I think this comment generalizes too much. I do not think Europeans are all the same on this (and probably Asians too).
As an example I have the impression that what you wrote is true for Dutch people (I don't know if it's true but I've heard/read they are more on the side of making elderly people comfortable in their last moments rather than trying to treat them with expensive procedures).
While here in Greece we do try to prolong the life of even the most hopeless situations (that might be changing). It's not rare to have our elderly parents/grandparents bedridden at home for years.
My wife used to tell me that kids should be asleep by 2100 because some study showed it is better for them. But what does 2100 mean? It is totally arbitrary. I could accept a study that would reference sunrise/sunset but a specific time?
I would always ask her "is this winter or summer time?" just to show how this does not really make sense. Other times I would say "what if we lived right at the point where a timezone changes?". A few meters difference means 1 hour difference. Which 2100 is the correct one? Or what if 2 people live in the same timezone at the opposite ends of it?
I believe most of these studies are performed in the USA. I have never lived there (I am in Greece, have also lived in Germany) but the feeling I have from some movies and shows is that there are places in USA where the sun comes up at 0500, maybe earlier (and accordingly also sets early). I do not think that the sun ever rises that early here (I actually just looked, throughout the year the earliest is ~0600 summer time). It is only natural to also have different habits on when to wake up/go to bed. And also 2100 (or whatever other time) to mean something else entirely.
"I would always ask her "is this winter or summer time?" just to show how this does not really make sense."
If the rest of your schedule keeps the same numeric time, then this does make sense. If your schedule allows for 9 hours of sleep before waking up for school, then you're still getting 9 hours. If you changed the numeric value, then it would either 8 or 10 hours since the school start time retains its numeric value.
"I believe most of these studies are performed in the USA."
My argument with my wife was not about the duration of sleep (nor has this anything to do with the schedule) but at what time a kid should go to bed. The reasoning behind this is that if a child goes to bed later it would be bad for brain development (or something) even if sleeping the required hours.
When I said that most studies are from the USA I was referring to studies in general (and about the children in particular) and not on the one discussed here. I confess, I might have been carried away a little because this has always been my pet peeve.
I've tried going later to bed to use these as more productive hours for my sideprojects (heck I am still going too late to bed). Although I say that I have more energy in the night the thing is that after a full day it is not easy to concentrate. In the morning you are fresher (provided you get enough sleep).
It's funny that you say you are not an early bird yet for me going to bed at 2300 - 0000 and getting up at 0700 or 0800 is still early.
I consider myself a night owl and if I ever get to bed before midnight I consider this early. I still have to wake up between 0730 and 0800 (because life/obligations) and that is why I am like a zombie half the day.
But no matter how tired I might be through the day, at night something happens and I feel full of energy.
Same here. It seems that I don't have just one tank for "energy", but two, and the second one unlocks somewhen between 20:00 and 23:00. More than that, no matter what time I go to sleep, I can't possibly get up on my own before ~10:00. This does not happen, period.
Between moving out of my parents' house and moving in with my wife, I had some years to do experiments on this, and there's one consistent result: whenever I'm not forced to wake up at specific time (say, by threat of getting fired, or just because I asked someone to keep calling me to make sure I got up), my sleeping pattern always settles around going to bed ~04:00 and waking up ~11:00. Whenever the external pressure stops, I automatically revert to that mode in two or three days.
It would all be fine, except this sleep mode is thoroughly incompatible with normal people and the society at large :/.
I'm very similar to you. Left to my own schedule, I will go to bed around 2-3am and wake up about 10am. Unfortunately, I have to be out of bed around 6:30am for work, but no matter how hard I try or how tired I was during the day, when it's the evening my brain wakes up and I just cant get to sleep before 12-1am. The only thing that really helps is cannabis, but as I got older cannabis started giving me anxiety really bad.
I've been able to make this sleeping pattern work by being in Asia while working with American companies. I reserve 11pm to 3am for meetings/sync with other employees, I work from home and do any work that requires deep concentration in the late afternoon and I reserve lunch plus early afternoon to play with my son.
