Ti Kanies?

April 26, 2012 12:58 AM

greek filter! Some girls said "poli kalo avto" in my direction and giggled when I walked by today. I know it's lame, but i'm a bit curious about what it means.
posted by bruinbruin to Writing & Language (8 answers total)

So, not a Greek speaker and undoubtedly one will come along at some point, but here's my preliminary answer just to get your imagination going.

Google Translate is totally confused with your phrase, until I enabled phonetic typing (btw, how awesome is that option? Buh?) and it came up with this: πολυ καλο αυτο which it translates as "was very good." Maybe that phrase will be a starting point for any Greek Speakers to help translate it more accurately. :)
posted by empyrean at 1:10 AM on April 26, 2012

This is a fragment so it's tough to give the grammatical shape of it. What also makes it tough is my rather poor command of Greek, but setting that aside,

-Very nice, this. (You would say something similar in English more along the lines of 'This right here - very nice.')

or, a bit more freely,

-He's pretty good (or hot or fine).
posted by BigSky at 1:36 AM on April 26, 2012

Maybe: πολλή καλός αυτόν (polli kalos auton) - a lot of good that.

This drug up an 20yr old memory from college days of a girl studying Classical Greek. And the thing we wanted to say was along the lines of 'a fine young gentleman'. She came up with something like 'kalos kathagos', but I can't figure out 'kathagos' using Google Translate :(. If we guess and go from the well known 'γνώθι σαυτόν/σεαυτόν (gnothi seauton) - know thyself' and take a guess... we get πολλή καλός αυτόν.

These girls may be worth investigating should you see them again.
I know nothing of Greek.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:01 AM on April 26, 2012 [1 favorite]

it means they thought you were cute. literal transaltion: very good, that. non-literal could be: good stuff.
posted by canned polar bear at 3:35 AM on April 26, 2012 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks guys, I knew that poli kalo/kala means very good, but i wasn't sure if avto (that) could be interpreted to mean a person - or if it's just used colloquially. Maybe a small grammar lesson would be in order here? :D
posted by bruinbruin at 4:02 AM on April 26, 2012

Maybe a small grammar lesson would be in order here? :D

Αυτός (aftòs): the pronoun "he" (αυτή = she, αυτό = it)

While the accusative of αυτός is αυτό ("κοίτα τον αυτό" = look at him), in context with the implied verb "is" (αυτό είναι πολύ καλό) means that the speaker is using the neuter in the nominative case, so canned polar bear has the best translation, "good stuff."
posted by deanc at 5:13 AM on April 26, 2012 [2 favorites]

And the thing we wanted to say was along the lines of 'a fine young gentleman'. She came up with something like 'kalos kathagos',

Kalos kagathos
posted by BigSky at 5:46 AM on April 26, 2012 [1 favorite]

In this case αυτό is the neuter, implying probably το κομμάτι or το τεκνό ('piece/item' and 'young man' respectively).

/Greek
posted by ersatz at 7:14 AM on May 1, 2012