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Category: Writing Systems
Shevchenko in Mariupolitan and Urum
The following are translations of Taras Shevchenko’s Testament into Mariupolitan Greek and Urum. They appeared in 1993 side by side, in a volume of (mostly Greek) translations of Shevchenko, the Ukraine’s national poet. The texts appeared in Cyrillic—including Kostoprav’s abridged translation, which would originally have appeared in the Soviet phonetic Greek alphabet. The transliterations into […]
Response to Kaplanis on Early Modern monotonic
These are my reactions to Kaplanis’ paper on using the monotonic for Early Modern texts. Vernacular Polytonic is Absurd: Nolo Contendere To start with, I agree with the position that applying the polytonic to Modern Greek is capricious and arbitrary and a blockage for learners. Triantafyllidis was the linguist Kaplanis cited (with tildes for circumflexes) […]
Kaplanis on Polytonic in Early Modern Greek editions
So. I’m going to summarise the Mona Lisa with a doodle, and Tasos Kaplanis’ paper on Polytonic in Early Modern Greek editions with a dot point summary. It’s my summary, not his, and I invite comment on whether it’s a fair summary (including from him). In all, I sort of agree intellectually with his conclusion; […]
On the retreat of Polytonic
I’ve been putting off this post because I lost an earlier draft to a crash. The Cloud will come back to bite us yet; but until it does, why can’t I have access to the Cloud on the train? Without having to remember to top up my wireless modem? So, it started a few weeks […]
Tsakonian orthographic reform
If you’re Hubert Pernot, the great hellenist whose grammar of Tsakonian is a Neogrammarian masterwork, Tsakonian gets written in some bizarre adaptation of a bizzare French dialectological alphabet (Gillieron-Rousselot, which seems to have evolved into the French Romance transcription.) If you’re Agathocles Haralambopoulos, former prof at Aristotle Uni who did his doctorate on Tsakonian phonology, […]
Pontic in Cyrillic orthography
I’m perusing that Russian Pontian forum some more. The Pontic is done in Roman script by some (default foreign script these days, I suppose), and Cyrillic by others. The Mariupolitan I’d seen in print had a systematic mapping, including Дъ and Тъ for ð and θ. Things are more chaotic here: θ is usually ф—the […]
Greek in Turkish orthography
In the history of Greek, Greek adjusts to the orthography of the culture it falls under; and cultures have their own scripts. So the Catholic Greeks, and the Greeks of the Venetian cultural sphere, wrote in Roman script with Italian spelling. The Greek-speakers of Southern Italy now write Greek in Roman script with Southern Italian […]