Luckily my partner is also a night owl and if she weren't forced to wake up early for work would go to sleep around 2-3am. So, when we're on holiday, we're in sync.
It would be cool to research those ideal times. It is obvious that if one sticks to the hard coded ideal rest/wake times one is much more energetic, productive and more focused but I'm curious how big the difference is. Around 11 am I can wake up and cycle 200 km or run a marathon starting immediately. If you ask me kindly to run 100 meters around 6 am your life is probably in danger.
In my opinion, most people who say they are night owls are just light sensitive.
If we didn't have so much light in our environment at night we would be bored to sleep. On top of this, there is also a physiological effect from light. It suppresses melatonin and makes you feel newly awake to be in anything above the intensity of candlelight.
Of course there are social elements to staying up late and partying. But unless you are a party animal (and it's great if you are, the world needs more happy socialization) it's hard to believe that this causes you to stay up late every night.
I don't know. If anything, maybe not total light, but some kind of inside/outside delta?
I am light sensitive. I tolerate only two states: very dark and very bright. The average underlit indoors people keep during the day, when there's not that much sunlight coming in, but enough for them to keep the lights off - those shut me down very quickly.
I normally thought of it in terms of not enough light, but I just realized it's not exactly it. There are cases when, during the day, the total of sunlight + artificial light in the room is squarely in the underlit, sleep-inducing zone, but only few hours later, once it's dark outside, the same amount of artificial light is enough for my mind to consider the room bright enough.
Still, the "second tank" effect doesn't feel light-related. It's fast-acting - one moment I'm tired out of my mind, the next one I realize someone just plugged me up to a fresh battery - and the change occurs without any obvious prompt like changing locations or light levels.
As for social element, I'm not a party animal. But I am someone who suffers from something like 報復性熬夜 - "revenge bedtime procrastination". The late-night ours, after everyone around me is asleep and couldn't possibly bother me anymore, are the only time I feel I can finally unwind, relax, and recover. I've had this for a long time, but I'm fairly certain it's a downstream effect - that is, my difficulty getting up and extra energy kicking it after dark were something I've had for much, much longer.
I liked this phrase "revenge bedtime procrastination". In my case there is often this parameter that I do not want the day to end, I feel I did not accomplish enough during the day or that I did not have enough "me" time and I spend the nights in front of my PC or watching a movie/series.
I was watching a video about getting good sleep hygiene the other day and the main tip was "control what time you wake up, because waking up tired is easier than going to bed when you're not tired."
That person is clearly not a night owl lol. Waking up at 7 doesn't make you feel any more tired at 11 when you're a night owl, because that's just when you're the most awake. All you end up doing is creating an ever growing sleep debt until you're on vacation and just sleep for its whole duration.
Oh, it's early for me too, but I can at least function well, and without becoming incredibly short tempered and frustrated, on a 0000 - 0800 sleep pattern. Left to my own devices, and with no alarm clock, I tend to actually wake up at around 0900 - 1000, but (not being independently wealthy) that's pretty incompatible with the rest of life.
If I had FU money I'd fully embrace that.
What's the point of getting up early, rushing around, only to leave the house and get immediately stuck in traffic? What a giant waste of time.
We use mercurial at work. I actually like it very much (of course it might be because we follow a certain workflow).
When I try to use git for personal projects (because everyone uses it and I'd like to learn it) and I really am struggling sometimes to get even the simplest workflow working as a single person. I can't even imagine how it would work when having multiple people work together.
