#while feta ''slice'' is countable | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mokeymokey · 2 years ago

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Just pondering how "feta cheese" and "pita bread" are a beautifully symmetrical pair of exemplary opposites as linguistic artefacts cause like "pita bread" is famously redundant ("pita" already being a word that means bread or pastry or some kind of baked product); whereas the expression "feta cheese" is in fact less redundant in Greek than it is in English, since in English "feta" is only ever a type of cheese, but in Greek "φέτα" on its own can also just mean "slice", so it's sometimes useful to clarify. You could classify many compound loans in language as being "pita bread"-type or "feta cheese"-type

#greeks usually call it just feta casually bc it's usually clear from context and also feta (cheese) is an uncount noun #while feta ''slice'' is countable #though uncount nouns still take most of the same determiners in greek so its a subtle distinction. but anyway.#etymologically I do believe it's the same word. ''slice cheese''

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