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Which of the Greek dialects sound harsh to a standard Greek speaker?
A most commendable question; and you’d think a Greek dialectologist would be ideally placed to answer this.
You would be wrong. Precisely because I’m used to dialects, it’s hard for me to make aesthetic judgements on them.
But let me attempt to at least posit why certain dialects might be considered harsh.
1. Cappadocian
It’s doubtful that most Greeks have ever even heard Cappadocian. Cappadocian is moribund, Cappadocians never had the numbers that Pontians had in Greece, and many Cappadocians had already shifted to Turkish before the population exchanges. So the full extent of my experience of what Cappadocian sounds like is the “Anatolian” (from Kayseri) in the 1830s dialect comedy Babel.
The Anatolian is introduced at 5:30, and yes, the very first thing he asks for is pastırma kayserili.
I’m guessing that Cappadocian will sound harsh to Greeks, because it sounds Turkish: language contact was most advanced there (even to the extent in places of vowel harmony). At an impressionistic level, it’s quite breathy, and the /a/ is back.
Then again, this recording of Pharasa [Çamlıca, Yahyalı] speakers in Greece doesn’t sound anywhere near as harsh as the music hall stereotype:
The other Anatolian dialect Pontic, by contrast, does not sound particularly harsh to me. At least, I don’t think so. Because the intonation really does soak in from the prestige language. Contrast below a newscast in Pontic in Greece (which sounds identical to Athens newscaster Greek), and a Russian Pontian speaker (who sounds, well, Russian):
EDIT: Just got this recording of Silli dialect (near Konya). Not unpleasant, but not very Greek-sounding, either:
2. Northern Greek
Northern Greek doesn’t sound particularly guttural or abrupt, but it is missing a lot of vowels. That makes it sound, at least, crunchy.
Here’s an interview with someone from Lesbos.
3. Assibilating dialects Greek
Assibilation is the process whereby non-sibilants become sibilants; in particular, tsitakismos (as the Greeks call it) is the subset of that process, whereby front [c] goes to a sibilant like [tʃ] or [tɕ]; palatalisation also made [s] go to [ʃ] in a lot of dialects.
Standard Greek doesn’t have Postalveolar consonants, and I’d fancy that any dialect that does have them would sound harsh to Standard Greek speakers.
That’s most dialects of Greek. Cretan, Cypriot, most Northern dialects, Pontic, Cappadocian, Italiot.
3. Standard Greek
Or at least, Peloponnesian, which is what Standard Greek is based on.
Ha! The rapid-fire intonation is what I have in mind. I don’t know for a fact what Standard Greek sounded like to Cretans or Cypriots when they first heard it, before they associated it with officialdom. But given how sing-song Cretan and Cypriot is, I imaging “harsh” would be one word.
Which Byzantine stronghold was the last to survive the Ottoman conquest?
The last Greek-ish state to fall to the Ottoman Empire was the Principality of Theodoro, in 1475. You know of it as Gothia: it’s in the Crimea, where Gothic survived to be recorded in the 16th century, before yielding to Greek. The Greek of the Crimea in turn survives as Mariupol Greek.
But the Principality of Theodoro was not a Byzantine outpost; it started as part of the Empire of Trebizond, before becoming autonomous. The Empire of Trebizond, which held out until August 1461, started out claiming to be a successor state of the East Roman Empire, after the Fourth Crusade. The Empire of Nicaea and the Despotate of Epirus did too. But Nicaea was the empire that ended up taking Constantinople back; so its claim was the claim that counted. And, Wikipedia informs me,
In 1282, John II Komnenos stripped off his imperial regalia before the walls of Constantinople before entering to marry Michael’s daughter and accept his legal title of despot. However, his successors used a version of his title, “Emperor and Autocrat of the entire East, of the Iberians and the Perateia” until the Empire’s end in 1461.
So it depends on whether, by Byzantine, you mean “part of the empire calling itself Roman, and whose capital was Constantinople”; “successor state of the pre-1204 Roman Empire whose capital was Constantinople”; or “state whose official language was Greek”. I don’t feel comfortable calling a state Byzantine if it doesn’t have Byzantium.
Now, the Byzantine Empire in 1453 consisted of Constantinople and a bit of the Peloponnese, around Mystras. The Despotate of the Morea was a province of the Byzantine Empire, that remained in Greek hands past 1453, under Demetrios Palaiologos and Thomas Palaiologos, brothers of Constantine XI. Not that they called themselves emperors after 1453, and not that they did much keeping of the Morea in Greek hands: they invited the Ottomans in to subdue a revolt by Albanians, right after the fall of Constantinople: Morea revolt of 1453–54
Mehmed had enough when the Palaiologos brothers started fighting each other. Mystras surrendered to Mehmed the Conqueror in 1460. The very last fortress of the Despotate, Salmeniko Castle, held out until July 1461 under Graitzas Palaiologos.
I don’t want to dignify the post-1453 Despotate of the Morea with the name Byzantine; but unlike Theodoro and Trebizond, there really isn’t anything else to call it. And Thomas Palaiologos was recognised in the West as the rightful heir of the Byzantine Empire.
