On the retreat of Polytonic

By: | Post date: 2009-05-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek, Writing Systems
Tags: ,

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 back, when I copy-pasted a verse from the Chronicle of Morea in a comment at the magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog. Nikos saw the comment, fully decked out in polytonic Greek, and asked: “Did the manuscript have those diacritics?” Because I thought the answer was obvious, and because I know how Nikos feels about the polytonic, I immediately got my back up. Like any manuscript of anything before the 19th century, Greek script meant polytonic. So of course it had them. And of course it had the wrong diacritics, and ignored iota subscript, because the scribes weren’t going to bother writing the vernacular “properly”; and the editor wrote some paragraphs justifying how he tidied it up, following a post-Classical norm. (It was 1904, you still had to justify not having an enclitic stress on properispomena in the modern language. As in χῶρος σου, not χῶρός σου; that’s how Ancient accentuation works, but not Modern.)

But the Chronicle was written, printed, and digitised in a polytonic scribal tradition, and I didn’t see the point in shaving the squiggles off. After all, noone retypes what they can copy-paste, even if they dislike the source orthography. (There had been a whole comment thread detour chez Nikos on the copy-pasting of the modern crasis σὄλεγα, which had been mis-monotonicised as the unrecognisable σόλεγα. Not that the more correct σό ‘λεγα or even σό’ ‘λεγα are much more helpful.)

“Woah woah woah”, answered my much too patient host, “I wasn’t suggesting that you shave the squiggles off. But I agree with Tasos Kaplanis that there’s no point in printing Early Modern texts in polytonic.”

At which I gulped. Tasos Kaplanis, mine godfather—for ’twas he who first called me Opoudjis—had been working at the monotonic Kriaras dictionary of the Early Modern vernacular at the time, and is now a lecturer at Cyprus U. He has put up on his shortlived Early Modern Greek Etc. blog a defence of monotonic for Early Modern texts, which he’d originally presented at the Oxford Neograeca Medii Aevi conference in 2000. It was long, it was tightly argued, it was lucid, and it was on the counterattack: the traditionalists argue that these texts should stay in the polytonic? Then what’s their argument for that, apart from mere unwillingness to change?

Though I too don’t like the concept of monotonic Early Modern texts, it’s hard to defend intellectually: I will try, but I don’t think I’ll get very far. It’s becoming even harder to defend in practice, because this is a post-polytonic world. This post sketches that world for those who aren’t in it; I’ll stutter my feeble “but… but… but…” to my godfather’s paper in another post.

❦❦❦

In Attic Greek, accentuation is surprisingly easy. Antepenults are always acute; whether the ultima is acute or circumflexed is determined by the grammatical suffix, and which inflections are circumflexed through vowel contraction is predictable. The only ambiguity is with α ι υ in the penult, and the penult is the least common place for an accent to go. There’s still some looking up of dictionaries for those ambiguities, and the Byzantines were quite at sea with them: there’s hardly a penult ῖ that they didn’t acute, and often enough vice versa. But the system as a whole can be dealt with, and noone is seriously proposing ridding us of these troublesome squiggles. Teachers of New Testament Greek often drop them in the early parts of their courses, as a practical measure—the squiggles are less important for their audience than for trainee classicists, and by Christ’s time had no phonetic value. But the Koine New Testament is still published in polytonic.

For the modern language, on the other hand, the polytonic is burdensome and artificial, and a whole philology grew up around deciding when to circumflex and when to acute. Because of dialect mixing in the Koine, you can no longer tell whether a final α is meant to be long or short. Because of dropped final ον, there’s no right accentuation for etymologically diminutive neuters—whether μοναχοπαίδιον should be accented as μοναχοπαίδι (just cut the ον), or μοναχοπαῖδι (apply the accentuation rules from scratch). Is my name in Greek and Sarantakos’ Νῖκος or Νίκος? It’s bad enough having to memorise ancient long penults, as the Byzantines found; if you truncate names like Νικόλαος, you’re now accenting in the penult vowels that had never before been exposed to the choice. If the word was borrowed at any time in the last two millenia, any notion of a vowel being long or short is artificial: why would you put a circumflex on a loanword from Turkish? And so on.

