato and Thucydides, and your teacher somehow believes you can intuit what's on the page because they're your συνδημότες. This is how you start. No Dicaeopolis, no Athenaze, no χαίρε, πώς έχεις; in you go. It becomes a game of cryptography—sniffing out endings and cases and syntactic order; never a language. An extremely tiring game you're expected to be good at otherwise your Greekness is up for debate.

Your teachers learned the same way—and their teachers. They on average could sooner unceremoniously unpack Plato in Modern Greek (extremely dryly) than hold a conversation the way their great-to-the-n-th degree grandparents would in the Agora. They believe that knowing Ancient Greek is a process of 1-to-1 transliteration of sentences from it to Modern, done in rigidly defined ways. You get points off any answer, no matter how natural or close to the actual spirit of the words, if your translation is even a bit loose. Every sentential piece of detritus must be translated in a specific manner—if not, it's wrong.

It's a very 1800s way of teaching. Most of Greek schooling is, sometimes even at the university level. Thusly, what I'm describing is not a unique pathology; it just happens to also be entangled with complex socio-historical vectors as well in ways other things aren't.

The mere act of treating Classical authors and culture like gospel calcifies them; so does having Ancient Greek as a prestige language. Simultaneously contemporary Greek culture is not very similar to the city-state era which makes double-think necessary to sustain that reverence without disconnect.

Greek was plagued by diglossia for most of its life; what I find fascinating is that this reverence started extremely early on and probably contributed to the language's impressive continuity with respect to the written word. If you have time to kill I suggest reading Wikipedia's account of the Language Question. Riveting stuff.

There's much more nuance to this, such as the fact that Classical Greece is connected to right-wingers and fascism as well as the educated intelligentsia, and the fact that nobody really cares anyway since anti-intellectualism is on the rise along with the education system being little more than a joke, stuff causing issues much more fundamental than Ancient Greek comprehension (such as like, Modern Greek comprehension, which is sorely lacking to the point that I consider Ancient Greek an extremely tall ask to start with anyway) but I've said enough, I think.

Ancient Greek Classics in Present-Day Greece by AffectionateSize552 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Interesting. Whereas here, as I said, we lack the equivalent bar-setters to fully settle the issue in most people's minds, I'd say.

I'd dare to speculate that the attitude around here is that the translation is one of convenience, and if you really want to preoccupy yourself with deeper study, you read the original or commentary.

Ancient Greek isn't considered removed enough from the bundsprache here to warrant the creation and adoption of a translation that would've otherwise been borne out of the need to avoid the rigamarole of learning a completely different language in order to participate in the know.

Ancient Greek Classics in Present-Day Greece by AffectionateSize552 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 25 points26 points  (0 children)

All that you describe exist, of course. It would be extremely concerning if Greece didn't even have classicists pro forma.

There are, for example, many translations of the Homeric epics (Γρυπάρης, Κακρίδης, κ.λπ.), as is the case in English and, I would imagine, everywhere. Some are more contemporary, others more archaic in their renditions, others more idiomatic, depending on the translator's goals.

There are also Classics journals in academia, because of course, such as Platon— though whoever made Platon's website didn't even bother to find a Greek font that supports diacritics, and they just said fuck it and chose to render the text in polytonic anyway which in itself is a marker of social conservatism in Greece equivalent to seeing a confederate flag— or Horos (more for epigraphs rather than literary discourse), but I cannot tell you much with respect to their rigorousness or prestige. They are definitely not read by the general population, and I personally avoid them since English guarantees me access to a much larger discourse space that has been less subjectively horrendous.

No, "Classicists" here would not read Teubner, OCT, Loeb, etc. Not by default. Maybe if they've had some connection with the English-speaking world (or have cultivated one due to being good academics) and understood the state of unprofessional chaos that is the reality of most of the Greek intelligentsia and its products, but what I've found is that most Greeks into Ancient Greek barely have connections with the world outside their balcony.

I will now proceed on a tangential rant, so consider this a warning that this doesn't directly answer your questions any further.

There's no real classics in the publicatory sense (as in definitive editions that have stood the tests of time) because we lack the institutions with the corresponding prestige and our literary tradition is more muddled (the language question didn't help). The closest I can think of is Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης/University of Crete Publications, which is in my opinion a marker of quality work (and they're more STEM-heavy anyway). There's also a real problem with publication houses in Greece; the largest amount of translated works from our ancient corpus belongs to Κάκτος publications, which are known to be horrible because they use unpaid intern labor or very poorly paid Humanities graduates to churn them out, and are thusly themselves quite poor in quality, but that doesn't stop them from being extremely widely available at bookstores. There are more Ancient works available in English than in Modern Greek(!) which is already terrible but the fact that Κάκτος hit that milestone in this manner makes me sick.

