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How do you feel when a foreigner speaks in your local accent/dialect? Are you offended when a foreigner imitates your local accent?
Intellectually, I want to love it.
Regrettably, being human, I freak out. Not much, just slightly, Uncanny valley-style.
Ross Daly for example is an Irishman who has lived in Crete for four decades, and a practitioner of Cretan folk music (among others). Having gone to the Cretan highlands to learn Cretan music, he speaks Greek like a Cretan highlander. And when he is interviewed on Greek TV, my reaction is… something… is… wrong here…
Like I say, intellectually, it is beyond awesome that an Irishman speaks better Cretan dialect than I can ever hope to. But the reptilian brain is tuned to using accent as an in-group marker, and it finds it jolting to see the clash between ostensive ingroup and outgroup characteristics. Like Patrick Edwin Moran said: “orange” written in purple ink.
And yes, I have the same reaction when I see the kids of African immigrants speaking idiomatic Greek on TV. And no, I am not intellectually proud of that.
I was much cooler about the Japanese PhD student whose Australian English accent was impeccable, even though she learned English as an adult. Partly because it was obvious what was happening: her accent was identical to her PhD supervisor’s, down to the intonation. (It was, after all, a phonetics PhD.)
And partly because non-ethnic-Anglos speaking English is rather less unusual than non-ethnic-Greeks speaking Greek. I didn’t bat an eyelid at Albanians speaking Greek like natives, after all. They look Greek. 🙂
I’ve inflicted that Uncanny Valley reaction in reverse, so that’s karmic revenge for you. I was speaking to a gelati seller in Lake Gardo, in my cod Italian, only to be asked “have you come from Friuli?” She could work out that I wasn’t from around there—so she assumed I was from the next district along. (The one that doesn’t speak Italian. 🙂
How do Greeks feel about references to Ancient Greece?
Depends, as with many of these things.
Yes, there is the reaction you mention. You will occasionally get Greeks (and non-Greeks) reminding you that the Roman Empire kept going for 1000 years after 476, thank you very much—though the relation of Greeks to Byzantium is more complicated than that.
There is the haunting feeling that we’ll never measure up to the ancient Greeks (one that the Byzantines shared).
There’s the reaction against that, with “we’re sick of hearing about the ancient Greeks”. You won’t get much of that aired to non-Greeks, but if you google Αρχαίοι Ημών Πρόγονοι (“Our Ancient Ancestors” in Katharevousa) and can translate what is being said, much of it makes fun of Greek ancestor-worship.
It’s a profoundly ambivalent relationship. The unlettered peasants 300 years ago had a much more straightforward relationship with the Hellenes: they were this race of pagan giants, the folk who built all them ruins; and they died out because they fell over, and couldn’t get back up…
EDIT: See also Do many modern Greeks feel a sense of failure or perhaps inferiority when compared with their ancient Greek ancestors? (where I say pretty much the same.)
What language uses 7’s and !’s?
Squamish language uses <7> conventionally to substitute for IPA <ʔ>, and I can imagine other languages doing so if their Romanisation was influenced by linguists. Squamish doesn’t use <!>, which turns up in Khoisan languages for clicks (Exclamation mark). Not convinced there’s a language that uses both, but who knows…
For the same reason of practicality, <8> substitutes in Wyandot language for <ȣ>: Ou (ligature).
What is the difference in Greek between κοίταζε and κοίταγε?
In practice: none. κοιτάω and κοιτάζω both mean “to look”, and are just morphological variants—of a kind quite common in Middle Greek, as new present tenses were being reconstructed from aorists. (Both -αζω and -αω verbs could have -ασ- aorists; so working backwards, you could end up with either present tense.)
There’s a slight register colouring in κοίταγε: for -αω verbs, Standard Modern Greek exceptionally uses a Northern Greek imperfect ending, -ουσ-, whereas Peloponnesian (on which Standard Modern Greek is based) uses -αγ-. This means that κοίταγε sounds more informal than κοιτούσε, whereas κοίταζε is unmarked.
What does it feel like to speak an almost extinct language? Does one feel a responsibility to carry it on to future generations? Does one try to practice it and not forget it?
I’ll quote what someone else in that position said (originally posted about on my blog: .sig quoting Marcel Cohen, corrected; see also Language Regained).
Marcel Cohen was a Jewish author writing in French. His first language was Judaeo-Spanish (aka Djudio, Ladino), which he barely remembered as an adult. As a one-off, he wrote a memoir in Ladino in 1985, with a parallel French translation.
At the start of the book, he writes what it feels like to use a nearly extinct language:
“Dear Antonio. I’d like to write to you in Djudio, before the language of my ancestors is completely extinguished. You can’t imagine, Antonio, what the death agony of a language is like. You seem to discover yourself alone, in silence [every day that God grants you]. You’re sikelioso [sad], without knowing why. What I’m going to record here is more or less what my mind retains of the five centuries that my ancestors spent in Turkey. I was born in Asnieres, a suburb of Paris, and my parents were in their thirties when they came to live in France. They spoke French perfectly. At the time it was the language of all the Jews of the former Ottoman Empire. They learned it at an early age in the schools of the Alliance israelite universelle, then in Istanbul at the Lycée de Galata Sarail. How could they not have loved France. This didn’t by any means stop them from speaking Judeo at home. And so it was that listening to them I was immersed in the language, without exactly speaking it myself.”
The phrase in brackets was left out in the French translation by the author: it was something the author felt that a Ladino-speaker could say, but a French-speaker could not (Laïcité and all that.)
How is rhyme used in different languages?
- Sporadically in Classical Greek and Latin, as a rhetorical technique for both prose and poetry, rather than a basis of verse: Homeoteleuton.