So, thanks Dimitris Sotiropoulos, for the question: I learned something new today!
What is the opposite of a girl?
Not satisfied completely with any of the answers, though C.S. Friedman and Michael Alvis are closer to my thinking, and Mack Moore and Kalo Miles are further.
Celia is closest in her initial formulation (which Michael does not contradict):
Opposites are paired items *in the same conceptual category*, with perfectly opposing (non-overlapping) qualities. To be one is to not be the other.
But the qualities not being overlapping is the most prototypical instance of opposition; you can have opposites on a cline, where there is no clear dividing line. The most clear instance of that is big and small, which are entirely subjective qualities (big and small relative to what?), and which are on a sorites scale (how many centimetres do you add to a dog’s height before it turns from small to big?)
So the fact that there is a cline of age, from infant to girl to maiden to woman to crone, is irrelevant. A woman can still be the opposite of a girl, particularly if we isolate the conceptual category as being not age, but (as Michael identified) womanhood, whether that is female + adulthood, or sexual maturity, or any of the murkier cultural constructs associated with girlhood and womanhood.
Mack’s notion that
The concept of “opposite” is geometric, geographic, or mathematical, not linguistic nor conceptual. In the observable world, few things have any actual opposite.
… well, I’ll just say that no linguist uses opposite in that extremely restrictive sense, and no layperson did either. If they did, big and small would not be opposites, because big and small are entirely conceptual and not geometric concepts (since they are subjective and contextual).
And “I’m an individual, I’m not a construct, you can’t put me in a pigeonhole”—that’s wishful thinking. Binary categories are how we understand the world. Intersex or queer individuals challenge the universal applicability of the binary category of gender; they don’t undo everyone else’s acceptance of that cultural construct for themselves.
I don’t like Michael’s answer, because I think the native speaker’s understanding of “opposite of girl” is far less refined most of the time. (It is, after all, a lay understanding.) But he is closer than Celia, in identifying that the conceptual category that the oppositeness is defined on is contextual, and in identifying several conceptual categories that it is aligned to.
If the context is sexual maturity, or adulthood, or other murkily related stuff, the opposite of girl is woman.
If the context is gender, the opposite of girl is boy.
By default? I’d say by default the opposite of girl is boy. There’s a reason Kalo Miles jumped to it. If for no other reason, because if you want to emphasise someone’s non-adulthood rather than their female gender, you don’t say “she’s only a girl!” You say “she’s only a child!”
EDIT: Oh, and the opposite wouldn’t be girls: we don’t consider inflection as making an opposite of a word. Opposites involve stems. Dictionary words, if you like. Baked in meaning.
Whats the difference between λες and πεις?
I had to correct your spelling there: πεις, not πες.
In the context you’ve given, both are subjunctives, following μη “don’t”. Λες is the present subjunctive, meaning it’s imperfective (continuous); πεις is the aorist subjunctive (perfective). So “don’t keep telling me” vs “don’t tell me” (once-off).
Why would the lyricist switch aspect in the verb? Variety: he gets to say the same thing in the chorus twice, but with a different rhyme:
http://www.stixoi.info/stixoi.ph…
Μεγάλα λόγια μη μου λες
όσα ακούω τα ξανάκουσα τόσες φορές
Μεγάλα λόγια μη μου πεις
μείνε και τίποτα μη μου υποσχεθείςDon’t keep telling me big words.
What I’m hearing I’ve heard so many times before.
Don’t tell me big words.
Stay and promise me nothing.
What role does belly dancing play in Greek culture?
I’ve read Dimitris M Papadakis’ response, and I’m quite happy to vehemently disagree with him. And of course…
Many modern Greek citizens may, of course claim otherwise, but there ought to be a distinction between those who happen to be Greek citizens and those who have a Greek mind and adhere to a Greek, that is genuinely “hellenic”, worldview.
… the disagreement is all about whether Modern Greek identity can admit any “oriental” element at all, or whether all Greek popular culture should have impeccably classical credentials.
Not a Tsifteteli
Possibly a bit closer to a Tsifteteli
The dance is certainly an innovation in Greece, and appears to have been come about with rebetiko music. While there are some elements to rebetiko that were indigenous to Greece, the major impetus for it came with refugees from Asia Minor, and tsifteteli similarly reflects Asia Minor popular culture. The claims of Byzantine or Ancient Greek antecedents are pretty blatant stretching.
It’s fair to say that the tsifteteli is low culture; word association with tsifteteli will bring up skyladiko “dog pound”, the low rent brash bouzouki joints out of town.
In my book, that’s just fine. There’s a prudishness in Greek folk culture (folk song outside of Cyprus does not acknowledge women have bodies—except for during carnival, when they only acknowledge they have bodies). The self-consciously sensuous dancing of the tsifteteli is something I find a welcome antidote to it.
Yes, it’s a dance starlets use to show off:
But notice, the cool young male thing to the left is having just as good a time of it.
One of the oddities of tsifteteli is that, quite often, it’s women that end up dancing it with each other. Not necessarily because they’re flirting with each other; more like, there isn’t enough critical mass of men feeling unselfconscious enough to join them. Which in any case means there’s a little more going on than:
None whatsoever beyond entertainment and flirting or lusting over the female body in front of you.
