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i've a general question for you guys: i don't get the whole "big picture" as far as latin and greek go. it seems so many of our words' etymologies suggest something along the lines of "from Latin xxxx from Greek yyyy"... so which came first? did they coexist? did one derive from the other? or did they each bother from the other? how different is the Greek language today from that of ancient times? someone enlighten me, pretty please =) 
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i've a general question for you guys:Not to be taken as assuming that our ladies couldn't trouble their pretty little heads thereover?
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In the beginning (more or less) was Proto Indo European, which divided up into the Indo European family of languages. Some of the branches of the family are the Germanic languages (English, German, Scandinavian languages, Dutch etc.), Slavonic languages (Russian, Polish, etc.), Italic languages (including Latin and some other languages spoken in would you believe Italy), Hellenic (Greek) languages, Hittite, Tocharian, Sanskrit and its descendants in India, Iranian languages, and some Afghan languages.
The earliest written form of Greek we have dates from the 2nd millennium BC, and was written in the Linear B syllabary. The earliest works we have using more or less the same alphabet as is used for modern Greek probably date back to about the eighth century BC (a lot of controversy about when Homer actually lived but 8th century is probably a good estimate for when his works were first written down). The alphabet they used was derived from those used for Semitic languges such as Hebrew and Phoenician, which ultimately derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Somewhat arbitrarily, the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) is taken as the dividing point between Classical Greek and Koine (common)Greek (the language of amongst others, the New Testament). Further developments were Byzantine Greek (say 4th century AD onwards) and then modern Greek (say 1453 onwards). In the Koine period all educated people would have been familiar with Classical authors and would have probably found them as easy or difficult as we do Shakespeare or the Authorised Version. One scene in the book of Captain Correlli's Mandolin which was left out of the film was where an English pilot parachuted down on the island and tried to speak to the locals in Classical Greek, which they could with some difficulty understand. I'm told that this was based on an actual incident.
Latin is an Italic language. There are inscriptions in Latin from the 6th century BC, and literature from the 3rd century BC onwards. From the 2nd century BC onwards educated Romans would also have known Greek. Many people were bilingual in Greek and Latin, and so the two languages were continually rubbing up against each other. Latin speakers often borrowed words from Greek, especially in the fields of philosophy and science. Don't forget that the Romans granted citizenship more and more freely after the time of Julius Caesar (first half of the first century BC), and so many Greeks were Romans as well.
Even after the fall of the Western Roman empire Latin was still widely used by the educated in Western Europe and with the rediscovery of Greek culture from the fourteenth century on they also borrowed from Greek. It's often uncertain whether a Greek word was borrowed directly into English or whether it came through Latin (and maybe French) first.
Bingley
Bingley
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Bingley, will you allow me to fall (not pregnant) at your feet, and feed you peeled grapes? SIGH...
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I don't think I've ever had peeled grapes. I've often wondered, how do you peel a grape?
It is the manggis (mangosteen) season at the moment, so could I put in for peeled manggis instead? The insides are delicious, but the peel contains a very strong purple dye, so to keep my clothes unpurpled ...
Bingley
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so to keep my clothes unpurpled ...
...you wear purple clothes?????????
Maybe that's not what he meant? [puzzled look-e]
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...you wear purple clothes?????????Sure...it's the color of royalty, what'd you expect?
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There is a poem written about a woman that says when she gets old, she will wear the color purple. She also says she will run a stick along the fence for the joy of the noise it will make. Does anyone know this poem? Could you post it?
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My Dear, I don't know what a mangosteen is, but for YOU I will peel anything, and serve it up as prettily as I know how. No purple on your clothes, manis.
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I know it, I have the tee-shirt, and here's a link I found: http://members.tripod.com/~Labyrinth_3/page59.htmlWhen I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves,
and satin candles, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired
and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
and run my stick along the public railings
and make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
and pick the flowers in other people's gardens
and learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
and eat three pounds of sausages at a go
or only bread and pickles for a week
and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
and pay our rent and not swear in the street
and set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple post-edit: I've been told that the way I formatted this is throwing off screen widths for some. How can I fix it?
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Ahhhhh, my maxim, my motto, indeed, my mantra!
Consider yourself warned.
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That's the one. Thank you AnnaS. I've only heard it done at the circle of stones so now I can come back to it again and again. A short story I much admire "Mr. Death and the Red-headed Woman" by Helen Eustis in the anthology "Westward the Women" is a fine story if you can find it, also done at the circle.
