{"id":280,"date":"2007-01-30T18:56:19","date_gmt":"2007-01-30T17:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/30\/brekekekex\/"},"modified":"2007-01-30T18:56:19","modified_gmt":"2007-01-30T17:56:19","slug":"brekekekex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=280","title":{"rendered":"Word of the day &#8211; Brekekekex (\u0392\u03c1\u03b5\u03ba\u03b5\u03ba\u03ad\u03be)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I came across the word brekekekex in a book I&#8217;ve just finished reading &#8211; <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1590171659\/omniglot-20\">A Time of Gifts<\/a><\/em>, the first part of Patrick Leigh Fermor&#8217;s fascinating account of his epic journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul), which he made in the early 1930s. He has a good ear for languages and acquired quite a good knowledge of German, plus bits and pieces of Hungarian, Greek and a number of other languages.<\/p>\n<p>He mentions at one point that there were many frogs brekekekexing in the woods. I thought he&#8217;d made the word up, but it seems Atrisophanes got there first. The word comes from the chorus of Atrisophanes&#8217; comedy, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mala.bc.ca\/~johnstoi\/aristophanes\/frogs.htm\"><em>\u0392\u03ac\u03c4\u03c1\u03b1\u03c7\u03bf\u03b9 (B\u00e1trachoi) &#8211; The Frogs<\/em><\/a>, which was first presented at the Lenaea in 405 BC:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Brekekekex koax koax<br \/>\nBrekekekex koax koax.<br \/>\nChildren of the marsh and lake<br \/>\nharmonious song now sweetly make,<br \/>\nour own enchanting melodies<br \/>\nkoax koax<br \/>\nThe songs we sang for Nysa\u2019s lord,<br \/>\nfor Dionysus, son of Zeus,<br \/>\nin Limnai at the Feast of Jars<br \/>\nas people in their drunken glee<br \/>\nthronged into our sanctuary.<br \/>\nBrekekekex koax koax.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The words brekekekex koax koax are intended to imitate the croaking of the frogs. You can see the original Greek version of the play <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/athens_5th_century\/BATR.html\">here<\/a>. In the above translation an extra syllable seems to have been added to Brekekekex &#8211; it&#8217;s \u0392\u03c1\u03b5\u03ba\u03b5\u03ba\u03ad\u03be (Brekekex) in the original.<\/p>\n<p>Does anyone know if this word is still used in Modern Greek?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across the word brekekekex in a book I&#8217;ve just finished reading &#8211; A Time of Gifts, the first part of Patrick Leigh Fermor&#8217;s fascinating account of his epic journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul), which he made in the early 1930s. He has a good ear for languages [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greek","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","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=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}