In the last few posts, I’ve worked through the analogies that have extended the o-vocative into proper names: M1–M5, O2–O6. There was to-ing and fro-ing, there was nebulous definition and redefinition of rules, there was a whole ballet of criteria. But the ballet orchestration can be formulated: the rules for the analogy are sweeping, even […]
So far we have accounted for: M1: Bisyllabic common nouns that used to be third declension: ˈɣeros “old man”, ˈðjakos “deacon”. (Ancient ɡérɔːn, diákɔːn). M2: Bisyllabic truncated, informal given names: ˈɣjorɣos, ˈnikos, ˈðimos (corresponding to the formal forms ɣeorɣios, nikolaos, ðimitrios) “George, Nick, Dimitri” M3: The trisyllabic (truncated) name aˈlekos “Alec” O2: Bisyllabic formal given […]
So we have the messy data on the distribution of the o-vocative in Greek. And we have the tools to try and make sense of that distribution, in terms of features that classes of nouns with the o-vocative have in common. We also, as it turns out, have an entire PhD thesis on the o-vocative: […]
We have seen the data on the spread of o-vocatives in Modern Greek. I will post how I make sense of the data. But first, some preliminaries about analogy. How analogy works Analogy in language change takes a linguistic rule that applies to one word or paradigm or category, and starts applying it to another […]
This is a story of analogy, based on an article at Nikos Sarantakos’ blog (because the traffic between our two blogs has ever been two-way). Sarantakos’ article in turn cites an older blog post by Giannis Haris, which cites two grammars of Modern Greek. The story is the retreat of the vocative in Modern Greek. […]
Michalis Bourboulis wrote the lyrics for Your Firework Eyes. Michalis Bourboulis has been interviewed about his greatest songs, including Your Firework Eyes. You can be a great artist, and still be a dick. For that matter, you can be a great artist, and still be clueless about what you’ve wrought. Bullying Stamos Semsis, the songwriter […]
Your Firework Eyes, Τα βεγγαλικά σου μάτια, is a 1995 song (Lyrics: Michalis Bourboulis, Music: Stamos Semsis), first sung by Giorgos Dalaras, and covered the following year by Dimitris Mitropanos. It is a moving, fragile, beautiful song about the loss of love. And there are some interesting things about how it was put together, that […]
I am about to post here on late song renderings by Dimitris Mitropanos, and there’s something about what he did with his late repertoire that was special, but that I couldn’t quite put a name to. Mitropanos had a decades-long career as a Laiko artist: he worked in the mainstream Greek bouzouki pop tradition, singing […]
I have consolidated my old Quora posts http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/2016-10-01-what-did-your-language-sound-like-1-000-years-ago/ and http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/2016-10-05-what-did-your-language-sound-like-500-years-ago/, and just had it published in Greek on Nikos Sarantakos’ blog: https://sarantakos.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/nikolaou-3
In the Textkit Greek and Latin Forum, Bedwere has been translating Sigrid Albert’s Imaginum Vocabularium Latinum into Ancient Greek over the past year (as Λεξικὸν Ἑλληνικόν). Albert’s dictionary is a Duden-style illustrated dictionary, where concepts are organised into thematic groups, and pictures of the concepts are accompanied by Latin glosses. In the (extensive) back of […]