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cmw
cmw
12:23 AM
@Adam This is because it goes back to a two-termination Greek adjective ἄτομος. Greek adjectives that begin with the privative a- or an- only have 2nd declension forms. Besides atomos, the same is true for atheos (ἄθεος), anarchos (ἄναρχος), etc.
I think most compound adjectives are two-termination, and there are a handful of other ones that aren't compounds.
The neat thing is that it's a true relic of PIE, and I virtually all other IE languages lost this feature (thus Sihler §339).
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
1:00 AM
@cmw I wouldn't know of any exceptions? Are there any?
The question is, what noun substantive gave ἄτομος its feminine gender?
@cmw That is pretty cool!
I wonder why that happened, though. It has always made very little sense to me.
 
Adam
Adam
1:11 AM
I also wonder why it didn't shift to being masculine, anyway. Without being told so, one would think that people mistaking it for masculine would become more common until it just became masculine.
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
I'm not sure how often that happens with Greek loans in Latin.
Literary authors are often very careful.
And I think this word was little used by the common man.
 
Adam
Adam
True.
I wonder if languages change faster or slower in cultures where there's lower literacy
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Hard to say, but I would expect faster: literacy helps people connect to their traditions.
 
cmw
cmw
1:55 AM
@Cerberus I'd have to look it up to be sure.
@Adam Learned borrowings follow their source languages more closely than vulgar borrowings.
@Cerberus Ope! Exactly as Cerberus said it.
@Cerberus I think you're right, too. Latin was fairly conservative for the several hundred years there was an active literary scene, but rapidly changed to the Romance languages once the western half of the empire fell.
Meanwhile, modern Greek is more conservative, because they lost their centers of learning much, much later (when the Ottomans conquered Byzantium).
There's a reason that Sumerian was a literary language for thousands of years.
 
Adam
Adam
I guess we just need to make Latin the literary language again. :)
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
2:10 AM
@cmw Yeah. The lower registers did change faster while Rome still ruled the world, though.
@cmw I would say the Greeks in Asia Minor probably never lost their literary tradition until perhaps fairly shortly before, or after, the formation of modern Greece? And around that time a larger proportion of the population could probably read, so it depends on how we define literacy: I'm sure they still wrote and read newspapers in Greek even when very few new novels came out.
Then again, I'm not quite sure to what extent New Greek was influenced by the traditions of those Greeks who remained on the Greek mainland.
I also believe there was continuous contact between the Greek mainland, the islands, and Asia Minor from Antiquity up to the expulsion of the Greeks, and to a small degree even now?
 
cmw
cmw
@Cerberus These are good questions that I have no answer to, as I'm not a modern historian!
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
I'm more into ancient history myself as well.
And I didn't learn much about the history of post-antique Greece in my history programme.
I do know many places on the mainland were almost depopulated sometime before the formation of modern Greece, like Athens, while many Greeks remained in Asia minor.
Although "depopulated" is perhaps a strong word: around 5000 people still lived in Athens when modern Greece was established.
View from the Acropolis in 1874.
Frankish Tower (Acropolis of Athens)
The Frankish Tower was a medieval tower built on the Acropolis of Athens by the Franks as part of the palace of the Dukes of Athens. It was demolished by the Greek authorities in 1874, on the initiative and with funding from Heinrich Schliemann. == Location and appearance == The tower was situated on the western corner of the Acropolis, next to the Propylaea, but probably did not communicate directly with them, as paintings and photographs from the 19th century show the entrance above ground, on the tower's eastern face at the second-floor level, some 6 metres (20 ft) above the architrave of the...
> Athens experienced its second period of explosive growth following the disastrous Greco-Turkish War in 1921, when more than a million Greek refugees from Asia Minor were resettled in Greece
> ...thousands of Asia Minor Greek families settled in Athens and the population of the city doubled.
 
Adam
Adam
2:45 AM
Fascinating, I had no idea Athens had been reduced to such a small size
 
Cerberus
Cerberus
Tragic, huh?
Mainland Greece was a fairly thinly populated backwater for a long time, until after Greek independence from the Turks.
I think Rome went from a million people during the reign of Augustus to forty thousand some time after the Empire had fallen.
Scattered over various smallish 'villages' within the former city's boundaries, like on each of the seven hills.
With many ruins in between, of course.
But, in the dark ages of western Europe, that was still a large city, and one with significant influence also because of the papal court, which always remained.
 
 
2 hours later…
cmw
cmw
4:40 AM
@Adam Rome too numbered in thousands in the middle ages, though not as bad as Athens. Athens, though, had never been as big as Rome was. What's crazy is that Athens is now more populous than Rome.
 

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