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56-544: In Ancient Greek , θ represented the aspirated voiceless dental plosive IPA: [t̪ʰ] , but in Modern Greek it represents the voiceless dental fricative IPA: [θ] . In its archaic form, θ was written as a cross within a circle (as in the Etruscan [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] ), and later, as a line or point in circle ( [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] ). The cursive form ϑ

112-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

168-492: A rhetorical strategy , in which case its goal is to change the valence of a description. Using a euphemism can in itself be controversial, as in the following examples: The use of euphemism online is known as " algospeak " when used to evade automated online moderation techniques used on Meta and TikTok's platforms. Algospeak has been used in debate about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict . Phonetic euphemism

224-441: A euphemism for dead and an adjective meaning overdue, can cause confusion in listeners. Euphemisms are also used to mitigate, soften or downplay the gravity of large-scale injustices, war crimes, or other events that warrant a pattern of avoidance in official statements or documents. For instance, one reason for the comparative scarcity of written evidence documenting the exterminations at Auschwitz , relative to their sheer number,

280-660: A euphemism for defecation in Pre-Germanic, as the Proto-Indo-European root * sḱeyd- , from which it was derived, meant 'to cut off'. Another example in American English is the replacement of " colored people " with " Negro " (euphemism by foreign language), which itself came to be replaced by either "African American" or "Black". Also in the United States the term "ethnic minorities" in

336-525: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as

392-718: A foreign language may be imported for use as euphemism. For example, the French word enceinte was sometimes used instead of the English word pregnant ; abattoir for slaughterhouse , although in French the word retains its explicit violent meaning 'a place for beating down', conveniently lost on non-French speakers. Entrepreneur for businessman , adds glamour; douche (French for 'shower') for vaginal irrigation device; bidet ('little pony') for vessel for anal washing. Ironically, although in English physical " handicaps " are almost always described with euphemism, in French

448-653: A holy silence" (speaking well by not speaking at all). Reasons for using euphemisms vary by context and intent. Commonly, euphemisms are used to avoid directly addressing subjects that might be deemed negative or embarrassing, such as death , sex , and excretory bodily functions. They may be created for innocent, well-intentioned purposes or nefariously and cynically, intentionally to deceive, confuse or deny . Euphemisms which emerge as dominant social euphemisms are often created to serve progressive causes. The Oxford University Press 's Dictionary of Euphemisms identifies "late" as an occasionally ambiguous term, whose nature as

504-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

560-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either

616-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

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672-532: Is "directives for the extermination process obscured in bureaucratic euphemisms". Another example of this is during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine , where Russian President Vladimir Putin , in his speech starting the invasion, called the invasion a " special military operation ". Euphemisms are sometimes used to lessen the opposition to a political move. For example, according to linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann , Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used

728-457: Is 4 and 5) substituted as a euphemism where a Θ (9) would otherwise be expected. Ancient Greek Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ),

784-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

840-587: Is also common in biblical and theological usage e.g. πρόϑεσις (prothesis) instead of πρόθεσις (means placing in public or laying out a corpse). In Latin script used for the Gaulish language , theta inspired the tau gallicum (Ꟈ ꟈ). The phonetic value of the tau gallicum is thought to have been [t͡s] . In addition, multiple modern languages written in Latin script use Latin theta . The early Cyrillic letter fita (Ѳ, ѳ) developed from θ. This letter existed in

896-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

952-423: Is deemed offensive or suggests something unpleasant. Some euphemisms are intended to amuse, while others use bland, inoffensive terms for concepts that the user wishes to downplay. Euphemisms may be used to mask profanity or refer to topics some consider taboo such as mental or physical disability, sexual intercourse, bodily excretions, pain, violence, illness, or death in a polite way. Euphemism comes from

1008-464: Is the IPA symbol for the close-mid central rounded vowel . The lowercase letter θ is used as a symbol for: The uppercase letter Θ is used as a symbol for: In ancient times, Tau was used as a symbol for life or resurrection , whereas the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet (ninth in the archaic form anciently used for numeration), theta, was considered the symbol of death . A quotation attributed to

1064-478: Is used to replace profanities and blasphemies, diminishing their intensity. To alter the pronunciation or spelling of a taboo word (such as profanity ) to form a euphemism is known as taboo deformation , or a minced oath . Such modifications include: Euphemisms formed from understatements include asleep for dead and drinking for consuming alcohol. " Tired and emotional " is a notorious British euphemism for "drunk", one of many recurring jokes popularized by

1120-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about

1176-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek

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1232-417: The Greek word euphemia ( εὐφημία ) which refers to the use of 'words of good omen'; it is a compound of eû ( εὖ ), meaning 'good, well', and phḗmē ( φήμη ), meaning 'prophetic speech; rumour, talk'. Eupheme is a reference to the female Greek spirit of words of praise and positivity, etc. The term euphemism itself was used as a euphemism by the ancient Greeks ; with the meaning "to keep

1288-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

1344-554: The Russian alphabet until the 1918 Russian orthography reform . In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), [θ] represents the voiceless dental fricative , as in th ick or th in . It does not represent the consonant in th e , which is the voiced dental fricative counterpart, represented in the IPA by [ð] (cf. Eth ). A similar-looking lower-case symbol, [ɵ] , which is called barred o ,

1400-419: The death penalty . Petrus de Dacia in a document from 1291 relates the idea that theta was used to brand criminals as empty ciphers, and the branding rod was affixed to the crossbar spanning the circle. For this reason, the use of the number 9 was sometimes avoided where the connotation was felt to be unlucky—the mint marks of some Late Imperial Roman coins famously have the sum ΔΕ or ΕΔ (delta and epsilon, that

