Greek Noun Research Articles

Some Linguistic Aspects of the Term “Statistics”

The origin of the word “Statistics” is mistakenly sought in the Latin word “Status”. Although the term is indeed etymologically linked to “Status”, it is derived from the Greek noun “Στατός” (statos), meaning standing.

ERIS: A WORDPLAY IN CATULLUS 40

Abstract In poem 40, through a series of rhetorical questions, Catullus confronts Ravidus about what made him commit such a foolish action as to fall in love with Catullus’ own lover. The poem ends with the lines: eris, quandoquidem meos amores | cum longa uoluisti amare poena, ‘You will be, since you have chosen to love my lover at the risk of receiving a long punishment’. There is a long-standing tradition of scholarship which testifies to the frequency with which Catullus incorporates wordplay in his poems, including bilingual puns. This essay proposes another such pun by arguing that Catullus is making a play on words through the homophony of the Latin verb eris and the Greek noun ἔρις.

Grammatical gender correspondence between French, Greek, and Spanish nouns

Analyzing the extent to which grammatical gender corresponds between languages contributes to an understanding of language processing in the multilingual mind and guides teaching and learning methods. The present study provides a perspective on this by examining the bilingual and trilingual grammatical gender correspondence between nouns of two Romance languages, French and Spanish, and Greek. Here, correspondence refers to any combination of genders for nouns of the same meaning in translation. The samples considered comprise frequently spoken nouns, nouns of similar ending, and loan nouns of similar pronunciation. Computations involve Greek nouns in singular nominative with and without neuter, the latter to eliminate the handicap of two grammatical genders in French and Spanish compared to three genders in Greek. The results reveal that bilingual and trilingual feminine similarity is considerably greater than masculine similarity, and more so for loan nouns than for frequently spoken nouns. This is because Greek neuter corresponds primarily to French and Spanish masculine, owing mainly to neuter becoming masculine in modern Romance languages. A consideration of semantics with respect to abstractness and concreteness show that noun endings as well as semantics play a significant role in interlanguage gender correspondence between French, Greek, and Spanish.

Um estudo de caso sobre o uso do artigo em inscrições dialetais gregas

This paper aims at discussing the usage of the definite article with common nouns in Ancient Greek (AG), based on a case-study of the noun ἡμέραις (hēmerais/day.dat.pl) in epigraphic inscriptions. We propose that the use of the article in the inscriptions can be accounted for by the grammaticalization of identifiability (Lyons, 1999). Given that the article appeared in AG through the grammaticalization of the demonstrative (Roberts; Roussou, 2003), we postulate that its use began as a marker for contexts in which the referents of the nouns were identifiable by their description. Diachronically, and during the time span of our corpus (containing inscriptions from V BC to III AD), the language has formalized some contexts as arthrous, to be marked as definite – starting from the prototypically identifiable ones –, and some as anarthrous. Namely, anaphoric nouns or nouns modified by qualifying adjuncts are always arthrous, even when the referent is not properly identifiable, while quantifying adjuncts occur with nouns that are anarthrous. Consequently, the distribution of the presence and absence of article did not happen evenly throughout the variants of AG: only Gortyn’s dialect marks with an article nouns that do not have either a qualifying modifier or anaphor, but only quantification. The first section presents the studies on the definiteness of AG. The second section discusses instances in which the nominal heads have modifiers. The third section analyses the occurrences in which the noun is arthrous only with a cardinal number as modifier, and the fourth gathers the conclusion of the analysis.

(206) Proposal to guide the choice among grammatical forms in epithets with uncertain grammatical status

(206) Proposal to guide the choice among grammatical forms in epithets with uncertain grammatical status

Zero-Derived Nouns in Greek

In this paper, we investigate zero-derived nouns based on irregular verbs in Greek. This is an under-explored area in Greek morpho-syntax, and in this paper, we will make three main contributions. First, we will discuss the fact that the overwhelming majority of these nouns are feminine, while neuter nouns are considerably less represented and masculine nouns are almost nonexistent. As feminine is taken to be the semantically marked gender in the case of animate nouns, asserting female sex, and neuter is argued to be the default gender in Greek for inanimates, the fact that zero abstract nouns are feminine is surprising. We will argue that feminine is the default in the case of zero derivation by exploiting an analysis of flavors of n. Second, we will show that, contrary to the findings in earlier literature, certain zero-derived nouns do have argument structure, similarly to their affixed counterparts. As not all zero-derived nouns have argument structure, we will appeal to complex head formation to explain the properties of those zero-derived nouns that have an eventive interpretation but do not surface with arguments. Finally, we will turn to an examination of the size of the domain that is nominalized. Since, in our cases, we observe root allomorphy conditioned by a nominal affix in the presence of a zero verbal head, we will suggest that Pruning is the mechanism that allows this.