… and, really, they said the same about waltzes.
What do modern Greek speakers think of the phonetics of ancient Greek as it is taught in textbooks and performed (in, say, readings of Homer)? Do they think these reconstructions are accurate? Why?
What do they think? *sigh*
The students at the Classics Department in the University of Auckland have this channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/…
In which they have published three recordings of pop songs sung in Ancient Greek, with Erasmian pronunciation.
They are exceedingly clever renderings, both in translation and staging. Mama Mia even has a Sappho quote. The students at the Classics Department in the University of Auckland make me proud to be Antipodean. (Because Australians like taking credit for their cooler cousins.)
If you can read Modern Greek, and delve into the comments…
… Well, if you delve into YouTube comments, you deserve what you got. But it is particularly disspiriting. Poke your own eyes out level disspiriting. I am grateful that at least some Greeks leapt to these kids defense’ (even if a couple of them still thought Erasmian was bogus). The majority just made dick jokes (spelling “dick” in Erasmian: πόυτσο. Ha. Ha. Ha).
Most Greeks aren’t aware that Ancient Greek was pronounced differently, and too many of those who are think it’s a Western conspiracy against them. They don’t base this on any knowledge of Ancient Greek epigraphy, or any consideration of how noone is going to invent the alphabet and then come up with a dozen ways of writing /i/. They base this on a rigid refusal to think outside the Reuchlinian box of their own knowledge of Greek.
When did Orthodox Christians (normal citizens, not clergy) get access to the Bible?
I am not aware of any Orthodox ban on laypeople buying bibles, if they could afford them. It may or may not have been seen as odd before the invention of printing.
The Greek Orthodox Church did have a massive problem with translating the Bible into Modern Greek, to the extent of getting a ban on translations written into the Greek constitution. It has been possible for laypeople to buy translations since 1638 (Bible translations into Greek); but the church of Greece seems to have only officially signed off on translations since the 1990s.
The resistance was more about fetishising the source language than about wanting the great unwashed to gain access to the original. The uproar around Ioannikios Kartanos’ paraphrase of the Bible in 1536 seems likewise to have been more about the fact that he used an Italian source text with a lot of apocryphal interpolations. But the Orthodox church was certainly no fan of people making up their own minds about how to make sense of the Bible.
What IT skills are useful or necessary for linguists and linguistics students?
What they said. For fieldwork, you get a flat-file database for organising your field notes and automatically generating glosses and dictionaries. (A relational database is overkill.) Toolbox (The Field Linguist’s Toolbox) and its predecessor The Linguist’s Shoebox from SIL International are the default tools.
Databases are less useful than you might think, though I found they were useful for typological work (if you’re doing wide surveys of languages).
For Computational Linguistics, you learn Perl (if you’re living 20 years ago like I still am) or Python, and you get hold of a good software library. The premier one seems to be Natural Language Toolkit. Treat it as a starting point, but it is a very good starting point. Enough that I’ve winced and taught myself enough Python to use it, though I still find Python distasteful.
If you’re doing phonetics, you will be doing a lot of IT, to get the data, and to get statistics about the data: phonetics is a lot closer to disciplines like psychology. Like Joonas Vakkilainen, you will get familiar with R. (Or Python, I guess.) Ditto sociolinguistics, as Joonas said. But for most other fields of linguistics, you won’t likely need more stats than you can get out of Excel.
Sorry for 4 month delay in A2A, Z-Kat.
Did the Orthodox Christian church have any equivalent to the Protestant movement?
Patriarch Cyril Lucaris made overtures towards Calvinist theologians in the 1620s, and many though not all specialists believe he was pursuing a reform of the church along Calvinist lines. His contemporaries certainly thought so, and attributed the Calvinist Confession of Cyril Lucaris to him.
The Synod of Jerusalem (1672) repudiated both the Confession, and Cyril’s authorship of the Confession, three decades after Cyril’s execution.
Why does The New Yorker use a diaeresis for some double vowels?
You can use a diacritic only when it’s necessary to prevent confusion, or you can use a diacritic consistently, whenever the pronunciation goes one way rather than the other. In the former case, you reduce the number of diacritics in the language. In the latter case, you reduce the amount of pronunciation ambiguity.
English has a spelling system insane enough to be quite comfortable with pronunciation ambiguity (the more English historical phonology I learn, the more annoyed I get about it). And diacritics have never taken off in English. So the move to avoid diaereses within English, in general, makes sense: Diaeresis (diacritic).
But that’s one language community’s decision. It’s also why Pinyin users aren’t too fussed about <ü>. German does not think the same way about <ü>; and many languages value lack of ambiguity over avoiding diacritics. They don’t want to have to think about how the word is pronounced; if you have to think, you might as well use ideograms.
That’s the general principles. In the 19th century, English was friendlier towards diacritics; hence the profusion of graves like learnèd and diaereses like naïve.
Why does the New Yorker persist in the 21st century, against the global trend in English orthography?
I give you: the New Yorker logo.
It’s a consciously old-fashioned affectation. Of the kind that the New Yorker hopes its readers will find cute.