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Month: January 2019
The expurgated and unexpurgated online versions of the earliest dictionary of Macedonian Slavonic
In the leadup and midst and the aftermath of the Prespa Agreement, the Macedonia naming dispute has flared up again within Greece, and it’s never been terrain I’ve been enthusiastic about wading in to. I guess I’m on the side of those pro, being an διεθνικιστής “internationalist” = “anti-nationalist”, as my non-“internationalist” friend George Baloglou […]
Karamanlidika orthography
I blogged about Phanariot in the last post, but what I actually wanted to talk about was something far more tangential. Phanariot, as we discussed, was filled to the brim with Turkish loanwords. Phanariot was still Greek, and it was still written in Greek script. That included the Turkish loanwords in the Greek. But the […]
Phanariot: an apology for Schleicherian bias
I was recently perusing Peter Mackridge’s paper Some literary representations of spoken Greek before nationalism 1750-1801, and I got sidetracked by an incidental footnote on diacritics use in Karamanlidika in the 18th century. And now, to unpack. Peter Mackridge is the emeritus professor of Modern Greek in Oxford. He has written a wealth of papers […]
Updated post on the etymology of βύσσινο “sour cherry”
I have expanded my old Quora post http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/2016-04-13-what-is-the-etymology-of-the-russian-word-vishnya-cherry-there-seems-to-be-a-connection-to-the-turkish-word/ and just had it published in Greek on Nikos Sarantakos’ blog: https://sarantakos.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/nikolaou Yes, this does mean I’m coming back. Eventually.