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I knew this had been posted before! I just didn't look far enough back, the first time, Searching on purple. Thanks, Anna--gobble allowed me to find it. Jo, I loved it then, and I love it now. http://makeashorterlink.com/?E29C4229EDIT--Ok, thanks to Keiva's post I found the site to shorten it. Even figured out that the reason the site "didn't like" the original link was that it had a space in it. [amazement e] This should narrow the screen again, though I've never had another board link widen it, since tsuwm told us to delete back to the post #. EDITof the EDIT AUGH--it didn't narrow the screen! Wail!
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Few dyes from plant xources are satisfactory.The royal purple of antiquity was derived from marine Murex snails, and so expensive only royalty could afford it, and it was forbidden to anyone else. Not until Perkin's discovery of dyes from coal tar could average people have pretty colored clothing.
T shirts colored purple from fruit will fade and just look messy. Only valuable plant color I can think of is indigo, first available in 1745.
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Never hearduvit.
But this is really good.
k
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re: Only valuable plant color I can think of is indigo, first available in 1745.
do you mean commercially available in the america's or in europe? the people of ghana (ashanti) were early (if not the first) people to have extracted indigo blue dye. they have many myths about how it was first found, basicly all involve a woman who begs the gods for cloth the color of the sky, and promises she will give anything.
she is lure into the forest, directed to collect some leaves to make a bed for her son, to lie him on it, and to build a small fire to protect him.
she lies him down, and then is taken all about the forest.. she is gone for hours, and is worried about her son..
finaly she returns, and finds her son is burning.. the blanket she laid him on, caught fire, she runs about, looking for some water, and throws it on him, but its to late. Everything is burnt, only a small scrap of cloth remains.. it smells, and it is warm, still damp from urine and the water she clutches it, an cries.. and as her salt tear touch the cloth, it turn the color of the sky.. and so the gods tell her, thank you for the gift of your first born son... -- now you know the secret.. you must take this plants, crush them, and cook them in urine, heat them, wash them, and then add salt water..
heating (or cooking) urine will give you a mild ammonia, a common solvent for plant dyes, and salt is a common mordant. the leaves, of course are indigo plants.
indigo became a cash crop in US, but i think it was introduced to the western world as europians went to west africa in search of slaves.
There is a name for one shade of purple that was made up.. since it was a shade never found in nature. (i thought it was mauve, but i checked and its not it.) it was a 'brand name' for a color extract from coal tar dyes. anyone remember?
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I've only heard it at the circle of stones
Sounds intriguingly occult, Consuelo. Is this 'show and spell' kinda thing for ladies only?
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In Bill Bryson's book, The Mother Tongue, he says it is likely that Homo Sapiens had a pretty sophisticated language capability (p. 23), but that the Neanderthals may have been more confined to things like, "I'm hungry. Let's hunt." He goes on:
It may be no more than intriguing coincidence, but the area of Cro-Magnon's cave paintings is also the area containing Europe's oldest and most mysterious ethnic group, the Basques. Their language, called Euskara by its speakers, may be the last surviving remnant of the Neolithic languages spoken in Stone Age Europe and later displaced by Indo-European tongues."
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Hi Moss, I hope you are enjoying yourself here. I was refering to something I had mentioned here before, Stone Circle. It is a place in Michigan, just north of the 45th parallel where poets, storytellers and musicians collect to perform around the fire under the summer night skies. I posted a link to the web page. Use "search" and type in Stone Circle. They have only three rules there, 1)You must know your material by heart, 2) Nothing Satanic is permitted, and 3) Nothing erotic until after midnight when all the kiddies are gone or sleeping.
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Harking back to earlier in this thread, the poem is called "Warning" and is by Jenny Joseph. Being an inveterate (and therefore probably obnoxious and unwelcome!) corrector, I feel compelled to set the record straight:
It's satin SANDALS, not candles; it's pickle, not pickles; it's beer MATS, not beer nuts!; and finally, it's practise, not practice (see thread on 100 most-often misspelled words - practise is the verb and practice is the noun).
Just can't help being a pedant....but also I LOVE the poem! what more can I say?! [apologetic-e]
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mg, I for one love pedantic correctors! (I live with one... hehehe) So, thanks for the corrections on the first three words (what is your definitive source?). However: ...practise is the verb and practice is the nounYou're joking in the spirit of the board, right? 
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old hand
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Anna my Strophe - My source is the poem as it is published in The Nation's Favourite Poems (published by the BBC and with a fwd by Griff Rhys Jones) - and that, of course, uses "practise" - because the speaker in the poem is suggesting the verb, not the noun. No, I ain't jokin'. See the thread in info about 100 most-often misspelled ww....!
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No, I ain't jokin'. See the thread ...
As my sainted mother used to say: If everyone else jumped off
a cliff, would you do it too?
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Faldage, it looks to me like a simple case of one lady asking for a source, and the other providing it.
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And what's source for the goose is source for the gander.
TEd
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TEd, you hitten the source again?
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