That's the point: you have to follow a workflow to make it even remotely usable. And even so, they are hacky workarounds at best and generally mercurial feel like the product of "that's good enough". And in a more general sense mercurial feels like(and in fact historically is) the product of unsolicited help. The concepts of having separate actions for pull and update are ridiculous. The --new-branch option is equally stupid. Many basic features are missing and you have to resort to stuff such as plugins like evolve or whatever it was called(say rename an existing branch without causing the universe to implode on itself). Back-merging in mercurial makes no sense if you live with the basic assumption that you have one default/master/main or whatever you wanna call it branch. And truthfully, storing the entire history of your work as diffs is what I'd assume Gutenberg would have come up with - great for the 15-th century but sticks and stones by 21-st century standards. And a ton of other basic features are either missing or a complete hack - stashing, rebasing, update-index, submodules and all the things which personally as a git user, I take for granted.
For some reason this post brought to my mind the website of Fravia [1]. It is defunct now (he died 10+ years ago) but it is archived and various mirrors exist (have a look at the wikipedia page [2]).
I never really got to explore the website in depth but the few articles I've read I remember to have been very interesting. More important he had some tips on how to make better searches to uncover websites that might not be high on the results list. Granted this information might be outdated now but I think it is worth a look.
This prayer or rather the use of epiousios in this prayer and its appearance only in this prayer and how it should be translated is exactly the topic of this discussion.
The wikipedia article mentions your 1st point (that it was used elsewhere) but then continues to say that when the original text was reexamined it was found that it was a different word.
>However, after the papyrus containing the shopping list, missing for many years, was rediscovered at the Yale Beinecke Library in 1998,[21] a re-examination found "elaiou" (oil), not "epiousios." (The original transcriber, A. H. Sayce, was apparently known to be a poor transcriber.)
As a Greek myself I never really thought much about this word. Yes, it is not common but I thought I understood this. After reading the linked article I am not so sure anymore and I am not really sure how I would translate it.
I cannot translate it to English in a single word but the way I understand it would be "what is needed, no more, no less" (which is also mentioned in the article).
I found two greek sources that seem to agree with me [1], [2]. Especially in the first it gives also as synonym the word "daily". However it also mentions that in the biblical context although it is widespread understood as "necessary" the correct interpretation (of the whole phrase) is rather "give us today the bread of tomorrow".
So, as a conclusion, I guess even as a Greek I am as much confused as all these scholars that try to translate it!
> I cannot translate it to English in a single word but the way I understand it would be "what is needed, no more, no less" (which is also mentioned in the article).
> I found two greek sources that seem to agree with me [1], [2].
Except did that meaning crystalize before or after the word was used in the New Testament?
What the original authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke meant, and what people started using the word for later in history, could be two very different things.
> I cannot translate it to English in a single word but the way I understand it would be "what is needed, no more, no less" (which is also mentioned in the article).
This might not be translatable to English in one word, but it can be to Swedish: lagom.
There is a thesis called "Indeterminacy of Translation" by the late philosopher W.V.O Quine. You don't need to worry about "fully translating" any word from one natural language to another language.
I generally distrust modern Greeks' knowledge about Ancient Greek. For example, beta has changed pronunciation, becoming something like English v instead of English b like it was originally, but most modern Greeks will vehemently deny that the pronunciation has changed.
We have good evidence that it used to be like English b (voiced bilabial plosive):
Yes I know about the Erasmus pronunciation and that it does not conform to how we talk nowadays. And I know most Greeks haven't ever heard about his theory. And I say theory because not everyone agrees with his proposed pronunciation.
But this here is another matter. Biblical texts are not in ancient Greek.
Edit:
I actually said that the biblical texts are not in ancient Greek (in that the language had evolved from the time of Plato and other such texts) but to be honest I wasn't really sure about my statement. I tried to do a quick research and I might have been mistaken.
However about this particular prayer, although it is of course not in modern Greek, I do not think there are particular hard passages that are not understood without knowing any ancient Greek.
To build a bit further on this. The new testament is written in Koine Greek (Common Greek) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek . A lot of the phonological changes from attic to modern have already happened by the time these text were written.
For most Greek speakers texts from this time are mostly legible, words like epiousios not withstanding.
Additionally I would like to point out that pronunciation has little to do with comprehension of written texts.
