As someone learning Ancient Greek, the modern iteration of the tongue often strikes me as far more
similar to… i don’t know, Italian or something, having been shaped by millennia of loanwords and the
influence of neighbouring peoples. So, what if it was just like Italian or something?
Presenting: Elinicá.
SimfonaConsonants
/m n ɲ ŋ/ ⟨m n ny~y¹~n² n⟩
/p b t d c ɟ k g/ ⟨p b t dd qui~qu²~ch³ gui~gu² c g⟩
/f v θ ð s z ç ʝ x ɣ/ ⟨f v th d s z x~c²~y⁴ j~g² ch gh⟩
/r l j/ ⟨r l y⟩
/ks/ ⟨cs~x²⟩
FonieddaVowels
/a e i o u/ ⟨a e i o u⟩
Stress is unmarked if on the antepenultimate syllable, or the first syllable of a
two-syllable word; otherwise, it is marked with an acute accent.
IposimiósisFootnotes
¹ In the word mya
² Before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩
³ After ⟨s⟩
⁴ After another consonant
An example of a plain, encyclopædic text:
O Constaddínos Caváfis itan Elinas piitís o opíos theoríte enas apó tus simaddicoterus
piités tis sinchronis epocís. Genithique qu’ezise s’tin Alecsandria, tis Egíptu j’aftó
qui’anafereti sichná os o Alecsandrinós. Dimosiefse piimata, enó decádes pareminan os
proscedia. Ta simaddicotera ergha tu, ta dimiurgise metá ta 40 eti.
And of a more conversational one:
— Ma jatí aftó meghálo misticó? I anthropi ine exipni; borún na to djaciristún.
— To atomo ine exipno. I anthropi omos ine anoita, panicovlita, epiquindina zoa, que to xeris.
Prin apó cilya peddacosia chronya, oli ixeran oti i Gi itan to queddro tu sibaddos. Prin apó
peddacosia chronya, oli ixeran oti i Gi itan epipedi, que prin apó decapédde lepta ixeres oti i
anthropi itan moni s’aftón ton planíti. [Anastenázi] Fantásu ti tha xeris avrio.
I found out from
a chain of comments
on the venerable Language Hat that the Jewish surnames Katz, Matz, and
Schatz were all originally acronyms.
Katz comes from כוהן צדקkohen tsedek “righteous priest” —
you’ll of course recognise kohen as the origin of the surname Cohen, denoting
Judaism’s paternal priestly lineage.1
Matz is similarly derived from מורה צדקmore tsedek, meaning
“teacher of righteousness”, and Schatz, the odd one out, comes from
שליח ציבורshaliaẖ tsibur, referring to a
cantor, though more literally translated as
“emissary of the congregation”.
Meanwhile, in the Russian Empire, bastard children would often have their surnames
symbolically clipped just so
noöne went around thinking they had anything to do with their aristocratic fathers. Thus
Ivan Pnin was the son of Nikolaj
Repnin, and
Elizabeta Tëmkina was the
daughter of Grigorij Potëmkin.
This isn’t a surname, but by all accounts it isn’t a given name either, and once you’ve noticed it,
you’ll never be able to unsee it. The name Jebediah does not exist.
Jedediah was a very real Biblical figure after whom many a son has been named, but
there’s no variant of any real-life person being named Jebediah with a
B. (I know what you’re thinking — but, nope, Jeb Bush’s name is… an
acronym, again, for John Ellis Bush.)
There’s this weird inconsistency in English in how we treat the names of people from cultures where
the surname comes first. Chinese and Korean people usually keep the original order:
Qian Xuesen and Bong Joon-ho are indeed from the families Qian and Bong, and it would
be quite the faux pas to refer to “Mr Joon-ho”.
Japanese names are less consistent — traditionally they’ve been flipped to conform to the English
order, so Hayao Miyazaki was born to a Mr and Mrs Miyazaki, but the trend in recent times has
been to restore them to the original order, such that the former foreign secretary officially styles
himself as Kōno Tarō, born to Kōno Yōhei.
Then, at the bottom of the ladder, there sits Hungary, whose names are so European-sounding and so
universally reordered that most people don’t even realise that, in his home country, the prime
minister is called Orbán Viktor. (This gets even more confusing with middle names — the mayor
of Budapest, known elsewhere as Gergely Szilveszter Karácsony, is natively
Karácsony Gergely Szilveszter, his given name nestled squarely in the middle!)
