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Month: December 2017
Kaliarda XXVIII: Sarantakos
Nikos Sarantakos has just published on his blog a report on Spatholouro’s finds in his blog comments of early attestation of Kaliarda, as already reported here. My thanks to him for disseminating Spatholouro’s findings more widely, as they deserve. There’s not a lot of new information in the article, but he does mention that Manganareas’ […]
Kaliarda XXVII: Biondo
Thanks to friend of this blog Kostas Karapotosoglou, I’ve consulted Raffaela Biondo’s honours thesis on Lubunca from Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice: Lubunca: Lo slang queer del turco. Usi e funzioni sociolinguistiche a Istanbul e Berlino. The research contribution of Biondo’s thesis is a survey of attitudes towards Lubunca by gay Turks in Turkey and Germany, […]
Kaliarda XXVI: Lubunca
Just when I thought I was done. Anna T’s article I just posted on mentioned Nicholas Kontovas’ 2012 M.A. thesis on Lubunca, the Turkish Gay Cant that until now I only knew of from Khyuchukov & Bakker’s 1999 paper. The first 9 pp of Kontovas’ thesis are available online. They’re actually enough to answer a […]
Kaliarda XXV: Anna T.
The last article I was going to look at was Anna T.‘s The Opacity of Queer Languages. There are some good points there, although it’s in the domain of queer theory that I’m not as conversant in: Kaliarda and other queer cants are neither visible nor invisible, but opaque—straight onlookers know that you’re speaking in […]
Kaliarda XXIV: Korovinis and Perdikea
Trying to wrap up this series, I’ve come across two more Kaliarda texts online. The first is a chapter from a 2010 novel by Thomas Korovinis, Ο γύρος του Θανάτου [The tour of death], with nine protagonists in Salonica of the 50s. One of them is a trans sex worker, and her narrative has a […]
Kaliarda XXIII: Dortika
I’ve left till late a comparison of Kaliarda with Dortika, the earliest researched of the Greek para-Romani cants; and the points to be made here have already been substantively made elsewhere, including in comparison with the Turkish Gay cant (which is also clearly para-Romani), and in Sechidou’s article on Greek para-Romanis. Kaliarda is different from […]
Kaliarda XXII: Minniti-Gonias
Domenica Minniti-Gonias’ study on “Italian and Heptanesian words in Greek slang” (specifically in Kaliarda) is significant because the Italian component of Kaliarda is one of the two core differentiators of Kaliarda from other Greek cants. (The other being its schematic approach to Romani vocabulary.) Montoliu already identified that Italian is a large and old component […]
Kaliarda XXI: Hatzidakis
The discussion on Sarantakos’ blog had derailed from Kaliarda to Lupine beans, because of how Faltaits had rendered Lubinistika as Lupinarika (possibly conflating it with the Roman lupinaria). In bringing the discussion back, Spatholouro popped yet another rabbit out of his archival research. To come back, as we should, from lupines to lubines, I had […]
Kaliarda XX: Tsipis, Antonakos
Sarantakos commenter BLOG_OTI_NANAI has found more two pieces from the Police Chronicles (Αστυνομικά Χρονικά) magazine, which also confirm the association of Lubinistika with both cis female prostitutes and “catamites”. The first comes from 1953, by K. Tsipis: A language of similar type and intent is also widely used in brothels, the circles of catamites, ande […]
Kaliarda XIX: Kostas in Larissa
Commenter Kostas on Sarantakos’ blog offered the following recollection of Kaliarda from the 1970s: I’ve already written this on another past. This is what a passive homosexual used to say, as I recollect it: —dziˈnavis ta javerˈda? —ˈama ðen ˈpesi o berˈdes ðen ˈexi kuraˈverta —θa su kuraverˈtaro ke tin ˈpulia He went around the […]