3 ms·

This is more like it! Still, that inscription seems to have vowel harmony, and the uruk-hai text doesn't ("gimbatul", "krimpatul"). Oh well, it's fantasy after

This is more like it! Still, that inscription seems to have vowel harmony, and the uruk-hai text doesn't ("gimbatul", "krimpatul"). Oh well, it's fantasy after all. Also, re: food: "dolmades"! :-) The interesting thing about words like "karpouzi" is that again, the o and i don't harmonize because the former is a low vowel, and the latter is a high vowel, and that's a pretty strong clue that it's been changed, because there are very few if any words in Turkish that don't follow vowel harmony. We say "karpuz". Then again, who knows who had it first and who changed it after! :P

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
Aw, dolmades, how did I leave that out :D I didn't know about vowel harmony, but it seems we have many, many words from Turkish in Greek that are just the Turkish word with an "-i" stuck at the end: pasoumi, ati, ginati, gieri ("gut", from cigeri), kapaki, kaloupi etc etc. I guess that just brings the sound of the word more in line with what we're used to in the rest of the Greek language. In Greek we don't have the long-"u" that Turkish has (incidentally, that long "u" sounds very similar to the French "u" to me, French being my second language) so we basically change it to the shorter, rounder "ou", hence "karpouzi" instead of "karpuz". Sometimes we just shorten and round-out an "o" sound also: we say "boudroumi", for "dungeon", coming from "bodrum" I reckon (the old joke is that "Boudroumia & Baboules" is the Greek version of "Dungeons & Dragons"; I don't know if "baboulas" comes from Turkish- it means "bogeyman"). It's funny because not speaking Turkish I have no idea what some of those words really mean, or how they 're pronounced in Turkish, or even sometimes if they're actually Turkish at all. I know that, to my ears they sound not quite Greek, and I can't really figure out their meaning, so they're probably loan words and therefore most likely Turkish (although there have to be plenty that come from Albanian). I quite like that btw, hope you don't want them all back now :P

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

Aw, dolmades, how did I leave that out :D I didn't know about vowel harmony, but it seems we have many, many words from Turkish in Greek that are just the Turkish word with an "-i" stuck at the end: pasoumi, ati, ginati, gieri ("gut", from cigeri), kapaki, kaloupi etc etc. I guess that just brings the sound of the word more in line with what we're used to in the rest of the Greek language. In Greek we don't have the long-"u" that Turkish has (incidentally, that long "u" sounds very similar to the French "u" to me, French being my second language) so we basically change it to the shorter, rounder "ou", hence "karpouzi" instead of "karpuz". Sometimes we just shorten and round-out an "o" sound also: we say "boudroumi", for "dungeon", coming from "bodrum" I reckon (the old joke is that "Boudroumia & Baboules" is the Greek version of "Dungeons & Dragons"; I don't know if "baboulas" comes from Turkish- it means "bogeyman"). It's funny because not speaking Turkish I have no idea what some of those words really mean, or how they 're pronounced in Turkish, or even sometimes if they're actually Turkish at all. I know that, to my ears they sound not quite Greek, and I can't really figure out their meaning, so they're probably loan words and therefore most likely Turkish (although there have to be plenty that come from Albanian). I quite like that btw, hope you don't want them all back now :P