Polytonic was an ill-fitting enough garment on Modern Greek, that it got progressively toned down from the rules applicable to Attic. By the 1960s, it had settled on a lightweight form, as practical as could be expected: drop breathings on rhos, drop graves, back away from iota subscripts, when in the slightest doubt go with the acute. Once Puristic Greek was dropped in 1975, with its haphazard dependence on Anything But Vernacular Greek, it was relatively easy in 1982 to legitimise what the press had already been doing in practice in the ’70s, release schoolchildren from their travails, and drop the extra squiggles.

So you’d only write Modern Greek in polytonic now if you wanted to assert continuity with the Greek written tradition, against the 1982 spelling reform. The monotonicists reading this shouldn’t get too smug: you’re writing in Greek script, and with a mostly historical orthography, for the same reason of asserting continuity. These are matters of degree; and just like the shades of gray between Puristic and Colloquial Greek, they are politicised degrees. The vehicle of the traditionalist conservative portion of society used to be Puristic. Now, it’s impossible to get anyone to write in Puristic, without your audience bursting out laughing; so the traditionalist portion (or a small and de facto marginal subset) can only assert its traditionalism through polytonic Demotic. Which still gets laughed at anyway.

Psichari taunted Puristic Greek for its eclecticism, which made it linguistically incoherent. The opponents of polytonic can likewise taunt the proponents with “which polytonic are you going to choose?”—because the ill-fitting garb has gone through several successive tailorings. But precisely because using the polytonic now is a matter of ideology, the polytonicists don’t choose the lightweight polytonic of the 1960s. They don’t want learnable squiggles, they want authentic Hellenistic squiggles: if someone is making the effort to put circumflexes, they will more than likely put graves in as well. (Not breathings on the rho as much.)

I was saddened when I found out that Hestia, the one Puristic holdout of the Athens press in the ’80s, switched to polytonic Demotic in the ’90s: that to me was the real death of Puristic. The fact that polytonic Demotic succeeded a fifteen-year Last Stand of Puristic (and that Hestia was the last newspaper printed with Linotype), though, tells you a lot about the role polytonic Demotic is now assumed to play in Greek society.

The monotonic has been official a generation now. In the 1930s, the accentuation rules were what you did in primary school, entrenched enough to write a rebetiko song on:

—I haven’t finished school.
I haven’t learned that much.
But I do know 1 + 1 is 2,
And that there’s seven vowels.

—So long together, yet you still don’t know
my likes, what makes me tick.
The antepenult’s never circumflexed
when the ultima’s long.

In the 1930s, everyone was supposed to know the song was misleading. Whether they did depended on how seriously they took the rules, because the song certainly didn’t: the penult’s never circumflexed when the ultima’s long; the antepenult’s never circumflexed at all. Kids now get taught that rule still, but in high school, with Ancient Greek (whether optionally or compulsorily depends on the current education minister). People no longer live in a polytonic world.

Doing anything in the Modern Language in polytonic is increasingly less tenable. The people who knew the polytonic rules are getting pensionable, and the diehard online advocates of the polytonic rely on software for their accent rules—much more than it is safe to do. Polytonic keyboards are around, but they aren’t the default, and most people don’t see the point in hunting them down. Polytonic Greek characters are now widely available even in default System fonts, but at least one commenter on Nikos’ blog is complaining about The Reign of Blank Squares, because that’s all Internet Explorer is letting her see. Typing in polytonic was always more work than using a single acute, so even if you’re transcribing a polytonic text, you’re not going to make the extra effort unless you see a point to doing so. Beševliev did not print Lord Krum’s text in monotonic, but I did. Of course, Lord Krum’s POWs chiselled the stone in all caps, so any diacritics were a modern intervention anyway.