Griechisch ὄνθος – eine Etymologie und ihre ritualökologische Grundlage

The Greek noun ὄνθος has thus far defied a satisfactory etymological explanation. The semantics, despite the everything but abundant attestation of the lexeme, have been uncontroversial, and are traditionally assumed to be ‚manure‘. But in an article published in 1994, György Németh showed that the meaning must have been ‚excrement and waste from the processing of sacrificed animals‘. Based on the semantics as specified by Németh, the present article proposes a new etymology for ὄνθος by connecting it with Hittite andaka- ‚loins, lower body parts‘ and ultimately deriving it from Proto-Indo-European *h1n̥dh- ‚below‘ (as in Sanskrit adhás ‚below‘), thereby contributing to the exact phonological reconstruction of the latter.

The concept and activity of ‘obedience’ in the Gospel of John

The concept and activity of obedience can be regarded as fundamental to human existence as well as to Christian religion. The focus of this study was to investigate the occurrence of this concept in the Gospel of John. Of the two well-known Greek nouns ὑπακοή and ἀπειθέω (translated as ‘obedience’), and the two related verbs ὑπακούω and ἀπειθέω (translated as ‘obedient’), only ἀπειθέω occurs once (3:36) in the Gospel of John. The verb τηρέω has been used several times and not consistently translated because of diverse literary contexts. The objective of this study was to point out how the Gospel of John is filled with the obedience concept and how it was implied from different perspectives. The following themes associated with obedience will be discussed: (1) obedience to God as Father, (2) the essence of obedience – to love, (3) various expressions of obedience, (4) the ability to obey, (5) Christian obedience is to become like Jesus and (6) the rewards of being obedient.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The concept and activity, ‘obedience’, are understood as a virtue fundamental to human existence, as well as fundamentally essential and important for the Christian religion. This article investigates the occurrence of ‘obedience’ in the Gospel of John. To experience God’s blessings and enjoy God’s communion, God should be obeyed.

Asymmetric Morphological Priming Among Inflected and Derived Verbs and Nouns in Greek.

The present study examined differences between inflectional and derivational morphology using Greek nouns and verbs with masked priming (with both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony) and long-lag priming. A lexical decision task to inflected noun and verb targets was used to test whether their processing is differentially facilitated by prior presentation of their stem in words of the same grammatical class (inflectional morphology) or of a different grammatical class (derivational morphology). Differences in semantics, syntactic information, and morphological complexity between inflected and derived word pairs (both nouns and verbs) were minimized by unusually tight control of stimuli as permitted by Greek morphology. Results showed that morphological relations affected processing of morphologically complex Greek words (nouns and verbs) across prime durations (50–250ms) as well as when items intervened between primes and targets. In two of the four experiments (Experiments 1 and 3), inflectionally related primes produced significantly greater effects than derivationally related primes suggesting differences in processing inflectional versus derivational morphological relations, which may disappear when processing is less dependent on semantic effects (Experiment 4). Priming effects differed for verb vs. noun targets with long SOA priming (Experiment 3), consistent with processing differences between complex words of different grammatical class (nouns and verbs) when semantic effects are maximized. Taken together, results demonstrate that inflectional and derivational relations differentially affect processing complex words of different grammatical class (nouns and verbs). This finding indicates that distinctions of morphological relation (inflectional vs. derivational) are not of the same kind as distinctions of grammatical class (nouns vs. verbs). Asymmetric differences among inflected and derived verbs and nouns seem to depend on semantic effects and/or processing demands modulating priming effects very early in lexical processing of morphologically complex written words, consistent with models of lexical processing positing early access to morphological structure and early influence of semantics.

