We interrupt your regularly scheduled silence for a language rant. Again.

[bktheirregular]

One thing about working for a firm dealing in lots of international commerce is that you end up dealing with a wide variety of businesses. Yesterday, it was renewable energy. Today, it's aerial target drones. I suppose it's inevitable that the Greeks try to retrofit old words to apply to new concepts.

Makes it more difficult, though, when at the same time, they make unstructured lists using those terms, which tend to run together and leave an inexpert reader scratching his head wondering just what the hell they're talking about.

Ah, well. That's what they pay me for.

Comments

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

*headdesk* Remind me to photocopy you some ancient Greek grammar charts. That'll at least give you an idea of what part of speech and case you're looking at for all of these archaisms.

[bktheirregular]

Hey, that might actually be helpful. :) Still doesn't solve the chicken-and-egg problem of needing the context to translate properly, and needing to translate properly to figure out the context, but every little bit helps.

If only the writers of these modern contracts weren't so ... cavalier about it. Actually, I'd love it if they used semicolons (or the ano-teleia, the half-colon they use in place of the semicolon because of how they do question marks) when they did lists, so that the damn things wouldn't run into one another...

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

I might have an ancient Greek dictionary too, though I'm not sure if it'd help-- you might at least be able to extrapolate some contexts based on what the words used to mean. I'll try and find this stuff over the weekend. :)