One last onomastic oddity. In olden days, the capital letter F was
written as if double struck, looking like two lowercase f’s put side-by-side. This was copied
and copied and misread over and over again until it became the case that some particularly snooty
English surnames were properly spelt to begin in lowercase — such as in the cases of
Gonville ffrench-Beytagh
and Charles ffoulkes. Truly, the irregularities of our language’s orthography know no bounds.
Look. Look. The world has seven jillion more pressing issues than the matter of international
toponymy. But i’ve been staring at maps for long enough that i’ve got some strong opinions, and
there’s a lot of confusion to be resolved.
First and foremost: one of the Congos is gonna have
to take one for the team. There’s no way about it. I get that “Zaïre” is kind of skunked, but at the
very least, one of them should consider making “Congo-Kinshasa” or “Congo-Brazzaville” official, to
spare us all the tyranny of having to repeat “Democratic Republic of the Congo” a thousand times
until we die.
The other main snafu of nomenclature is Dominica and
the Dominican Republic: two countries, both of which are in the Caribbean, and both of which have
the demonym “Dominican”, except stressed on different syllables. (Dominica on the -ni-, the
republic on the -mi-.) This is not tenable.
The republic is the better known Dominica, but i’m going to say it should draw the short straw here,
because it has a ready-made alternative right in the national anthem, which honours its
valiant Quisqueyans. Not only would the name “Quisqueya” put them in the élite ranks of
countries whose names start with a Q1, but it’s far more mellifluous than the other isle’s equivalent, “Waitukubuli”.
The Central African Republic might be better off
going by the Sango “Bêafrika”, too. The name worked when it was the Central African Empire, high on
Bokassa the butcher’s tinpot monarch dreams, but in a world of sixty-second attention spans, most of
the time, it’ll end up shortened to CAR and confused with a Honda Civic.
We’re getting into pettier territory now with New
Zealand, Britain’s antipodean twin2
and runt of the Anglosphere. I don’t particularly have anything against its current name, but when
the alternative is this good, that’s hardly enough! Throw off your Dutch trappings and become
Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud — culture war be damned, it rolls off the tongue like honey
from turned wood. (And, hey, you finally get a usable adjectival form.)
Lightning round! Equatorial Guinea is neither
crossed by the equator3
nor anywhere near the other two Guineas. Fix it.
South Africa means the opposite of “North Africa” is
“Southern Africa“ and is overall terribly generic. “Azania”’s the obvious pick, but historically
inaccurate at best, being the Greeks’ name for what is now the Tanzanian and Kenyan coast. Might i
suggest “Macrobia”, the opposite of Hyperborea, the semi-mythic land of the long-lived and happy at
the very tip of Africa, beyond where the Romans ever ventured?
And “United Arab Emirates” is trivially true, but
boring as sin. The worst part is there’s no compelling alternative, with the area being an
artificial conglomerate of princedoms once called the “Trucial States” because… er, they’d all
signed truces with the British Empire. 10/10 naming, bang up job, good enough, let’s all go home.
Last, the bald eagle in the room: the United States
of America, hogging the name of two entire continents all for itself in typical Yankee fashion. For
all i care, they can keep it: the alternatives are straight trash. “Usona”? “Fredonia”?
“United Statesians”?? Gods know nobody’s saying that with a straight face. Plus, it’s
really funny when people from the rest of the Americas get riled up online about people using the
word “American” for the U.S.
All that said — if they were to change, they’d do well to go back to the civil war, and start
branding themselves as “the Union”, rather than “America”. All the historical swag, none of the
cringe.
P.S. “Britain” is also ambiguous between the island and the
country, but my preferred solution there is to make Northern Ireland the republic’s problem.
Sorry, Sir Ian junior, but you’re reëntering the EU, and you’re
going to like it.
Mandarin Chinese implies the existence of Fed English and Apparatchik Russian.
It still confuses me a little why Minecraft doesn’t have a Swahili translation. It can’t be a
question of not having the will or number of speakers to do it — they’ve got Yoruba, Hawaiʻian,
hell, even Nahuātl. Is it something to do with the prefixes? (Fudging grammatical gender is one
thing, but 13 clearly distinct classes is another…)
We have a saying in the Netherlands: “Nee heb je, ja kun je krijgen.” It translates to
something like you’ve already got a no; you might as well try for a yes — it’s always
better to ask rather than stay silent.
There’s a few English phrases that are similar. Up north, shy bairns get nowt is a common
instruction from parents; across the pond, hockey player Wayne Gretzky contributed the saying
you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take to the local lexicon in a 1991 interview.
Are there any similar sayings in your neck of the woods, or your language? I’d love to hear.