- Systematically in Arabic and Chinese, but I don’t know much about them.
- In Europe, rhyme emerges as a structural feature of verse (as opposed to an occasional device) in the Late Middle Ages. I see from Wikipedia (Rhyme) that the likely source was Arabic poetry. Once it got started in Europe, it migrated from place to place; in Greek, it turns up in the 14th century (Stephanos Sahlikis), under Italian influence.
Different languages differ in their tolerance of “poor” rhyme, or even their definition of it (French regards it as the final vowel; Portuguese and Esperanto as the same inflection); their tolerance of imperfect rhyme; their pursuit of identical rhyme, and so forth. The phonology of the language determines how much rhyming is possible, and therefore what kind of rhyming is desirable.
Literary fashion determines whether rhyme is still considered current or old-fashion in high literature (as opposed to song lyrics, which are arguably the mainstream modern form of poetry at least in the Anglosphere). Russian still likes rhymes; in English literary circles, rhyme is now considered a regression. (The libretto of Nixon in China was labelled rhymed, when in fact it’s largely assonance.)
Why don’t we all use the IPA?
Nice idea, but of course even spelling reform is near impossible, let along script reform—unless you’re Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and your country is post-Ottoman Turkey. And even when your language community adopts a script from scratch, practicality means the script will look a lot closer to the local majority or prestige language’s script. And the more IPA is not easily available, the more it will not be used.
Besides, historical orthographies have been argued to be a feature and not a bug.
The level of detail in the IPA would be an argument against practical use as a script, since writing systems need to be phonemic and not phonetic. In fact, the IPA was original intended to be used in less detailed mode as well as more detailed mode; the original proposal for example said that you could use <e> instead of <ɛ>, if your language didn’t have a contrast between the two. But that detail has been largely ignored.
The IPA would still need some tweaking to be used as a practical script, anyway. Or at least, the people behind the Africa Alphabet thought so…
Why are Greeks so leftist?
Good question! I trust someone more knowledgable will reply (who actually lives there now).
Of course, not all Greeks are leftist, and as with much of the West, the nominal left-wing parties have drifted further and further to the centre (Panhellenic Socialist Movement, PASOK). There are two related questions here: why has the Left been historically so strong in Greece in the 20th century; and why is Syriza so strong now?
Historical reasons include:
- the large number of dispossessed refugees from Asia Minor, and the ongoing low standard of living in the population until fairly recently;
- the lack of rule of law, which meant that people did not trust the government and were attracted to radical alternatives;
- repressive regimes for a large chunk of the 20th century;
- clientelism from the conservative governments (which was a problem right up until the Socialists took power, and ran their own clientelist state);
- left-wing alignment and advocacy from many of the musicians and authors of Greece. (Don’t underestimate the recruiting potential of Mikis Theodorakis back in the day.)
Elsewhere in the west, the mainstream left parties have drifted to the centre, and no further-left parties have taken their place. The Greens are doing well, but they have not overtaken the social-democrats. Greece is an exception, and that’s the second question: why is Greece the one country where the former Euro-Communists are (nominally) running the show?
The answer of course is that Greece has been pushed to the wall in the past five years, and voters have lost all faith in the mainstream parties — the mainstream left more than the mainstream right, since the mainstream left is felt to have sold out on its principles, while the mainstream right hasn’t.
That’s why New Democracy (Greece) still exists, and has not been cannibalised by Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) or (shudder) Golden Dawn (political party). Not so for PASOK: in the past couple of decades, they have pretty much swapped percentages with SYRIZA, and have barely scraped in to parliament.
What is the historical significance of Thessaloniki, Greece?
Up and coming city in the Roman Empire. Was the base of the Emperor Galerius. Very important city during Byzantium, to the extent of being termed the Co-Queen of Cities (συμβασιλεύουσα—the Queen of Cities being Constantinople). Main trading town for much of the Balkans. Major centre of Sephardic settlement after their expulsion from Spain—to the extent of being a largely Jewish city until the 20th century, and an inspiration to Zionists. Lots of historical architecture spanning a very long period. Having been the Co-Queen of Byzantium, is now the Co-Capital of Greece (συμπρωτεύουσα). Has traditionally been the refuge of progressive intellectuals, though commentators have noted that the dust of reaction has settled around it more recently.
How many Indigenous Australian languages are there? How similar are they?
At the time of European invasion *cough* settlement, the guesstimate is 200. The guesstimate is based on poor data, since many were wiped out so quickly, and on Lexicostatistics — because we don’t have enough data to make a good linguistic assessment of what counts as a different language otherwise.
We could of course ask the indigenous Australians themselves how many languages there were. Their answer will be closer to 600, which was the number of distinct tribes — because like people everywhere else, their notion of what counted as a distinct language was based on identity politics rather than mutual intelligibility. (I see that Wikipedia is now using the identity politics answer rather than the white linguists’ answer: Australian Aboriginal languages ).
That’s a distinct answer from how many languages are alive today, being passed on to new speakers, and not revived from written sources after going extinct. That answer is closer to a dozen or so.
How similar are they? Tasmanian is very poorly attested (likely nine distinct languages jumbled up in a concentration camp), but we are pretty sure they have no detectable relation to the mainland languages. The bottom 2/3 of the mainland belong to the Pama–Nyungan languages, meaning they have discernable similarities. Given that pana means “man” in one end of the family and nyunga means “man” in the other end, they aren’t that similar. The guesstimate is that they are of a similar time-depth as Indo-European, 5000 years.
The top 1/3 of the mainland are heterogeneous, and are not particularly close to each other; it doesn’t seem to have been definitively proven that they are related to Pama-Nyungan, either.