Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

(Language advisory yet again. Since, on the one hand I will be linking to slang.gr a lot, and on the other I’m guessing some of my readership would rather not see this kind of language, I’m open to suggestions on a more succinct rating system. Extra alert: there’s a reference to blasphemy in this post as well.)

Following up from the preceding post on obscene compounds starting with verbs, I’m linking to the slang.gr entry for the use of γαμο- as a prefix, for two reasons.

The first reason is, the entry identifies other instances in the slang.gr dictionary of /ɣam/ as the first part of a compound, and it highlights its linguistic oddity. The first oddity is, these compounds are unusual as forming a verb-initial compound class. Verb–noun compounds in Modern Greek are probably as productive as the Early Modern English equivalent John Cowan pointed to in comments (tosspot, scofflaw), but they’re still not all that common, and they’re restricted to the colloquial register.

The second oddity is that /ɣam/ can be used as a productive expletive attaching to any noun, without actually referring to the act of copulation. As in γαμοσταυρόλεξο “fucking crossword”.

That’s sort of news to me, but slang.gr does not lie. My ossified Greek is familiar with σκατο- “shitty” in that usage instead (like German Scheiß-). I’m guessing this use of is γαμο- is recent, and is transparently a borrowing from English—just like the expletive I actually have heard recently, γαμημένος “fucked”.

Hence the incredulous slogan once Greece started to look likely to win the 2004 European UEFA championship: σήκωσέ το το γαμημένο, δεν μπορώ, δεν μπορώ να περιμένω, “lift it up, the fucking thing [the trophy], I can’t wait any more”. Subsequently coopted by the mass media, where it was necessarily bowdlerised to τιμημένο, “the honoured thing”.

But then, slang calques, as the Balkans richly attests: today it’s English, yesterday it was other hegemoniacal languages. You don’t think τρώω ξύλο “eat wood” for “get beaten up” comes straight from Homer, do you?

I’d add that a quotative use of γαμώ (as in, the word used in a compound actually quotes its use in full as a verb in a phrase) is possible some times, as vikar posits in his post on γαμο-, and indeed has been conventional in spelling. Compounds like γαμωσταυρίδι “I-fuck-cross-thing = blasphemous swearing” is a reference to the oath γαμώ το σταυρό σου “I fuck your cross”, and can be interpreted as the embedded quotation «γαμώ-[το-]σταυρ-»ίδι. In that case, the omega (“I-fuck-cross-thing”) can be justified, it really is an inflection. That kind of quotation in compound does come up elsewhere in slang, as in ωχαδελφισμός “‘Come-On-Brother’-ism = systematic indifference”.

(There was a pretty decent English Wikipedia article on ωχαδελφισμός once, but it’s been whittled down. Yes, it’s not encyclopaedic, but it is lexicological…)

You could argue the same for γαμαοδέρνουλας, as I did in passing: that γαμαο- is quoting the first verb of γαμάω και δέρνω, so it should be spelled like an inflected verb. But that’s highly unusual for Greek in general—and γαμαωδέρνουλας “Lord Master ‘I-Fuck-and-Bash'” looks even stranger than γαμαοδέρνουλας “Lord Master Fuck-and-Bash” already looks.

But internal inflection is still a barrier to a compound being linguistically acceptable: it violates the sense of the compound being a single linguistic unit. French-inspired compounds like παιδιά-θαύματα “child[ren]-wonders”, λέξεις-κλειδιά “key-words”, like English singers-cum-songwriters, don’t comply with that notion, admittedly. Τhen again, without the linking /-o-/, and precisely because the two halves inflect independently, they shouldn’t really be considered compounds at all. They’re more a coordinated phrase, minus the and coordinator.

The test for whether to use an omega or an omicron in such compounds as γαμαοδέρνουλας or γαμοσπέρνω, as vikar rightly says, is whether you could conceivably have another inflection on the first half of the compound. Can you use expressions like χεσε-μεσ-όβιος (imperative), έγραψες-ατζής (aorist), κλαφ-τα-Χαραλαμπ-άκιας (imperative)? Well, nothing’s really impossible in language, but only the last one sounds plausible to me. (I could argue why, but I’ve detoured enough in this post already.)

The other reason for this post is that vikar has given me a shout out in his own post. I am very, very far from being above that kind of thing.

I return the favour by retracting my definition of slang.gr, as the Greek equivalent of Urban Dictionary. The Urban Dictionary *wishes* it was both as entertaining and as erudite as slang.gr. Seriously, for all the shaggy dog stories and obscenity and made up words over there, slang.gr has some serious linguistic analysis going on. There are reasons why slang.gr has done better than Urban Dictionary: its format encourages longer definitions, and it has a much smaller and more focussed community behind it. It’s sort of a blog vs a microblog approach to online lexicography.

