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Month: April 2009
News in Tsakonia, 1895
When Thanasis Costakis, fresh out of high school, sat down in 1930 with Hubert Pernot to give him language data, Tsakonian was still quite different from Standard Greek, not just in morphology, but syntax as well. The phrase I keep coming back to is αρχίνηε κχαούντα “he started barking”: participles could still be the complements […]
Tsakonian orthographic reform
If you’re Hubert Pernot, the great hellenist whose grammar of Tsakonian is a Neogrammarian masterwork, Tsakonian gets written in some bizarre adaptation of a bizzare French dialectological alphabet (Gillieron-Rousselot, which seems to have evolved into the French Romance transcription.) If you’re Agathocles Haralambopoulos, former prof at Aristotle Uni who did his doctorate on Tsakonian phonology, […]
How to teach historical linguistics
It was 1991, and I was an engineering student who was not interested in engineering, and for whom the joy of mathematics had recently been killed by the “Shut Up And Learn The Formula” approach to the proof of Fourier Transforms. I met a girl at a party, and followed her into a linguistics course. […]
Pontic in Cyrillic orthography
I’m perusing that Russian Pontian forum some more. The Pontic is done in Roman script by some (default foreign script these days, I suppose), and Cyrillic by others. The Mariupolitan I’d seen in print had a systematic mapping, including Дъ and Тъ for ð and θ. Things are more chaotic here: θ is usually ф—the […]
Greek in Turkish orthography
In the history of Greek, Greek adjusts to the orthography of the culture it falls under; and cultures have their own scripts. So the Catholic Greeks, and the Greeks of the Venetian cultural sphere, wrote in Roman script with Italian spelling. The Greek-speakers of Southern Italy now write Greek in Roman script with Southern Italian […]
Little Grammar of Early Modern Greek
First up, it’s very little. I mean, srsly, very very little. But: the TLG has been entering Early Modern Vernacular Greek works for a little while into its corpus. The proofreaders are classicists, and they have on occasion tried to make these texts much more Classical than they need to be. (ποτέ in Modern Greek […]