Because most people aren’t going to bother getting a polytonic keyboard or using it, you will see snippets of Ancient Greek on blogs and the press, cited in monotonic. As here (possibly a cut and paste, since the post also cites another Ancient passage in polytonic):

Η γαρ ευγένεια τώνδε των ανδρών εκ πλείστου χρόνου παρά πάσιν ανθρώποις ανωμολόγηται. Ου γαρ μόνον εις πατέρ’ αυτοίς και των άνω προγόνων κατ’ ανδρ’ ανενεγκείν εκάστω την φύσιν έστιν, αλλ’ εις όλην κοινή την υπάρχουσαν πατρίδα, ης αυτόχθονες ομολογούνται είναι. Μόνοι γαρ πάντων ανθρώπων, εξ ήσπερ έφυσαν, ταύτην ώκησαν και τοις εξ αυτών παρέδωκαν, ώστε δικαίως αν τις υπολάβοι τους μεν επήλυδας ελθόντας εις τας πόλεις και τούτων πολίτας προσαγορευομένους ομοίους είναι τοις εισποιητοίς των παίδων, τούτους δ’ γνησίους γόνω της πατρίδος πολίτας είναι.

Ἡ γὰρ εὐγένεια τῶνδε τῶν ἀνδρῶν ἐκ πλείστου χρόνου παρὰ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ἀνωμολόγηται. οὐ γὰρ μόνον εἰς πατέρ’ αὐτοῖς καὶ τῶν ἄνω προγόνων κατ’ ἄνδρ’ ἀνενεγκεῖν ἑκάστῳ τὴν φύσιν ἔστιν, ἀλλ’ εἰς ὅλην κοινῇ τὴν ὑπάρχουσαν πατρίδα, ἧς αὐτόχθονες ὁμολογοῦνται εἶναι. μόνοι γὰρ πάντων ἀνθρώπων, ἐξ ἧσπερ ἔφυσαν, ταύτην ᾤκησαν καὶ τοῖς ἐξ αὑτῶν παρέδωκαν, ὥστε δικαίως ἄν τις ὑπολάβοι τοὺς μὲν ἐπήλυδας ἐλθόντας εἰς τὰς πόλεις καὶ τούτων πολίτας προσαγορευομένους ὁμοίους εἶναι τοῖς εἰσποιητοῖς τῶν παίδων, τούτους δὲ γνησίους γόνῳ τῆς πατρίδος πολίτας εἶναι. (Demosthenes Epitaph 4)

With such Puristic Greek as makes it online, you’ll routinely see them in monotonic:

οι Σάξωνες ανήγειρον πάλιν την θρασείαν και ακτένιστον κεφαλήν των και βυθίζοντες την χείρα εις το αίμα ουχί ταυρείων, αλλ’ ανθρωπίνων θυμάτων ώμνυον εις τον Τουΐτονα, τον Ιρμινσούλ και Αρμίνιον, ή ν’ αποσείσωσι τον Καρόλειον ζυγόν, ή διά του αίματος αυτών να φυράρωσι του Άλβιος και Βισούργιδος τας όχθας. Ήλθεν, είδε και ενίκησε κατά το σύνηθες ο άμαχος Αυτοκράτωρ διά της λόγχης εκείνης, ην κατά τους Ευαγγελιστάς εβύθισεν ο Ρωμαίος στρατιώτης εις του Σωτήρος την πλευράν, ο δε αρχάγγελος Μιχαήλ εμφανισθείς καθ’ ύπνους τω Καρόλω εναπέθεσεν επί της κλίνης του, ίνα κατά τους χρονογράφους ανταμείψη αυτόν, διότι και από εψημένου και ωμού κρέατος απέχων την Τεσσαρακοστήν εκοιμάτο μόνος.(Emmanuel Rhoides, Pope Joan, Project Gutenberg copy)