In the last post, I showed that the slang.gr coinage γαμαοδέρνουλας made an odd choice in its first stem, using /ɣama-/ instead of /ɣam-/ as the stem—although Modern Greek speakers would typically interpret /-a-/ as part of the verb inflection. You can interpret /-a-/ as part of the stem, but the interpretation is novel and restricted enough that the compound looks wrong.

But people don’t just do random stuff in their morphology, even on slang.gr. There is a reason why the coiner of the word chose to use that odd stem. To explain it, I’m going to write about the verb–noun and verb–verb compounds of Modern Greek.

Language advisory still applies.

I’ve written about verb–verb compounds elsewhere with Brian Joseph, in what may be my last linguistics paper; it has a response by Paul Kiparsky which makes historical sense of why this linguistic innovation happened, and (I’ve just googled) seems to have provoked another paper by Angela Ralli. The verb–verb compounds are dvandvas; the V₁V₂ compound can be paraphrased as “V₁ and V₂“.

The phenomenon needs to be explained, because verb dvandvas, such as μπαινοβγαίνω “enter–exit = go in and out” are very unusual by European standards; in fact, Modern Greek’s the only place they turn up. English arguably has them as well, as in freeze–dry; then again, typologically English is a lot closer to Chinese anyway…

I’ve written about the history of the construction there, and Kiparsky has written more, but for this post, we’re going to concentrate on two features of the dvandvas: the tense they use, and the form of the first stem.

Verb dvandvas are often antonyms, and they refer to the alternation of V₁ and V₂: μπαινοβγαίνω “go in and go out”, αναβοσβήνω “light up and extinguish = flicker”. Even when they don’t, they still refer to repetitive action: στριφογυρίζω “twist and turn”. That means they always turn up in imperfective aspect—corresponding to the present stem: the V₁ will never appear in the aorist stem, which has perfective aspect. So αναβοσβήνω “I am lighting up and extinguishing”, not *αναψοσβήνω “I have lit up and am existinguishing” or αναψοέσβησα “I have lit up and exstinguished”. (George Chortatzis uses εμπαινοβγήκα in the aorist for “I went in and out”; that’s not allowed in the contemporary standard, and its V₁ stem is still in the present tense form.) The one exception I could find was λυσοδένω “untie–and–tie”, rather than λυνοδένω; and that was clearly influenced by the similar αλυσοδένω “bind in chains”.

This is in contrast with Verb–Noun compounds, which are a bit older in Greek, and are a particular feature of Greek slang. In those compounds, the verb is typically in the perfective (aorist), ever since Demosthenes’ φυγόδικος “flee-trial = fugitive”. Thus, σπασαρχίδης “ball-buster”, κλαψομούρης “cry-face”. It is in the perfective even when the verb clearly refers to habitual activity, as in χασοδίκης “lawyer who keeps losing trials”, αλλαξοκωλιά “ongoing exchange of arses = being a switch sexually; intimate friendship”. The present stem can be used, but is rarer: σπαζοκεφαλιά “bust-head-ness = brain-teaser”.

However, both VN and V₁V₂ compounds are unusual to being with, because they start with a verb. Compounding in Greek, as in most languages, normally starts with a noun. As a result, there is a tendency in V₁V₂ and VN compounds to make those V₁ verbs look more like nouns. The first way of doing that is stripping tense suffixes from the verb, if you can get away with it. What’s left behind will look like a noun—and often enough actually is a noun, if noun and verb share the same root.

You can get away with stripping the tense suffix if the tense suffix has a vowel in it. If the tense is formed by just appending a consonant, or by changing the root vowel, you leave it alone. So:

• Present μπαιν-, Aorist μπηκ-: nothing to strip, so μπαινοβγαίνω “go in and out”
• Present παιζ- (*παιγ-j-), Aorist παιξ- (*παιγ-σ-): no vowel in suffix, so παιζογελώ “play and laugh”
• Present χαν- , Aorist χασ-: no vowel in suffix, so χασοδίκης “lose-trial, incompetent lawyer”
• Present γελ-(άω), Aorist γελ-ασ-: no vowel in present suffix (we’re discounting the γαμαοδέρνουλας form), so γελοκλαίω “laugh and cry”

But:

