LAILAPS
Micheal Palmer
mwpalmer at earthlink.net
Sat Aug 29 23:14:56 EDT 1998
At 3:39 AM -0000 8/28/98, Micheal Palmer wrote:
>At 12:24 PM -0000 8/27/98, Adam, Professor AKM wrote:
>>Colleagues,
>>
>>Doesn't the problem arise from our having a technical definition for
>>"hurricane" that would have been inaccessible & irrelevant to our Greek
>>sources?
>
>Yes. I suspect strongly that this explains the broad use of LAILAPS in
>ancient Greek (Classical and Hellenistic), but it still seems a bit strange
>that LAILAPS would take on the specific meaning 'hurricane' in modern
>Greek. Do we have any modern Greek speakers on the list who would care to
>comment. Is the term really as specific as my dictionary claims?
>
I have three native Greek speakers in my Attic Greek class, so I posed this
question to them today. One answered that he could not think of any word in
modern Greek which meant specifically what the English term 'hurricane'
means. LAILAPS for him indicated as strong storm, but not necessarily a
hurricane. Perhaps my dictionary overstates the case.
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Micheal W. Palmer mwpalmer at earthlink.net
North Carolina State University
Philosophy and Religion (New Testament)
Foreign Languages (Ancient Greek)
Visit the Greek Language and Linguistics Gateway at
http://home.earthlink.net/~mwpalmer/
You can also access my online bibliography of Greek Linguistics at
http://home.earthlink.net/~mwpalmer/greek.linguistics.bibliography/bibliography.
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