Θηλυκά επαγγελματικά της αρχαίας ελληνικής: επιθηματοποίηση, παραγωγικότητα και γλωσσικές ιδεολογίες

This paper aims to examine the suffixation of feminine professional nouns in Ancient Greek and the productivity degree of their suffixes. To achieve this aim, it exploits data drawn from grammars (Οικονόμου 1971, van Emde Boas et al. 2019), reverse lexicons (Kretschmer & Locker [1944] 1977, Buck & Petersen [1945] 1984) and the LSJ lexicon. The research results show that the majority of these nouns were formed with feminine suffixes, whilst only a small number was using the masculine form. This tendency is discussed diachronically (from Ancient to Modern Greek) considering the effects of morphological changes and language ideologies.

Assignment of Grammatical Gender in Heritage Greek.

This study investigates the acquisition of grammatical gender in Heritage Greek as acquired by children (6–8 years of age) and adolescents (15–18 years) growing up in Adelaide, South Australia. The determiner elicitation task from Varlokosta (2005) was employed to assess the role of morphological and semantic cues when it comes to gender assignment for real and novel nouns. Ralli’s (1994) inflectional classes for Greek nouns and Anastasiadi-Symeonidi and Cheila-Markopoulou’s (2003) categories of prototypicality were employed in the analysis of the collected data. The performance of heritage speakers was compared to that of monolingual speakers from Greece (Varlokosta, 2011). The results indicate that–beyond age differences in the two groups–a formal phonological rule guides gender assignment in the production of heritage speakers which departs from initial expectations.

The interpretation of plural mass nouns in Greek

This paper focuses on the interpretation of what has been considered an expletive marker in the grammar of the Greek nominal domain: the plural number of mass nouns. We present the results of an experimental investigation on the interpretation of plural mass nouns by native speakers of this language, and we propose a speech act analysis according to which at the time of producing utterances that contain plural mass nouns the speaker performs two speech acts: an assertion and an expressive speech act by which (s)he publicly commits to an emotive stance of dislike towards the expressed proposition φ. This stance is analyzed as an emotive judgment with respect to φ, the expression of which directly transfers the speaker's emotion from the conversation into the speaker and addressee's common ground.

“The Messengers are Called Sangandai”: the Greek σαγγάνδης and its Relationship to ἀσγάνδης/ ἀστάνδης

This article examines the Greek noun σαγγάνδης ‘messenger’ which is attested in two lexica, dated to the Roman or early Byzantine periods: the Cambridge Rhetorical Lexicon by an anonymous author and Difficult Words in the Attic Orators by Claudius Casilo. In both works, σαγγάνδης appears together with three words of likely Iranian provenance: ὀροσάγγης ‘benefactor of the Persian king; bodyguard’, παρασάγγης ‘parasang; messenger’ and ἄγγαρος ‘messenger, courier; workman, labourer’. The word σαγγάνδης is analysed in comparison with ἀσγάνδης/ ἀστάνδης ‘messenger’ occurring for the first time in Plutarch’s works and closely linked to the Achaemenid administration. According to the hypothesis put forward in the present paper, both σαγγάνδης and σγάνδης (with its secondary variant στάνδης) are connected to Manichaean Middle Persian/Parthian ižgand ‘messenger’, Sogdian (a)žγand/(ɔ) žγand/ž(i)γant ‘id.’, Jewish Aramaic ʾîzgaddā ‘id.’, Syriac izgandā/izgaddā ‘id.’, Mandaic ašganda ‘helper, assistant, servant; the Messenger’, and go back to Old Persian *zganda- or to early Middle Persian/early Parthian *žgand- (or *zgand-) with the original meaning ‘mounted messenger’. The reconstructed noun is derived from the Proto-Iranian root *zga(n)d- ‘to go on, gallop, mount’, attested in Avestan (Younger Avestan zgaδ(/θ)- ‘to go on horseback, gallop’) and in some Middle and Modern Iranian languages. The original form of the loanword in Greek was probably *σγάνδης which then underwent certain transformations.

The Age of Πειθανάγκη. A Note on Remembrance and Reinvention of Ancient Words under the Komnenoi

The article focuses on the historical semantics of the Greek noun πeιθανάγκη. It is a postclassical creation with the earliest attestation in Polybius and the earliest conscious usage as an oxymoron in Cicero. In Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium it occurs rarely and means “coercion” or “extortion”—a device used by those in power to force their will under the pretense of giving their victims freedom of choice. This meaning became proverbial and found its way into modern dictionaries. After a long period of dormancy, the word became popular under the Komnenoi, but the shades of meaning changed drastically. Whereas initially the compound derived its meaning from its second part (ἀνάγκη), in the 12th century the stress shifted to the first element (πeιθ-) and the idea of a half-hinted-at threat of violence gave place to deception or bewitchment. As a practical device, some writers placed πeιθανάγκη within the domain of rhetoric; others, within that of syllogistic reasoning. In the rarest cases πeιθανάγκη was associated with the highest philosophy and Platonic truth. It is worth noting that these texts are specimen of Manuel I Komnenos’ imperial propaganda. The survey ends with a discussion of the subversive πeιθανάγκη as an essential characteristic of Emperor Andronikos Komnenos in Niketas Choniates’ History.

Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought: The Beginning of All Things by Joseph Torchia

Reviewed by: Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought: The Beginning of All Things by Joseph Torchia S.J. Joseph T. Lienhard TORCHIA, Joseph. Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought: The Beginning of All Things. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2019. xxxiv + 228 pp. Cloth, $95.00 A sentence like "Greek philosophers held that the world existed eternally, while Jews and Christians held that God created the world out of nothing" has surely been spoken in countless undergraduate classes in philosophy or theology. Joseph Torchia, in his book on creation in early patristic thought, shows that the matter was far more complex on both the Greek and the Christian sides. A few classic passages, cited over and over, form the basis for the discussion. On the Greek side, Plato, in the Timaeus, wrote of a Demiurge who was the "Maker and Father" of the whole, a passage that was sometimes interpreted (even by pagans) as implying a creation of sorts. In the same work, Plato wrote of the Receptacle, the "Nurse of all Becoming," which is some kind of primal stuff. These passages were discussed endlessly by later philosophers. On the biblical side, two texts were key. The obvious one was Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The other was 2 Maccabees 7:28, words that the mother of the seven sons spoke to her last son after the other six had been killed at the order of King Antiochus for refusing to eat pork: "I beseech you, my son, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed"—or, in another possible translation, "God made them out of things that did not exist" (RSV). This text contains the phrase that was crucial to Christian teaching on creation, "out of what was not"—in the Greek of the Septuagint, ouk ex ontôn (later expressed as ex ouk ontôn). Torchia's book is a search for the point in the development of early Christian thought at which "creation out of nothing" was clearly and unequivocally understood and affirmed. Few of the terms employed by ancient authors on this topic can be understood univocally. Torchia rightly supplies Greek terms freely in the course of his exposition. For example, Greek nouns of agency like poiêtês, ktistês, or dêmiourgos recur over and over. To translate these words as if their meaning were obvious begs the question. Surely, "Father" has [End Page 628] different senses in the Timaeus and in the New Testament. As Torchia shows, it is a mistake even to assume that these terms had the same clarity of meaning in pre-Nicene Christian writers—even in Origen—that they (supposedly) have in fourth-century creeds and in expositions of the creeds. Torchia's book is clearly and carefully structured. In the first part of the book, he engages the two poles of the subsequent development: the scriptural point of departure and Plato's teaching on cosmic origins. Then, in an extended treatment, he passes through the complex and shadowy world of Middle Platonism. The second part of Torchia's book deals with the first and early second centuries—that is, with Philo Judaeus and the Apostolic Fathers. Philo assumed the consonance of the creation narratives in Genesis with the Timaeus, an assumption that had profound consequences, positive and negative, for later Christian development. In the third and most important part of the book, Torchia traces the evolution and elaboration of the doctrine of creation in several pre-Nicene Christian writers: the apologists Justin Martyr, Athenagoras of Athens, Tatian the Syrian, and Theophilus of Antioch, and the Alexandrian theologians Clement and Origen. Inevitably, this history is seen as the move to a predetermined goal, namely, a clear understanding and formulation of creation "out of nothing," ex nihilo or ex ouk ontôn. The path was a complex one. One sticking point was inevitably the haunting suspicion of some substrate, some preexisting chaos or primal matter that God might shape or give intelligibility to. These authors were making tentative steps toward clarifying...