• Present σκοτ-ων- (*σκοτ-ο-), Aorist σκοτ-ωσ-, Noun σκοτ-: σκοτοψώμης “killbread, one so hungry he hunts down and kills loaves of bread”
• Present ζυμ-ων-, Aorist ζυμ-ωσ-, Noun ζυμ-: ζυμοφουρνίζω “knead and bake”
• Present ανεβ-αιν-, Aorist ανεβ-ηκ-: ανεβοκατεβαίνω “go up and down”

Even more compelling, some verbs have been distorted to forms they never have in isolation, to look more like nouns:

• στρίβω + γυρίζω: στριφογυρίζω “twist and turn”, cf. noun στροφή “turn”
• κλέβω + κότα: κλεφτοκοτάς “thieve-chicken, chicken thief”, cf. noun κλέφτης “thief”
• σκάβω + κλαδεύω: σκαφοκλαδεύω “dig and prune”, cf. noun σκαφή “digging”

(However, στρίβω does have a variant στρέφω, and κλεφτοκοτάς does alternate with κοτοκλέφτης, so these examples may not be that compelling.)

Equipped with all that, we come back to γαμαοδέρνουλας. The coinage is V+V+noun suffix: it first coins a verb dvandva, γαμαοδέρνω “fuck and bash”, summarising the phrase γαμάω και δέρνω, and then it attaches the augmentative ουλας, “someone big who fucks and bashes”. The coinage is *not* VN, like αλλαξοκωλιά or χασοδίκης. So the V₁ could not appear in its aorist form, as *γαμησοδέρνουλας. It couldn’t appear like that anyway, since the aorist suffix -ησ- contains a vowel, and so is too obtrusively verblike.

Which means the dvandva should be the imperfective γαμοδέρνω, just like other dvandvas whose V₁ is an -αω verb: γελοκλαίω, γεννοσπέρνω, γεννοβολώ, τσιμποφιλώ. The V₁ should look like a noun.

The thing is, it does look like a noun, because the related noun already exists: γάμος “wedding”. (Γαμέω “marry” was just the denominative verb derived from γάμος.) But unusually, the noun and verb have diverged appreciably in meaning, so the verb looking like the noun can be confusing. We could conclude that γαμαοδέρνω was coined instead, to avoid a confusing ambiguity with “wedding-bashing”, especially when NV compounds are much more prevalent than VV compounds.

We could say that; after all the compound was coined by a single person, and they may well have consciously thought: “γαμοδέρνω. Hm. Sounds like weddings. Better drag it out to γαμαοδέρνω just to make sure I’m understood.” If I say αυτός γαμοδέρνει “he XXX”, it does indeed sound like it shouldn’t be referring to coitus.

But ambiguity is not as effective a driver of language phenomena as we might expect. There is a much more real ambiguity in γαμοτράγουδα between “weddings songs” and its actual meaning, “songs about fucking”. But that hasn’t prevented γαμο- being understood as the verb in the compound: noone has felt the need to use *γαμαοτράγουδα.

There is a second reason why you would say γαμαοδέρνω: γαμαο- /ɣama-o-/ sounds identical to γαμάω /ɣama-o/, the inflected 1st singular form in γαμάω και δέρνω. We wouldn’t expect the first half of a compound to be inflected, of course; in fact Hatzidakis expended some ink in refuting spellings like μπαινωβγαίνω, and arguing that this really was just a compound with a linking /-o-/ —the second person is μπαινοβγαίνεις and not *μπαινεισβγαίνεις, so the vowel isn’t doing any inflecting.

We wouldn’t want to go back to the bad old days of 1840s spelling with *γαμαωδέρνω; but the colloquial flavour of γαμάω would have encouraged the coiner to echo it in γαμαοδέρνω. The compound isn’t actually quoting the original phrase literally: it isn’t «γαμάω και δέρνω»-ουλας /ɣamaokeðernoulas/ “Lord Master ‘I fuck and bash'”, and the connecting “and” and the second verb inflection have been dropped. But the phonology of the verb in the phrase would have influenced the coiner’s phonology in the compound, especially if they hesitated over the ambiguity of γαμοδέρνω.

Those of you that have made it that far may well be rolling your eyes by now. “Surely people don’t go through this amount of geometry whenever they make up some crappy little joke compound.” They don’t do it consciously and deliberatively, certainly; the whole thing may have been a second of hesitation, and driven by intuition rather than ratiocination. But the intuition itself is based on rules and structures: the understanding of how Modern Greek compound works is not divine revelation, it’s picked up from patterns, and it’s followed quite diligently.

