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Month: November 2017
Kaliarda XIII: The Turkish Gay Cant
I’ve found the paper by Kyuchukov & Bakker on the gay cant of Istanbul. Spatholouro’s find and Montoliu’s had built up my expectations that this would be a carbon copy of Kaliarda, with the same polyglot amusements and compounding hilarity. Maybe it was; but the vocabulary Kyuchukov & Bakker recorded is just straight Romani words—like […]
Kaliarda XII: Attestation from 1904, 1934, and 1938
I’d been impressed with Spatholouro, commenter at Nikos Sarantakos’ Greek Langauge blog, for his detective skills with old Greek newspapers, from a recent article he wrote about inconsistencies in Markos Vamvakaris’ autobiography. Greek linguistics owes Spatholouro a massive debt for the find he just posted at Sarantakos’ blog, reacting to my mention of this series […]
Kaliarda XI: Christodoulou
Katerina Christodoulou’s 2016 thesis A lexicological analysis of slang vocabulary of Modern Greek is a thorough analysis of the morphology, semantics and pragmatics of multiple Greek slang variants, old and new, and of the colloquial use of obscenities. Kaliarda is one of the old variants studied; while most attention is given to contemporary youth slang […]
Kaliarda X: The etymology of Kaliarda musando, Mainstream Greek Slang musi “fake”
A Kaliarda adjective that poses an interesting etymological conundrum is musando “fake”. It is interesting both because it is in a chicken-and-the-egg relationship with Mainstream Greek Slang musi “fake”, and because the etymology of both could be Romani, Turkish, French, Greek, or likelier a conflation of all four. The data for this comes from a […]
Kaliarda IX: Montoliu
I’ve already posted the etymological information from Montoliu’s 2005 paper on Kaliarda. This is what else the paper covers: p. 300. There is a Romani-based gay cant used in Istanbul. The Istanbul cant and Kaliarda share words and linguistic features, and may be related from Ottoman times. p. 301. Kaliarda is derived from Romani kaljardo […]
Kaliarda VIII: Pavrianos, Klynn
In this post, I give two somewhat extensive texts in Kaliarda, that give a better flavour of the language than I’ve found elsewhere—even if they don’t date from the 1960s, let alone the 1920s. The first is a 2013 pop song, Καλιαρντοσύνες “Kaliardadoms”, with lyrics by Giorgos Pavrianos, and sung by Betty Vakalidou; recall that […]
Kaliarda VII: The Romani basis of Kaliarda, updated
I have found a copy of Montoliu’s paper on Kaliarda. I will post on it separately, but I’m going to use the opportunity to supplement the Romani etymologies provided by Poniroskilo on slang.gr, with the extensive etymologies provided by Montoliu. Where a term appears in both Poniroskilo and Montoliu, I have gone with Poniroskilo’s transliteration […]
Kaliarda VI: Revenioti
The trans activist Paola Revenioti has made a series of documentaries in recent years about sundry aspects of Greek society. On of these was a a documentary about Kaliarda in 2014; the trailer is available on YouTube: There is an interview with her on Lifo magazine about the documentary, as well as an extensive review; […]
Kaliarda V: Romvos, Angelou, Gkartzonika
I noted that there was a dearth of material online on Kaliarda. There is a dearth, but not as much as when I posted about it in 2010. I will come back to two more extensive sources in later posts: the 2015 documentary on Kaliarda by trans activist Paola Revenioti, and Katerina Christopoulou’s 2016 PhD […]
Kaliarda IV: Petropoulos’ addenda on Kaliarda
It turns out that the edition available online of Petropoulos’ Kaliarda is his second edition—which is just his first edition with an addendum. So I’m going to supplement the information I gave from his first edition. I’m again going to limit myself to what he says about Kaliarda and his speakers, and how he engaged […]