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Month: March 2011
Aeolic θᾶς “until”
This is an RTFM question, and someone must have already worked out the answer to it; but that someone didn’t work out the answer to the question in the 19th century, which would have let me look up the answer easily online. I’m actually halfway hoping that a reader will find the answer in their […]
Dictionary Updates: Kriaras, Vol. XVII; Trapp, Fasc. VII
New volumes of Kriaras’ and Trapp’s dictionaries of Greek are out. Kriaras covers Vernacular Early Modern Greek, and Trapp covers (mostly learnèd) Late Mediaeval Greek, with some overlap. For background on these dictionaries—and on the coverages of the dictionaries of Greek in general—see my earlier post on Dictionary coverage of Greek. Trapp’s Dictionary, Fascicle 7 […]
Sorting of breathings and accents in Unicode
Microsoft’s implementation of Unicode, as a recent post by Michael Kaplan points out, sorts ἒ and ἕ as the same character. In fact, it sorts identically any vowel with acute and rough breathing, and the same vowel with grave and smooth breathing. Why is it so? Allow me to get my geek on. You may […]
The declension of -ευς: Ionic forward to Modern Greek
In the last (but one) post, we worked out a reconstruction of the -ευς declension, to the point that we could explain the Homeric inflections. Where we wanted to get to was not Homer, but Aristophanes’ Attic. But once we have the proto-forms in place, we can use sound change rules and analogy to explain […]
Tsakonian documentary
Thanks to my friend George Baloglou, I’m passing on this news item from in.gr, on a new documentary on Tsakonian. Translations mine. See also the documentary website. Documentary description from the 13th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival site: Α γρούσσα νάμου / Massimo Pizzocaro, Elisavet Laloudaki In the Eastern Peloponnese, in a remote region under the shadow […]
The declension of -ευς: Homeric back to Proto-Greek
I’ve been neglecting Ancient Greek, and I don’t know that my posts on Ancient Greek are particularly quality offerings anyway. But, once again, perusing the comments of the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog has given me an idea for a posting—on Ancient rather than Modern Greek for a change. The post is no surprise to anyone […]
αμέτι μουχαμέτι: Semantics
We have just looked at the development of the syntax of αμέτι μουχαμέτι, from an Ottoman Turkish noun phrase ümmet-i Muhammed “nation of Muhammad”, to the Modern Greek adverb “come hell or high water”—which arguably has ended up, in a limited sense, as a noun comparable in function to σκοπός “purpose” or όρκος “oath”. And […]
αμέτι μουχαμέτι: Syntax
We saw in the last post the evidence for the development of αμέτι μουχαμέτι in the 19th century, from the Ottoman Turkish ümmet-i Muhammed “nation of Muhammed”, to the Modern Greek “come hell or high water”. We can already get a fair idea of how the meaning shifted, from the examples Vasilis Orfanos produced—and which […]
αμέτι μουχαμέτι, “Come Hell or High Water”
As I alluded to in the previous post, this post is about how the Ottoman phrase ümmet-i Muhammed, “Nation of Muhammad”, turned into the Modern Greek expression αμέτι μουχαμέτι, “come hell or high water”. The material for this post is taken from the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog—as much of the material on this blog is. […]
άμε and άντε: Semantics Persistence in Modern Greek hortative particles
Vasilis Orfanos wrote a magisterial post on αμέτι μουχαμέτι, which I alluded to last post, and which am using to base the next post on. (Or maybe the post after that.) To acknowledge my debt, this is a post on a topic he requested from me a few weeks back. The topic in turn is […]