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Month: November 2017
Kaliarda III: The Romani basis of Kaliarda
NOTE: Updates on The Romani basis of Kaliarda, updated. What Petropoulos had not picked up on in his first edition was that the base of the distinctive lexicon of Kaliarda is Romani—something that he had emended by the second edition. There is precedent for a Romani base in other Greek cants—notably the builders’ cant Dortika […]
Kaliarda II: Petropoulos’ description
Having given what little information Petropoulos gives about the gay community that spoke Kaliarda, I am moving on to discussion of the cant itself. I’m putting Petropoulos’ own linguistic observations up first, with some comments of my own. I’m going to be vacillating between Greek and IPA for this, because I want to make sure […]
The speakers of Kaliarda
I’ve namechecked Kaliarda, the gay Greek cant, several times on this blog. There is still a dearth of English-language information on Kaliarda; and since this blog is about making Greek linguistics more googlable in English, I’m going to attempt to remedy that. In this post, I’m going to start by giving what information is to […]
αγορίνα I: The patriarchally safe meanings
I was asked to weigh in a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, on the provenance of the contemporary Greek slang word αγορίνα. It’s a term I myself, being in the diaspora, had not heard before this year, and I was suitably taken aback when I did first hear it. (“She’s calling me a female […]
Future Imperfect
Latin and Greek both had an indicative tense called the Future Perfect. The tense described a event occurring in future time, but with perfective aspect—something complete in the future. The future perfect fits neatly into the matrix of possible tenses of Greek: it has the reduplication of Greek perfect tenses, but the -s- ending of […]
Counterpoint: Against Derivational Morphology
Matt Treyvaud has refuted my argument in In Defence of Derivational Morphology, in the following comment which I’m happy to repost: “Speciesism” was a better choice than “specism” for the English word. Even an English speaker who was perfectly fluent in Latin would have chosen “speciesism” if they had any taste at all. To the […]
In defence of derivational morphology
In my post on the formation of speciesism, I noted that Speciesism is a coinage so clueless about how Latin works, it could only have been coined in English, and in English after people stopped learning classical languages, at that. (It dates from 1970.) The -es in Latin is an inflection. You never ever put […]
The Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität is complete
The Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität published its first fascicle in 1994 as a joint project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Bonn, under the direction of Erich Trapp, and after a decade of preparatory work. The Lexikon started out as the Dictionary of Byzantine Greek focussing on the 9th to 12th centuries—but, in […]
Is the σου in καλή σου ἡμέρα out of place in Northern Greek
In a previous post, I mused that the use of καλή σου ἡμέρα “Good day to you” in Constantinople, in texts such as De Cerimoniis from the 10th century, was problematic—since by then the dialect split was meant to be in place, between genitive pronouns in the South (Southern Italy), and accusative pronouns in the […]