> For most Greek speakers texts from this time are mostly legible, words like epiousios not withstanding.
Is this true? As someone who studied classical Greek, I can mostly understand NT Koine OK, but most of modern Greek goes right over my head. Conversely (anecdote alert) I watched a YouTube video where a Greek guy took ancient texts out onto the streets of Athens and asked people to make sense of them; most people giggled self-consciously and admitted that while they had studied them in school they were able to make very little headway in actual translations.
Edit: so my point is that, to my naïve eye, Koine seems much closer to Attic than to Modern, and hence I'd expect modern Greeks to struggle with it - but would be very interested in being proved wrong :)
In my own limited experience in school, I found texts from the first century AD much easier to comprehend than say the odyssey, or even classical texts.
But still it was an academic exercise, it required attention and some time, it was far easier than classical texts yet not something you can do in the street on the fly.
I may have to pull back from mostly legible to mostly decode-able. ;)
I only really know some classical texts and, for Koine, just the NT, but the structure of the NT is so much more straightforward to understand - it's basically this happened, then that happened, etc etc and there is none of the "decoding" that you often have to do with the classical stuff. But I am fascinated by how much of this is intrinsic to the language and how much is down to artifice on the part of the classical writers. In other words, the audience for the NT is ordinary folks whose first language in many (most?) cases is not even Greek, so the message has to be written as plainly as possible (and actually the prose is kind of pedestrian as a result IMO). But what's the situation with classical authors? Are they really reflecting the speech of the time or are they using a more complex and artificial form of language divorced from daily speech? I don't know - I think there must be an element of it, but otoh someone like Aristophanes is trying to make audiences laugh so the language has to be relatable and idiomatic you would think.
This, exactly. The Greek alphabet is much older than Koine Greek, of almost 500 years. While spoken language tends to change fast, written language tends to stick and doesn't easily change, for obvious reasons (just look at English or Tibetan). People won't change how they write some word just because they pronounce it differently from the past, because that would make the text much harder to read.
Also, /b/, /β/ and /v/ have the tendency to get swap with each other in lots of languages, and most people fail to distinguish them apart unless their language imposes a clear distinction among them. See for instance how Italian or English distinguish /b/ from /v/, while /b/, /β/ and /v/ are all basically the same thing for a Spanish speaker.
Indeed Koine Greek is not ancient Greek, and while also being different from modern Greek, it's also different. The main difference being that Koine stems from the attic dialect and modern Greek from the dimotic dialect. To make matters even more complicated, the transition to make dimotic official happened in 1979 and thus there is still a living generation accustomed to read and write Koinè/kathareuousa Greek.
This familiarity didn't end overnight and as these things often do they live on in a long tail, see for example Russian influence in many ex-soviet republics which is only waning with the youngest generations, or for example German influence that lasted in northern Croatia way longer than the austro-hungarian domination.
That said, linguistics is full of traps. The common person on the street makes all sorts of assumption based on modern facets, often inverting the relationship between Prestige/low-education/provinciality with historical language change, i.e. often assuming that the poor illiterate provincial people are those who talk badly and distort the language, while in reality they often preserve archaic forms in some cases (while innovating in others).
An example from contemporary coastal Tuscany in Italy: in the local dialect the word for rabbit is "cunigliolo" while the offician Italian is "coniglio". If you ask a random person from the street they would tell you that "cunigliolo" is not only an uneducated form but actually a silly deformation of the right word and that it's obviously so, because the suffix "-olo" sounds funny (probably because of the influence of the names of the seven dwarves in Italian, brontolo, cucciolo, mammolo, pisolo, ... all designed to sound cute to the ear of a modern italiano speaker).
Turns out that the latin word for rabbit is "cuniculus".
