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907

And now, for something completely different: the etymology of English place names.

Some of our counties end in -land, especially in the North, which is pretty obvious: Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland.

Many others end in -shire (of LotR fame), which is an indigenous word for district, originating from Old English scir: Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Buckinghamshire.

Three counties in the South-East end in -sex, which comes from Old English Seaxe (Saxons). Each of these specifies a location: Essex, East; Sussex, South; and the historic county Wessex, West. There is no “Nossex”, just as there’s no North Riding of Yorkshire.

In the South-West are Dorset and Somerset. -set seems to descend from an Old English word saete, which meant simply “people” or “settlers”.

Cornwall’s name has been suggested to have originally nothing to do with either corn or walls, but rather be a fusion of a reconstructed Celtic word karnos, meaning horn (compare Latin cornu) and an Old English term wealh (foreigner). So, something to do with foreigners who had hunting- or drinking-horns, perhaps – likely an exonym.

The Isle of Wight is, surprisingly, not named for its white chalk cliffs. Rather, it’s just an evolution of its Classical name Uectis, which it bore as part of the Roman Empire. This in turn has been suggested to be a Latinisation of an unrecorded Celtic name Ixtis, meaning “nether”, ie. the most southern part of Britain.

So, what about our towns and cities?

The suffix -chester, eg. in Manchester, is rooted in the Latin castra (military camp), via Old English ceaster (city, town). Sometimes this has been otherwise mutated, such as in Lancaster or Leicester.

There are towns named after an important ford (river crossing). Sometimes their first part is the name of the river, eg. Chelmsford (the ford over the River Chelmer). Other times it’s a generic noun, like in Oxford. Towns ending in such words as -port, -castle, -field and so on are similarly obvious.

The -minster in Westminster means cathedral and derives from Latin monasterium.

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908

ευχαριστώ πολύ, ἀλλὰ τῷ ὄντι τὴν ἀρχαϊκὴν γλώῶτταν λέγω.

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909

Δασεία δε θέλει η αιτιατική; :stuck_out_tongue:

910

Χαΐ, σῶ δες.

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911

That I don’t understand hahahaha. My limit was found.

But some of the standard ones are so deeply ingrained after more than 2 decades, I wish I remembered other things as well as I remember Ancient Greek stress tone rules…

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912

Is Ancient Greek taught in Greek schools?

Or when you study the old literature, is it with books that have lots of annotations and explanations, like when we English read The Canterbury Tales?

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913

That was japanese :stuck_out_tongue:

What’s really difficult for me, I think, is not just remembering vocabulary, but the way the Greek need to use the vocabulary they just happen to have to describe all sort of concepts, where we would just use a latin loanword that already expresses exactly what we need. Something like ὡς δεῖ μιν ἀποδέξαντα βασιλέα which literally means “that he needs to ‘show’ a King” and I’m like “dude, what’s that supposed to mean? ‘to show’ can mean anything.”, but now that I can use words like ‘designate’ in English, it’s easier to express this way.

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914

Well, it depends on people’s age.
Every few years school system changes, because I guess someone needs an outlet for their creativity…
I don’t even now what is the current one, but I was taught Ancient Greek throughout high school. Our system is something like
General curriculum classes+ Classes depending on the University type you want to go (general division, think languages/ social studies, science stuff/ medicine, technical stuff.).
People who take the first branch have extra classes in Ancient Greek and also Latin.
I was in the second branch, so I took extra Math, Chemistry, Physics and Biology and extra extra Economics because I wanted to study Economics.
(note: the university you want to attend, it doesn’t mean you end up attending it)

tl;dr, most people are taught Ancient Greek at some point in high school, it depends on the time they attended. Some people can get extra classes of Ancient Greek, depending on their University choice.

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915

Well, most well-known texts are either speeches, plays/ poetry, or history books, where the writer wanted to add some flourish.

The same way with

Ὦ κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον Ἰσμήνης κάρα

It literally means “head of my sister Ismini”, but what it really means is “Ismini”. It’s poetic language.

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916

That’s interesting. In the current “comprehensive school” system in the UK, which the vast majority of people attend, there’s no teaching available whatsoever of Greek, Latin, Middle or Early Modern English, or any other ancient language.

I’m not criticising this at all, but it’s something to note.

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917

That’s the great think with loanwords, and why I love foreign languages. There’s always some language that nails it 100% and it’s a bliss to know the exact word. :wink:

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918

In Switzerland, they change every few kilometres.

Other than that, it’s similar to what you described. “Foundational classes” (L1, L2, L3, Maths, Physics, Bio, Chem, History, PE and some more) + “Focus classes” (Pick one: Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, English, Physics, Economics, Arts, Music, PE and some more).

But here, only a third, I think, of all pupils go to high school, a majority makes an apprenticeship at a company of their choice, with the option to do a vocational equivalent of A-Levels that allows them to visit a university or college.

ἆρ᾿ οἶσθ᾿ ὅ τι Ζεὺς τῶν ἀπ᾿ Οἰδίπου κακῶν
ὁποῖον οὐχὶ νῷν ἔτι ζώσαιν τελεῖ;

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919

I don’t want to express an opinion for any specific country, because it’s a very complicated issue.
In my personal opinion, proper use of the country’s contemporary language(s), basic science (math, physics, biology, chemistry) and history (both local and international) are a must, the bare minimum.
A second language, art and PE would be greatly beneficial.