1456-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between

1512-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

1568-492: The " euphemism treadmill ", as coined by Steven Pinker . For instance, the place of human defecation is a needy candidate for a euphemism in all eras. Toilet is an 18th-century euphemism, replacing the older euphemism house-of-office , which in turn replaced the even older euphemisms privy-house and bog-house . In the 20th century, where the old euphemisms lavatory (a place where one washes) and toilet (a place where one dresses ) had grown from widespread usage (e.g., in

1624-598: The 2010s has been replaced by " people of color ". Venereal disease , which associated shameful bacterial infection with a seemingly worthy ailment emanating from Venus , the goddess of love, soon lost its deflective force in the post-classical education era, as "VD", which was replaced by the three-letter initialism "STD" (sexually transmitted disease); later, "STD" was replaced by "STI" (sexually transmitted infection). Intellectually-disabled people were originally defined with words such as "morons" or "imbeciles", which then became commonly used insults. The medical diagnosis

1680-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

1736-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

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1792-576: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   Euphemism A euphemism ( / ˈ juː f ə m ɪ z əm / YOO -fə-miz-əm ) is an innocuous word or expression used in place of one that

1848-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for

1904-453: The English word handicap is used as a euphemism for their problematic words infirmité or invalidité . Periphrasis , or circumlocution , is one of the most common: to "speak around" a given word, implying it without saying it. Over time, circumlocutions become recognized as established euphemisms for particular words or ideas. Bureaucracies frequently spawn euphemisms intentionally, as doublespeak expressions. For example, in

1960-515: The United States) to being synonymous with the crude act they sought to deflect, they were sometimes replaced with bathroom (a place where one bathes), washroom (a place where one washes), or restroom (a place where one rests) or even by the extreme form powder room (a place where one applies facial cosmetics). The form water closet , often shortened to W.C. , is a less deflective form. The word shit appears to have originally been

2016-476: The ancient Roman author Ennius (though possibly spuriously) said of it: "oh, theta, a letter much unluckier than the others". According to Porphyry of Tyros , the Egyptians used an X within a circle as a symbol of the soul; having a value of nine, it was used as a symbol for Ennead . Johannes Lydus says that the Egyptians used a symbol for Kosmos in the form of theta, with a fiery circle representing

2072-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

2128-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

2184-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

2240-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under

2296-510: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at

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2352-518: The neutral Hebrew lexical item פעימות peimót (literally 'beatings (of the heart)'), rather than נסיגה nesigá ('withdrawal'), to refer to the stages in the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (see Wye River Memorandum ) , in order to lessen the opposition of right-wing Israelis to such a move. Peimót was thus used as a euphemism for 'withdrawal'. Euphemism may be used as

2408-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

2464-655: The past, the US military used the term " sunshine units " for contamination by radioactive isotopes . The United States Central Intelligence Agency refers to systematic torture as " enhanced interrogation techniques ". An effective death sentence in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge often used the clause "imprisonment without right to correspondence ": the person sentenced would be shot soon after conviction. As early as 1939, Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich used

2520-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

2576-404: The same purpose: to call a person a berk sounds less offensive than to call a person a cunt , though berk is short for Berkeley Hunt , which rhymes with cunt . The use of a term with a softer connotation, though it shares the same meaning. For instance, screwed up is a euphemism for 'fucked up'; hook-up and laid are euphemisms for ' sexual intercourse '. Expressions or words from

2632-421: The satirical magazine Private Eye ; it has been used by MPs to avoid unparliamentary language . Pleasant, positive, worthy, neutral, or nondescript terms are often substituted for explicit or unpleasant ones, with many substituted terms deliberately coined by sociopolitical movements, marketing , public relations , or advertising initiatives, including: Some examples of Cockney rhyming slang may serve

2688-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

2744-566: The term Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment") to mean summary execution of persons viewed as "disciplinary problems" by the Nazis even before commencing the systematic extermination of the Jews . Heinrich Himmler , aware that the word had come to be known to mean murder, replaced that euphemism with one in which Jews would be "guided" (to their deaths) through the slave-labor and extermination camps after having been "evacuated" to their doom. Such

2800-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with

2856-424: The world, and a snake spanning the middle representing Agathos Daimon (literally: good spirit ). In classical Athens, it was used as an abbreviation for the Greek θάνατος ( Thanatos , "death") and as it vaguely resembles a human skull, theta was used as a warning symbol of death , in the same way that skull and crossbones are used in modern times. It survives on potsherds used by Athenians when voting for

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2912-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

2968-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in

3024-416: Was changed to "mentally retarded", which morphed into the pejorative, " retard ", against those with intellectual disabilities. To avoid the negative connotations of their diagnoses, students who need accommodations because of such conditions are often labeled as "special needs" instead, although the words "special" or "sped" (short for "special education") have long been schoolyard insults. As of August 2013,

3080-583: Was part of the formulation of Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question"), which became known to the outside world during the Nuremberg Trials . Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration , which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the " euphemism cycle " in 1974, also frequently referred to as

3136-526: Was retained by Unicode as U+03D1 ϑ GREEK THETA SYMBOL , separate from U+03B8 θ GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA . (There is also U+03F4 ϴ GREEK CAPITAL THETA SYMBOL .) For the purpose of writing Greek text, the two can be font variants of a single character, but θ and ϑ are also used as distinct symbols in technical and mathematical contexts. Extensive lists of examples follow below at Mathematics and Science. U+03D1 ϑ GREEK THETA SYMBOL (script theta)

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