οἱ Σάξωνες ἀνήγειρον πάλιν τὴν θρασεῖαν καὶ ἀκτένιστον κεφαλήν των καὶ βυθίζοντες τὴν χεῖρα εἰς τὸ αἷμα οὐχὶ ταυρείων, ἀλλ’ ἀνθρωπίνων θυμάτων, ὤμνυον εἰς τὸν Τουίτονα, τὸν Ἰρμινσοὺλ καὶ Ἀρμίνιον ἢ ν’ ἀποσείσωσι τὸν καρόλειον ζυγὸν ἢ διὰ τοῦ αἵματος αὐτῶν νὰ φυράσωσι τοῦ Ἄλυος καὶ Βισούργιδος τὰς ὄχθας. Ἦλθεν, εἶδε καὶ ἐνίκησε κατὰ τὸ σύνηθες ὁ ἄμαχος αὐτοκράτωρ διὰ τῆς λόγχης ἐκείνης, ἣν κατὰ τοὺς Εὐαγγελιστὰς ἐβύθισεν ὁ Ῥωμαῖος στρατιώτης εἰς τοῦ Σωτῆρος τὴν πλευράν, ὁ δὲ ἀρχάγγελος Μιχαὴλ ἐμφανισθεὶς καθ’ ὕπνους τῷ Καρόλω ἐναπέθεσεν ἐπὶ τῆς κλίνης του, ἵνα κατὰ τοὺς χρονογράφους ἀνταμείψῃ αὐτόν, διότι καὶ ἀπὸ ἐψημένου καὶ ἀπὸ ὠμοῦ κρέατος ἀπέχων τὴν Τεσσαρακοστὴν ἐκοιμάτο μόνος. (Wikisource copy, with some accent corrections)

I find the monotonic somewhat harder to read, because in Ancient Greek, the diacritics aren’t purely decorative: they do help disambiguate the text. If people are careful with how they render Ancient or Puristic Greek in monotonic, some of those ambiguities can be dealt with: article ο vs. relativiser ό (ὁ, ὅ), or interrogative τίς vs. indefinite τις. Because monotonic Ancient Greek happens on an ad hoc basis, people often aren’t careful enough to make up that kind of stress-based disambiguation. That’s actually one of my main concerns with putting older stages on the language into monotonic, though admittedly it’s not an insurmountable one.

In fact the heavy lifting of disambiguation in Ancient Greek isn’t really done by circumflex vs. acute at all: there are minimal pairs, like ἤρα “he loved” ~ ἦρα “I lifted”, but there aren’t many. The breathings do some more work than the accents (ὀδός “threshold” ~ ὁδός “road”), and because of the way inflection works, the iota subscripts do a lot of work (nominative λύπη dative λύπῃ). Without any of these hints, you can still read Ancient Greek (epigraphers do, after all, and so did Ancient Greeks). But it’s somewhat more haltingly than it needs to be (as I found with the Demosthenes at least): we’re not native speakers of this lingo, we shouldn’t be deprived of hints.

So if you use accents to disambiguate monosyllables in a systematic way, and are not so purist that you refuse to allow iota subscripts in your monotonic, you’ll get a transcription which is workable at a last resort for Ancient Greek, and may be close to acceptable for Puristic. Of course, a monotonic with iota subscripts might seem to defeat the purpose of having monotonic at all; but monotonic was not designed for a language with a productive dative.

So just as there are different flavours of polytonic, of increasing irrelevance to the modern language, there can be different flavours of monotonic, of decreasing incompatibility to the ancient language and the stages in between. There were multiple flavours before 1982, and there are decisions taken in 1982 that people still chafe on, like clitic του or the interjection να. But of course, the point of getting a State-approved monotonic was that there should only be one flavour (and that noone could counter-taunt “which monotonic are you going to use?”): Kriaras had to change the system he was using in his dictionary after 1982, even if he didn’t agree with all the decisions made. Still, he has pretty much tweaked his monotonic to deal with archaic elements the way I’m suggesting. So this is his entry for κυκλεύω, written in 1985:

(ενν. τῳ ποταμῴ) κλήσις Αμαζονικός, έχων κύκλευμα χρόνου· … τέλος, αρχήν ουκ έχει Βίος Αλ. 5503. [Kriaras modified monotonic]

ω (ενν. τω ποταμώ) κλήσις Αμαζονικός, έχων κύκλευμα χρόνου· … τέλος, αρχήν ουκ έχει Βίος Αλ. 5503. [raw monotonic]

(ἐνν. τῷ ποταμῷ) κλῆσις Ἀμαζονικός, ἔχων κύκλευμα χρόνου· … τέλος, ἀρχὴν οὐκ ἔχει Βίος Ἀλ. 5503.[polytonic]

So if people want to monotonicise Early Modern, Puristic, or otherwise macaronic texts, they can—as long as they don’t monotonicise them in exactly the same way they accent the contemporary language, and the way they do monotonicising them is consistent and documented.