I don’t think Ancient Greek in particular would be beneficial in another country, if a kid isn’t interested. I’d rather teach them history and arts and let the children find their own way.

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920

Before this whole discussion gets moved to the Language Learners’ Library, I thought I’d give an example of how much English can change over a relatively short period of time, which is why the comparative continuity of Greek seems interesting to an English-speaker. I’ve cherrypicked one of the more obscure verses from a poem I like, from the early 17th century (aka. Shakespeare’s era), called Tom o’ Bedlam – presented with modernised spelling, mind you…

The palsy plagues my pulses
When I prig your pigs or pullen,
Your culvers take, or matchless make
Your Chanticleer or Sullen.
When I want provant with Humphrey
I sup, and when benighted,
I repose in Paul’s with waking souls
Yet never am affrighted.

palsy is an obsolete word for fever.
pulses is an archaic / poet way of saying health.
prig is an obsolete word for steal.
pullen is an obsolete word for poultry.
culver is an obsolete word for dove.
“matchless make” is a poetic way of saying to take either the male or the female of a pair.
Chanticleer is an obsolete word for cock (rooster).
Sullen appears to be an obsolete word for hen, but no-one seems to really know.
provant is an obsolete word for food. Here it’s being used in a set phase provant with Humphrey, which means to go hungry.
sup is here being used in its archaic meaning of dine.
benighted is an archaic word meaning been overtaken by night.
repose is a slightly poetic word for sleep.
Paul’s is St. Paul’s Cathedral
And finally, affrighted is an archaic word for frightened

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921

Σνίκι γιου αρ! φάνυ δατ γουόζ! Γιόντα σες :stuck_out_tongue:

It was tought in middle school for three years and highschool for two years, unless you went on the “direction” of lingustics and philology which meant that you did ancient Greek and Latin on your last year as well. Yeah, that means that I was tought FIVE years of ancient Greek and I was horrible at them, but that stands true for most of us. Being a language teacher requires a modicum of passion and talent and most school teachers lack that. Before I ever got to university (were I pulled some pretty wild studying sprees that were tiring), the ancient Greek class at 8 o’clock in the morning was the only class that I actually fell asleep at school.
I was in the front row too and the teacher did not notice … talk about teaching passion :roll_eyes:

Howoever, what is impressive is that once - around 1993-1996 - in middle school some very very interesting ancient texts were in the curriculum. Mostly in translation, but still it was impressive that a 14 year old was being tought at school “Timon the Athenean” and the “Dialogues of the dead” by Lucian of Samosata (personally I called them “deadly dialogues” because some of those one-liners were “killers” :stuck_out_tongue: ). Those are some very deep and cynical texts and I applaud the people that decided to print them and give them to kids to read at school.

In the gradual process of watering down of everything those texts are gone now from the curriculum, but not forgotten :slight_smile:

P.S.
I got off topic, since a mod was already called to tidy things up and/or ban us :innocent:

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922

Hahaha I always consider our 12-18 years school as “high school” altogether, I never use “middle school” for the first one, maybe “junior high” when it was a thing in TV series*. We can’t even agree between us. :stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue:

Well, we are taught stuff considered “classics”, so mostly everything taught is deep and/ or meaningful in some way.

(*I mean in English, I use our proper terms in Greek.)

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923

Well, I would have called our middle school “γυμνάσιο”/“gymnasium” like we do here, but people like @Sanonius that are actually being taught ancient Greek might take things literally and think that we go to school naked :stuck_out_tongue:

I still do not know why we call it like that … kids have clothes in Greece, damn it :sunglasses:

Oh, there are a lot of words that are “lost” like that or are very very obscure … a very old school teacher here is a linguist of sorts and he is writting a book on the matter called “Lexignosia”/Λεξιγνωσία or “knowledge of words” if one was to translate that neologism in English. I am helping him typeset the book since he is so old that he has no clue about computers and in that process I have learned about a lot of ancient Greek words that serve as “roots” for modern words.
Indeed the modern language stands on some very solid ground set by the ancients, which is why it seems to change in a slower manner.

For example, there is an ancient root/word for the word “stone” named “Λας” … noone uses that today, but a quarry in modern Greek is still called a Λα-τομίο, which literally means “a place where you cut stones” (Λας = rock/stone + τομή = cut).

Or the word “άρουρα” which means earth/the ground … it is used in Homer when, if I remember correctly, Achilles calls himself “άχθος αρούρης” = a weight upon the earth, which is a poetic way to say that he was totally useless.
Well, noone uses the word άρουρα to describe the ground anymore, but the word for the ground rat is still “αρουραίος” which literally means something “of the ground”/“that lives in/on the ground”

It is all so very interesting. I wish school included fun things like that …
If you’d like I could send it to you in pdf once it is ready … we are in the last proof-reading process at the moment and it is 100 pages of quite good linguistic analysis with some occassional hypothetical linguistic gymnastics, but they still make a lot of sense and are very educative.

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924

No worries, we call it Gymnasium too, and so does most of Europe.

What you do sounds really interesting!

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925

Sure, that’d be nice. I won’t be able to get any use of it now, but in a few years perhaps :smiley:

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926

I just remembered that when I said that Latin nouns don’t end in -e in the nominative singular, that wasn’t true, because there’s mare (sea).