ГРЕЦЬКИЙ СЛОВОТВІР: ОСОБЛИВОСТІ СУФІКСАЦІЇ

The article analyzes the main features of the affixation as one of the ways of the Greek word formation, of suffixation in particular. In order to reveal the complete historical picture concerning the processes of appearance or loss of specific suffixes, besides the synchronic, the diachronic approach was used in the work. Firstly, the history of the development of linguistic traditions of the Greek language is mentioned, the main theoretical concepts are defined, such as: a word-forming type as the main classification unit of a word-forming paradigm, a word-forming meaning and a word-forming category. The Greek suffixes were divided into two types: those that add an emotional tone to the word (diminutive, augmentative), and give a new meaning to the word. Diminutive suffixes are are of substantival and adjective nature, while augmentative suffixes might also be added to the verb bases. It is noted that the augmentatives are used exclusively in masculine and feminine genders, while diminutives are used in three genders (of which the neuter prevails). Suffixes of the second type transfer the creative basis into another grammatical category, changing the meaning. In the system of Modern Greek nouns several word-forming categories were singled out, on the basis of which word-forming models and meanings of suffixal derivatives are demonstrated. Adjective suffixation is briefly examined. The most common verb and adverb suffixes are listed. The main data on the Greek suffixation are systematized in the article: the general features of MG suffixes, the main differences between the features of AG and MG suffixations, the evolution of MG suffixation is analyzed on the basis of four types of suffixes, the borrowed MG suffixes are classified by origin.

Indo-European syntax in disguise

Abstract The Greek noun suffix -ευς is analyzed as a hypostatic u-stem formation based on an instrumental in *-eh₁- with close cognates in Lithuanian -ius and Armenian -oyt‘ < *-eh1u-ti-. Thus the type reflects the inherited predicative use of the instrumental case also known from the Old Indic cvi-constructions and the Latin type rubefaciō.

Topic Strategies and the Internal Structure of Nominal Arguments in Greek and Italian

In this article, we argue that a set of unexpected contrasts in the interpretation of clitic-left-dislocated indefinites in Greek and Italian derive from structural variation in the nominal syntax of the two languages. Greek resists nonreferential indefinites in clitic left-dislocation, resorting to the topicalization of an often bare noun for nonreferential topics. By contrast, clitic left-dislocation is employed in Italian for topics regardless of their definite/indefinite interpretation. We argue that this contrast is directly linked to the wide availability of bare nouns in Greek, which stems from a structural difference in the nominal syntax of the two languages. In particular, we hypothesize that Greek nominal arguments lack a D layer. Rather, they are Number Phrases. We situate this analysis in the context of Chierchia’s (1998) typology of nominals. We argue that, on a par with Italian nouns, Greek nouns are [−arg, +pred]. However, they do not employ a syntactic head (D) for type-shifting to e . Rather, they resort to covert type-shifting, a hypothesis that is necessary to account for the distribution and interpretations of bare nouns in Greek, vis-à-vis other [−arg, +pred] languages like Italian and French.

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Across languages, plural marking on count nouns typically gives rise to a multiplicity inference, indicating that the noun ranges over sums with a cardinality of 2 or more. Plural marking has also been observed to occur on mass nouns in Greek and a few other languages, giving rise to a parallel abundance inference, indicating that there is a lot of the relevant substance. It has been observed in the literature that both of these inferences disappear in downward-entailing environments, such as when a plural appears in the scope of negation (Tsoulas 2009; Kane et al. 2015). There are two main competing approaches in the literature that aim to account for the described pattern with respect to multiplicity inferences: the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and the implicature approach (Sauerland 2003; Spector 2007; Mayr 2015, among others). As discussed in Tieu et al. (2018), while both approaches can account for the upward- versus downward-entailing pattern of multiplicity inferences, they differ in what they predict with respect to the acquisition of these inferences and their relationship with implicatures. Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) investigated multiplicity inferences in English and reported evidence for the implicature approach. In this paper, we first show how the ambiguity approach and the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference can be extended to account for the abundance inference. We then report on an experiment that tests the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity and abundance inferences in preschool-aged children and adult native speakers of Greek. Our results replicate the patterns reported in Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) for multiplicity inferences, and crucially reveal an analogous pattern for abundance inferences. Adults computed both kinds of inferences more in upward-entailing environments than in downward-entailing ones, and children computed fewer inferences overall than adults did. These results reflect an overall pattern of implicature calculation in line with a unified implicature analysis across the three kinds of inferences. By contrast, we discuss how they pose a challenge for the ambiguity approach.

Transgendered and re-flected borrowed Greek nouns in anatomical Latin.

In this survey, almost 30 borrowed words in anatomical Latin were found to differ from the original Greek noun in gender and/or inflection. A third of these cases were judged to be errors. The rest are long-standing or widely-accepted exceptions to the usual adoption rules for borrowed Greek words. Possible linguistic explanations for these exceptions are presented. Clin. Anat. 31:306-309, 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.