In fact, that’s the real reason why γαμαοδέρνουλας sounds odd. Not because the analysis of /ɣama/ as a stem is impossible: people wouldn’t be saying γαμάω if it was. But because stems ending in /a/ haven’t made it to compounds yet: people’s linguistic intuition is based on precedent, and without precedent for stems ending in /a/, they’ve never seen an /ao/ cluster in a compound before. So the /ao/ cluster in γαμαοδέρνουλας is jarring.

Which may well be the point of the compound. If you know the rules (intuitively), you also know when to break them, to greater effect. And γαμαοδέρνουλας is certainly effective.

It got two blog posts of morphological argumentation out of me, for one…

This post is about an obscene compound of Modern Greek, made up on slang.gr, and how it clearly violates a rule of compounding, by including what looks like a piece of inflection in the first half of the compound. The follow-up post is on how verb–verb and verb–noun compounds work in Modern Greek, and why the coiner of the compound had no choice but to break the rules.

Again, it’s not that I’m making a point of posting about obscenities; but obscenities do tend to have interesting linguistic stuff go on with them.

The compound is: γαμαοδέρνουλας.

If you know Modern Greek, have a stare at it. It’s not quite right, is it? If you know Ancient Greek, pretend instead it’s βινεδέραξ. Which isn’t quite right either.

Story beneath the fold.

So, the background to the story is, Language Hat was kind enough to post on my repost of the slang.gr taxonomy of linguistic attitudes. The apotheosis of that taxonomy was “slang.gr FTW”. The original had something similar to FTW, Το slang.gr γαμεί, “slang.gr fucks!” Language Hat was amused by this semantic extension of γαμώ.

As I followed up in comments there, this use of γαμεί is a truncation of the old expression γαμά και δέρνει, “he fucks and bashes”. (I’ll come to the alternation between γαμεί and γαμά in a bit). The sense of the expression I knew was “he is in command of a situation”; the allusion is to the use of penetrative sex and violence as the privilege of the powerful. There is regrettably no shortage of instances where this has happened; the explication I’ve seen (in Zahos’ slang dictionary Το Λεξικό της Πιάτσας) was to tradesmen, and how they used to enforce obedience on their apprentices.

slang.gr does not list this meaning under its entry for γαμά και δέρνει; it gives instead the related meaning “(s)he exercises great skill”. If the derivation from masters and apprentices is correct, this extension makes senses; but it is plausible even without it. The original sense is however recoverable in the noun someone has derived from it there, γαμαοδέρνουλας, a sarcastic term for a he-man, “Lord Master Fuck-And-Bash”. γαμαοδέρνουλας is derived from the verb γαμάω (Ancient γαμέω), the verb δέρνω (Ancient δέρω), and the augmentative suffix -ουλας, which echoes μπαμπούλας “bogeyman”.

Modern Greek can form compounds starting with a verb, and even compounds of two verbs; that’s an oddity in Indo-European which will get a separate post. But such compounds still follow the rules of Greek morphology: stem₁ + /o/ + stem₂ + inflection. Having the inflection on the end is normal in compounding: the stems are combined to form a new stem, and that new stem is what gets declined and conjugated as a unit.

• άνθρωπ-ος “human”, μορφ-ή “form”, ανθρωπ-ό-μορφ-ος “human-shaped”.
• έ-χασ-α “I lost”, δίκ-η “trial”, χασ-ο-δίκ-ης “lose-trial, incompetent lawyer”.

The linking -o- is only dropped in Modern Greek when the second term starts with /a/, following the Modern hierarchy for vowel deletion:

• παλι-ός “old”, άνθρωπ-ος “human”, παλι-άνθρωπ-ος “ol’ human = scoundrel”
• έ-σπασ-α “I broke”, αρχίδι “testicle”, σπασ-αρχίδ-ης “ball-buster”

Now, Ancient Greek verb roots could end in vowels: /aɡapa-/ “love”, /ɡame-/ “marry”. The inflections following those roots in the present tense typically started with vowels (the thematic vowel): /-ɔː -eis -ei/.

That meant that a vowel went next to another vowel in those proto-Greek verbs: /aɡapa-ɔː/, /ɡame-eis/. But most vowel–vowel combinations in proto-Greek ended up coalescing into a single contracted vowel. You can tell it’s contracted, because contracted vowels got circumflexes· /aɡapɔ̂ː/, /ɡameîs/ (ἀγαπῶ, γαμεῖς). So the proto-Greek (and Homeric) ἀγαπάω “I love” (column 1) was contracted by Attic into ἀγαπῶ. The way contraction works, this meant that the thematic vowel, which alternates between /e/ and /o/, turned into an alternation of /aː/ and /ɔː/.

