Hello , if you like what you hear in this podcast leave us a review on the platform of your choice. It helps other people find us and I love reading what you think!

(piano music)

Hello, and welcome to Your Greek Word On A Sunday, a weekly, bite-size podcast for anyone curious on language, etymology and connections. I am your host, Emmanuela Lia and wherever you are in the world, if you want to entertain your brain for a few minutes, this is the podcast for you. Let's Go!

We now know that ancient civilisations created some of their myths based on what surrounded them but was at the time incomprehensible. We don’t exactly know how the myths evolved or got embellished with time but sometimes there are clear and verified links. For the next two episodes I’m going to talk to you about two different words that come from the same fact. Prehistoric fossils found in Ancient Greece. Nobody could explain them and they looked… bizarre! Γαία (Gaia) was the name for the goddess Earth. Among her children were 100 , of enormous height and strength. With scaled bodies and lizard tails who were covered in hair. looked like humans and they were mortal. They were divided in clans and each had special extra powers. Including the lightning power they gifted Zeus. Most of them died in the Great War between them and the Olympian gods and there are depictions of that war on ancient vases and sculptures. Their name means ‘of the earth’ but in English it came through Latin and old French in the 1300s and by then it had turned into an adjective ΓΙΓΑΝΤΙΟΣ/GIGANTIC

Instagram @yourgreeksunday ,
Blue Sky @yourgreeksunday.bsky.social
email yourgreeksunday@gmail.com

(piano music)

Hello, and welcome to Your Greek Word On A Sunday, a weekly, bite-size podcast for anyone curious on language, etymology and connections. I am your host, Emmanuela Lia and wherever you are in the world, if you want to entertain your brain for a few minutes, this is the podcast for you. Let's Go!

‘Remember remember the 5th of November…’ That’s how the rhyme goes in the UK. On November 5th 1605 a company of Catholic men was arrested for treason and hanged for attempting to blow up the House of Lords of the Protestant monarchy. The failure of The Gunpowder Plot as it’s known is celebrated to this day with bonfires and fireworks. Guy Fawkes one of the members of the plot, has been turned into an anti-establishment hero through movies and iconography but mainly, through a grave misunderstanding of history. He really was nothing more than a religious fanatic against a religiously fanatic monarchy. It's worth reading the story in full and understanding the behaviours of both religious groups at the time. Now, that misunderstanding leads us to an even older misunderstood word that is often assigned to guy Fawkes too. The word came to England through France in the 1600s and wasn’t always a pleasant term until Samuel Johnson put it in a dictionary, in 1755, cementing it as a virtue. Πατήρ (patir) in Ancient Greek and Πατέρας (pateras ) in modern means ‘father’. Πατρίδα (patrida) means ‘fatherland’. The ancient Greeks had city -states, Πόλεις (polis) so anyone who was a free citizen from the same city was a Συμπολίτης (sympolitis) unless they were a slave or a group of foreigners from another country entirely . They, were called ΠΑΤΡΙΩΤΕΣ/PATRIOTS

Instagram @yourgreeksunday ,
Blue Sky @yourgreeksunday.bsky.social
email yourgreeksunday@gmail.com

(piano music)

Hello, and welcome to Your Greek Word On A Sunday, a weekly, bite-size podcast for anyone curious on language, etymology and connections. I am your host, Emmanuela Lia and wherever you are in the world, if you want to entertain your brain for a few minutes, this is the podcast for you. Let's Go!

I hope you had an amazing Halloween! I’m going to do one last spooky word for you today. Hades , the god of the underworld was married to Persephone (that’s a whole other can of worms for the Greek gods and, a future episode for us) but like his brother Zeus, Hades wasn’t very faithful. Persephone caught him cheating with a nymph of the underworld. And in the myth, there’s no indication that she punished him for it. The nymph however, had a terrible fate. She was dragged by Persephone on top of a mountain and crushed to dust in the ground. But then, and some say that was Hades’ doing, the air was filled with a scent of freshness and a small green plant started growing. A plant that, to this day , grows on the mountains of Greece and has been used to heal , refresh and restore our bodies . It has the nymph‘s name and it was brought to England by the Romans during their occupation. Μίνθη (minthi) in Ancient Greek and in modern ΜΕΝΤΑ/MINT

Instagram @yourgreeksunday ,
Blue Sky @yourgreeksunday.bsky.social
email yourgreeksunday@gmail.com