{"id":13684,"date":"2017-03-08T17:30:15","date_gmt":"2017-03-08T17:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=13684"},"modified":"2017-03-08T17:30:15","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T17:30:15","slug":"protagonists-and-sidekicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=13684","title":{"rendered":"Protagonists and sidekicks"},"content":{"rendered":"

When listening to The Allusionist<\/a> podcast today I learnt an interesting word – tritagonist<\/strong>, who was the actor who played the third role in ancient Greek drama.<\/p>\n

Tritagonist comes from the Ancient Greek word \u03c4\u03c1\u03af\u03c4\u1f00\u03b3\u03c9\u03bd\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03ae\u03c2<\/em> (triag\u014dnist\u1e17s), from \u03c4\u03c1\u03af\u03c4<\/em> \u200e(third) and \u1f00\u03b3\u03c9\u03bd\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03ae\u03c2<\/em> \u200e(combatant, participant).<\/p>\n

The actors who played the first and second roles in ancient Greek drama were known as the protagonist<\/strong> and deuteragonist<\/strong>, or sidekick. Proto- comes from \u03c0\u03c1\u1ff6\u03c4\u03bf\u03c2<\/em> \u200e(first), a superlative of \u03c0\u03c1\u03cc \u200e(before), and deuter- from \u03b4\u03b5\u03c5\u03c4\u03b5\u03c1<\/em> (second).<\/p>\n

Proto goes back to the Proto-Indo-European *pro\/*per-<\/em> (to go over), which is also the root of:<\/p>\n

– Proto-Celtic *\u0278ro<\/em> = before, in front of, in addition
\n– Welsh rhy<\/em> = too
\n– Irish ro<\/em> = too
\n– Proto-Germanic *fram<\/em> = from, by, due to
\n– English from<\/em>
\n– Scots frae<\/em> = from
\n– Swedish fr\u00e5n<\/em> = from; and fram<\/em> = forward
\n– Icelandic fr\u00e1<\/em> = from, away from, about
\n– Latin per<\/em> = through, by means of, during, and related words in Romance languages.<\/p>\n

The antonym of protagonist is antagonist<\/strong>, from \u1f00\u03bd\u03c4\u03af<\/em> \u200e(against) and \u1f00\u03b3\u03c9\u03bd\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03ae\u03c2<\/em> (combatant, participant).<\/p>\n

Source: Wiktionary<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When listening to The Allusionist podcast today I learnt an interesting word – tritagonist, who was the actor who played the third role in ancient Greek drama. Tritagonist comes from the Ancient Greek word \u03c4\u03c1\u03af\u03c4\u1f00\u03b3\u03c9\u03bd\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03ae\u03c2 (triag\u014dnist\u1e17s), from \u03c4\u03c1\u03af\u03c4 \u200e(third) and \u1f00\u03b3\u03c9\u03bd\u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03ae\u03c2 \u200e(combatant, participant). The actors who played the first and second roles in ancient Greek […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,118,127,10,15,45,55,67,77,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-greek","category-irish","category-language","category-latin","category-proto-indo-european","category-scots","category-swedish","category-welsh","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}