In fact contraction meant that there are few verbs in Ancient Greek whose stems ended in a vowel intact next to the thematic vowel. Stems ending in /a/, /e/ and /o/ all contracted, and stems ending in /ɛː/ and /ɔː/ were absent from Attic. That left /i/ and /y/, and the Modern Greek vernacular has got rid of many of even those exceptions by analogy: λύω “loosen”, the standard example verb, is now λύνω.

Koine gradually merged -αω verbs and -εω verbs. In fact that happened with γαμέω “marry”, which in its modern guise “fuck” can be conjugated identically to ἀγαπάω. The merger did not happen in all variants of Greek with the same verbs, which is why it is possible for γαμεί and γαμά to coexist in the Modern language.

The merger generated the Early Modern Greek forms in column 1: the alternation is now between /a/ and /u/. Modern Greek then got rid of the alternation between /a/ and /u/, giving the paradigm in column 2.

The thing to note is that since Attic, the inflection on the present tense is not /-ɔː -eis -ei/ > /-o -is -i/, but /-ɔː -âːis -âːi/ > /-ˈo -ˈas -ˈa/. So the -a- is not part of the stem, it is part of the inflection, and it does not belong on compounds starting with such a verb:

• ɣen-ˈo, -ˈas, -ˈa “I give birth”, vol-ˈo, -ˈas, -ˈa “I do repeatedly”, γεννοβολώ ɣen-o-vol-ˈo “I keep giving birth”
• ɣam-ˈo, -ˈas, -ˈa “I fuck”, traɣuði “song”, γαμοτράγουδο ɣam-o-traɣuð-o “fuck song, obscene song sung during carnival”

And so we come to γαμαοδέρνουλας, ɣama-o-ðern-ulas. The compound is formed as if the stem of “fuck” is /ɣama-/, not /ɣam-/. That conflicts with compounds like /ɣam-o-traɣuð-o/. Why was this done?

What made this possible is a reanalysis of /-ˈo, -ˈas, -ˈa/ verbs in some variants of Modern Greek, which in the standard is confined to colloquial usage. Unlike normal (uncontracted) verbs, these verbs are accented on the ultima (the final syllable) in the singular. This is odd, and those variants have repaired the discrepancy by adding the normal endings to /-a-/:

This has been called at least once a linguistic atavism: Colloquial Modern Greek has accidentally rediscovered the Homeric forms /aɡapá-ɔː, aɡapá-eis, aɡapá-ei/ (whose modern pronunciation would indeed be /aɣap-ˈa-o, aɣap-ˈa-is, aɣap-ˈa-i/). That’s not the reason it’s happened of course—someone who says /aɡapá-ɔː/ is unlikely to be stereotyped as an Homeric scholar, and the atavism hasn’t extended to the plural */aɣap-ˈaume aɣap-ˈaete aɣap-ˈaune/, whose accent is unexceptionally on the penult (second last syllable).

In conjugation tables, and indeed in people’s grammatical intuition, /-ao -ais -ai/ are still treated as inflections; but the whole point of the analogical change was to make /-o -is -i/ the inflections, attaching to a stem ending in /-a-/, so the stress would be more normal. Under that analysis, the stem of /ɣamˈao/ is indeed /ɣama-/. And notice that the expression is cited in slang.gr in the first person as γαμάω και δέρνω, not γαμώ και δέρνω: being colloquial, it is supposed to have the colloquial innovative form of the verb.

So whoever coined a noun γαμαοδέρνουλας, based on the phrase γαμάω και δέρνω, could access an analysis of the verb where the verb stem is /ɣama/ not /ɣam/, and combines as /ɣama-o-ðern-ulas/. But that still looks decidedly odd. /ao/ is an infrequent cluster in Standard Modern Greek in general, routinely occurring only in this colloquial inflection, and in verbs historical ending in /aɡɔː/ (e.g. /pʰaɡɔː/ > /fao/ “that I eat”). Stems ending in /a/ are rarer still: in fact, they shouldn’t be there at all; so we are surprised to see one in a stem boundary in a compound. And that’s why this form just looks wrong.

So why *did* the coiner of γαμαοδέρνουλας use that odd stem variant, instead of the expected γαμοδέρνουλας? Speakers of Modern Greek can probably guess what I’m guessing the reasons are (γάμος, and echoing the phrase explicitly). But to explain that through, I’m going to discuss the strange history of Greek verb–noun and verb–verb compounds, in the next post.