January 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 296 other subscribers
Category: Culture
Is the bible just a history book or is there more to it than that?
Are they all not just history books concluding to have some moral message to help us live our lives? Because if this is true, then life should be put first before religions. And nobody should take a life of a preacher or one dedicated in a path to understand religion. It’s secondary is it not? […]
Epictetus, Discourses I 1
Well, I don’t know if this is a good idea at all. But this is one of my favourite passages of Ancient Greek. Rendered in GoAnimate, with pseudo-Laurence Olivier Text-To-Speech. Epictetus, Discourses I 1, in the Loeb Oldfather translation from 1925.
Book Review: Ismail Kadare, The H File
The good thing about being confined to a chair in the sky is, you can catch up with your reading, because internet connectivity has not yet made it to Cattle Class. So I finally have been able to catch up on reading a book I was given for my birthday 14 months ago. Having internet […]
The Authority of Nasrudin
I’ve just posted at The Other Place on Nasrudin, the Muslim comic hero whose stories also pervade Greece and Cyprus. I finished my post there with a Nasrudin joke from Wikipedia, which I chose to render in Ancient Greek (and in the process forget the declension of “this”.) Here’s the joke again: A neighbour comes […]
Summer Glau’s Uncanny Valley
No, I’m not referring to a TV actress’ cleavage. In truth, I don’t even know whether Summer Glau has a cleavage. No, I’m talking about the robot she portrayed on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (A post on a TV show?! Well, this is the personal blog, not the linguistics one.) I don’t much watch […]
Look for Etymologies on the Tiber
The Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog (to take a break from the problematic of Canada and go back to matters Hellenic) has recently unearthed the origin of that fine Greek apophthegm, πᾶς μὴ Ἕλλην βάρβαρος, “anyone not Greek is a barbarian”. (Which was in fact the original definition of barbarian.) The sentence is absent from Greek […]
Chioniades and Wilbour Hall
Our story’s not about him, really, but in the Year Of Our Lord 1295, Gregory Chioniades [Bio Enc Astronom, Wikipedia] went from Trebizond to Tabriz, to learn astronomy at the feet of the Persian masters. When he got there, he set about translating the Arabic Zīj al‐ʿAlāʾī under Shams al‐Dīn al‐Bukhārī. We’re reasonably sure he […]
The Ibycus mainframe
In re: TLG: Ibycus The Ibycus computer was what Thesaurus Linguae Graecae data crunching got done on throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It was the stuff of legend, an HP 1000 customised in David Packard Jr.‘s garage, with spelling and format checkers and text editors in assembler, that crunched through tens of millions of words […]
Pseudo-Chrysostom: Catechetical sermon on Easter
Leafing through the Holy Synopsis (the summary of movable feast services), I find that in leaving on the dot when John Damascene’s Canon started for offal and eggs, I had also been missing out on a lovely sermon by John Chrysostom, wedged in after the bible readings. The Synopsis groused that the sermon was intended […]
Good Saturday Tomato Soup
So yes, I don’t know what the Anglo-Catholic for Good Saturday is. It’s simpler in Orthodoxy, where each day of Holy Week is Great: Great Monday, Great Tuesday, Great Wednesday. And each day of Holy Week matters: Orthodoxy has a well-ordered liturgical calendar around Holy Week. The Office of the Bridegroom on Great Monday, the […]