Now, did I say that linguistics is tricky? Turns out that the "-olo" suffix has been added to other words as well, like "ragnolo" which has no etymological explaination. They could be an innovation to regularize the perceived "funny local way of saying rabbit", perhaps modeled on the 7 dwarves, or not. Perhaps cunigliolo etymology is also wrong and I'm grasping at straws, but I think my main point still holds: don't trust the gut reaction of native speakers for anything other than their living language.
I will disagree. I cannot see how a native speaker can be the worst at understanding their own language. Your own language is the one you understand best, and even though that is not directly the opposite statement, for your statement to be correct it would mean that statistically native speakers are of inferior understanding compared to others. When you take that to apply for all languages you would end up with a paradox. You give an example based on pronunciation, which does change for all languages, so I would not take knowledge of history of pronunciation to have anything to do with the instinctive understanding of concepts in your mother tongue. Now on the second part, I.e. the ability to explain, I would think it’s related to understanding, but it is more nuanced as it also has to do with knowledge of the language in which the explanation is articulated.
—-edit to add comment on pronunciation of β
On the specific pronunciation subject, I am no expert in the matter but I do wonder how that reconciles with the fact that the letters μπ make the sound b in Greek and that combination of letters is not modern but has been in Ancient Greek words too, such as in εμπνέω.
I think what the OP means is that on average native speakers understand the language intuitively, while most of the non-natives were taught the rules and structure of the language directly.
Being a non-native english speaker I experienced this often. I have never gotten a useful answer for a question about english from English people. It usually was "oh, I just feel which word is right"...
I find the same. My wife is from another country and we find she has more command of my mother language’s rules and whys and viceversa.
For example she had a hard time expressing when does she say “oui” and when does she say “si”; being such a basic word (probably learnt at age 2), she never had to sit and try to infer the rule explicitly. Whereas every french-as-second-language speaker, this is a basic (explicit) rule that has been discussed in class and memorized before being internalized.
And having the rules more explicitly in the head enables hard reasoning over them, which goes beyond intuitiveness in some contexts.
That’s why I separated the treatment of understanding and explaining. I would still argue that a native English speaker has better skills to explain an English word in English - on average.
>> On the specific pronunciation subject, I am no expert in the matter but I do wonder how that reconciles with the fact that the letters μπ make the sound b in Greek and that combination of letters is not modern but has been in Ancient Greek words too, such as in εμπνέω.
It's possible that "μπ" was not pronounced "b" as today, in ancient times, but as "mp". For example, I think Cypriot Greeks tend to pronounce another consontant dipthong, "ντ" as "nt" rather than "d".
> I generally distrust modern Greeks' knowledge about Ancient Greek
I'd find it fascinating that you would have encountered these discrepancies often enough to form such an opinion, assuming you're not involved in studies of or adjacent to ancient greek.
Isn't this a tad exaggerated, jumping from the change in the pronunciation of one letter, to native speakers being the worst? I think you need considerably more proof than that.
I'm sure you didn't intend this as an insult but in the context of the comment you were responding to, it could have been expressed more kindly.
Unfortunately, an inflammatory grandiose generalization like "native speakers are the worst at understanding their own language" is likely to derail a thread altogether and turn itself into the (much less interesting) topic, so please let's all try to edit those out of our posts to HN.
As a Greek myself I can confirm that most of us know almost nothing about ancient Greek and a lot of us think that they do because they have the mistaken impression that the two languages slightly differ.
To be fair though, i guess this happens in any language/ethnicity so it is better to leave science to the experts/scientists and take their opinion. And ancient Greek scientists are not necessarily Greeks as much as any random Greek speaker is not a linguist.
Know-it-all armchair Internet experts are always the worst at understanding and explaining anything, especially when they attempt so with scarce evidence.
As an example I have the impression that what you wrote is true for Dutch people (I don't know if it's true but I've heard/read they are more on the side of making elderly people comfortable in their last moments rather than trying to treat them with expensive procedures).
While here in Greece we do try to prolong the life of even the most hopeless situations (that might be changing). It's not rare to have our elderly parents/grandparents bedridden at home for years.
Of course I might be generalizing also.