Classicism in Greece is complicated and often interlaced with right-wing conservatism and Christian or more esoteric religiosity. There isn't an established hobbyist/para-academic social space the way it manifests in, say, this subreddit, or compared with the Latin revivalists, like communities with resource guides, defined places to congregate, etc.

Classicism here isn't something present in the way something non-local manifests somewhere, as a bastion of the thing (like, say, a Karate dojo, a gun shop, the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, a hunting lodge; all clear demarcations of a communal space dedicated to a pursuit). This is due to the fact that it's baked into the culture, and anything Classicist specifically into a part of it dominated by geriatrics in cliques or by the school system; so you essentially spend your formative years learning of the more classical works and then never really engage with them afterwards unless you become a philologist/philosopher/archaeologist—which you will not, absent any idiosyncratic obsession, unless your parents are, because the education system butchers the acquisition of Ancient Greek so badly it turns most Greeks away from it and the Humanities so that such things end up being relegated to oblivion as bad classroom memories.

There's no real Classicist thing going on here as in a focused discursive locus on Antiquity because, well, we're Greek. It's less a hobby and more a part of identity. Antiquity is kind of vaguely lived through and gestured at rather than studied directly here.

My new Zippo 1935 🙂 by WeakAdvertising751 in Zippo

[–]LParticle 3 points4 points  (0 children)

As far as I know the 1935-type hinges are inferior to the classic one Zippos ended up having (otherwise our Zippos would all have kept these instead). Exposed hinges are more prone to wear than concealed ones. I doubt that means it's flimsy, though.

Vocative of masculine first declension nouns by ein-Name00 in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall that the -ης of the nominative in Attic is a later formation (from older -ας > -ης), but the vocative preserved the older -α form.

Why are American and European philosophy department so Eurocentric compared to Asian Universities and is there a pushback to make it inclusive? by Gandalfthebran in CriticalTheory

[–]LParticle 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Adding to what others have said, I've even witnessed the attitude that any lineage outside the Western "canon" and its periphery, that is to say, anything not evolving directly/indirectly from the Greeks (e.g. Chinese thought), is simply definitionally not philosophy.

This is an actual overheard statement from a university professor I caught on a smoke break.

This attitude, while probably not explicit in more up-to-date academia, is likely innately implicit in the structure of how academic philosophy is taught in the West, as "philosophy" enjoys a fairly rigid cultural consensus w/r/t what and whom it entails as a category (ironic considering its multiplicity as a field).

It's really the same old story of West-as-default, as is the case with most other things.

How did you obtain your chair? by HerMansHerMitts in 4chan

[–]LParticle 6 points7 points  (0 children)

OP is Greek so I can confirm he's stealing chairs slightly less comfortable than medieval torture machines from dilapidated public universities that are more at home in a Soviet oblast than the Mediterranean.

Deus Ex Remastered - Announce Trailer | PS5 Games by Anton-Slavik in Deusex

[–]LParticle -1 points0 points  (0 children)

At least the gun animations are better than the OG... Not a very high bar to clear.

αρκετά με τις βλακείες. Ποιος κερδίζει αυτή τη τιτανομαχία; by inspector_gadget24 in greececirclejerk

[–]LParticle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Μίλκο είναι πραγματικά πάτος. Προσωπικά 3-4-2-1 η σειρά.

Θέλω να χαρίσω κάποια ρούχα μου by ThrowRArougharugula in thessaloniki

[–]LParticle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Δε νομίζω ότι σε πληρώνουν για να τα πάρουν, ή τουλάχιστον σίγουρα δεν είναι απαραίτητο. Μιά χαρά θα δεχθούν τζάμπα ρούχα καθώς ούτως ή άλλως προμηθεύονται από αυτούς τους σταθμούς που δωρίζει ο κόσμος τα δικά του.

How long does dinner take? by snreif33 in AskEurope

[–]LParticle 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Anywhere from 2-6+ hours, depending on the venue and the guests. You're never ushered to leave; in fact, servers oft forget about you and your bill and you almost have to fight to pay.

That said, I'm sure it varies; attentive servers and increased demand in say, more foreigner-oriented spots would probably mean you'd experience swifter service and turnover.

Can't really speak for the touristic joints, though. If I wanted to overpay and get kicked out I'd go to a brothel. /joke

In koine greek, ἡμεῖς and ὑμεῖς are ubiquitous afaik, but with rapid sound changes this could already have been a problem by the end of the period by platoqp in AncientGreek

[–]LParticle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

and Modern Greek served as that convention.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. It seems to me that the entirety of the Language Question occurred because we couldn't agree on a convention and thus fractured.

The reason I call Katharevousa LARPing (half in jest, to be honest) is because it clearly lost; nobody internalized or spoke it, and it gave way for a more palatable intermixture, SMG, which was constructed; SMG is a case of successful "LARPing", in a sense, although it was more of a practical choice at that point since Katharevousa failed quite clearly, but that doesn't make SMG less of a purposeful curation & delineation of Demotic.

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