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The Alexandrine grammarians, and most likely Aristophanes of Byzantium in particular, seem to have been the first to divide Greek comedy into what became the canonical three periods: [3] Old Comedy (ἀρχαία archaía), Middle Comedy (μέση mésē) and New Comedy (νέα néa). These divisions appear to be largely arbitrary, and ancient ...
Irony" entered the English language as a figure of speech in the 16th century with a meaning similar to the French ironie, itself derived from the Latin. [7] Around the end of the 18th century, "irony" takes on another sense, primarily credited to Friedrich Schlegel and other participants in what came to be known as early German Romanticism.
Humour (Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks , which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours ( Latin : humor , "body fluid"), controlled human health and emotion.
Though in the English language there is not any standard accepted method to denote irony or sarcasm in written conversation, several forms of punctuation have been proposed. Among the oldest and frequently attested are the percontation point —furthered by Henry Denham in the 1580s—and the irony mark —furthered by Alcanter de Brahm in the ...
But the early release of dramatic tension is consistent with the holiday meanings in Old Comedy [59] and it allows the audience to relax in uncomplicated enjoyment of the spectacle, the music, jokes and celebrations that characterize the remainder of the play. The celebration of the hero's victory often concludes in a sexual conquest and ...
The adjective "comic" (Greek κωμικός kōmikós), which strictly means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage, generally confined to the sense of "laughter-provoking". [5] Of this, the word came into modern usage through the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time, passed through various shades of meaning. [6]
The word humor is a translation of Greek χυμός, [3] chymos (literally 'juice' or 'sap', metaphorically 'flavor'). Early texts on Indian Ayurveda medicine presented a theory of three or four humors (doṣas), [ 4 ] [ 5 ] which they sometimes linked with the five elements ( pañca-bhūta ): earth, water, fire, air, and space.
Both the concept and the etymology of the word, while being of uncertain origin, appear to stem from the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. [4] The 10th-century Byzantine Greek encyclopedia Suda traces the word's earliest roots to the notion of grinning (Ancient Greek: σαίρω, romanized: sairō) in the face of danger, or curling one's lips back at evil.