They can; should they? After all, there’s more digitised monotonic Emmanuel Rhoides than Apollonius Rhodius out there, and there’s a reason for that. And Early Modern Greek texts are only slowly starting to be published in monotonic, and there’s a reason for that too. It’s not purely a linguistic reason. But that’s for the next post.

Rumi & Walad: Cantabrigensian Contribution

By: | Post date: 2009-05-11 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , , , ,

I forwarded my posts on Rumi and Sultan Walad to Petros Karatsareas, who is in fact doing his doctoral work on Cappadocian morphology in Cambridge, and who had written me to ask what I thought of those texts a couple of months back. (I’d been intended to put them online for a while, but kept putting it off; in fact Petros is the indirect reason why I’m blogging on Greek linguistics now. Don’t blame him if I stop again.) I was wondering what Petros would make of my analysis of the texts. I haven’t succeeded in getting him to post directly in comments 🙂 , but I’m pasting our exchange here with permission. (And if he wants to comment further, he’s welcome to.)

I generally agree with you that the language in Rumi and Walad’s poems is very underwhelming. It does not appear to be of any (identifiable) Greek dialect and the list of alleged Cappadocianisms is very poor, in my opinion. Of course, the texts are from a very early period and one would (rationally, I think) expect Cappadocian and the other Asia Minor Greek varieties to start to diverge at that period at the earliest and then even more intensively after the fall of every kind of Greek power centre in the region, be it the Byzantine Empire (or the pathetic sod of what was left of it) or the Trabzon Empire.


Gregoire’s list of Cappadocianisms is a joke: θέκνω is as good as it gets. But I indeed find it hard to believe Rumi picked up a Constantinopolitan Standard Greek that was distinct from what was spoken in Iconium. The use of σκήνωμα means that there was (inevitable) learned influence even here, but what they are presenting is not learned Greek.


Yet, I find some things to be potential indications of dialectal speech such as the στο σον το χείλο and the ση prepositional phrase (from σε + τη) in the ‘ση εστία μου’. However, why does this Pontic στ > σ change appear only there but not in στο σον το χείλο which would have to be σο σον το χείλο or, to be more pedantic, σο σον σο χείλο?


Dunno if I’d trust that instance of ση, for that reason. I don’t want to generate a new edition, but the Persian script is just tydhs as astya mw; and given Walad’s allergy to articles (a foreignerism, I suspect), I’d just render this as τι είδες εις εστία μου.


I’m also thinking the lexical peculiarities (e.g. πορπατώ), how sure can we be of them? I haven’t looked into the history of the word in the various dialects and periods, but for some reason I feel less keen to accept such examples as evidence of dialectal features in the text. Of course, the Arabic script poses many problems and I think I personally would stick to the uncontroversial ones which are somewhat interesting.


The Arabic script is extremely problematic, and the scribes had no idea what was going on; what’d be interesting to work out is, whether scribal errors can be explained by soundalikes as well as lookalike letters (i.e. internal dictation). Recall also that B & M had to basically make a new edition of Walad, seeking out a couple of manuscripts made the most sense; but this is still haphazard stuff. So no, I wouldn’t trust πορπατώ… except that the Rababname has vowel pointing, and here reads straightforwardly powrpaty. Hm. This’d at least be worth checking whether πορπατώ turns up this far east….


An interesting example is the accusative plural άλλους in the verse το πωρικό το πικρό δος το άλλους. It is very suspicious and reminiscent of the Cypriot Greek genitive/accusative syncretism in the plural of the masculines (CG το φαΐν τους σιύλλους instead of το φαΐ των σκύλων or something like that). I have also found some similar examples in my Cappadocian texts. Can you see a pattern emerging there? That, of course, is if and only if the Arabic spelling uncontroversially reads άλλους and not something else.


The reading is dsta āls. (The first a is an alif, which can stand in for other vowels.) It’s not the expected ālws, but I dount that helps: άλλας or άλλες leave us with the same problem in the feminine plural accusative, and άλλης should itself be ālys—or rather, is no more plausible a reading of āls than is άλλους. We’re mid-verse, so we can’t use rhyme to emend. Was I naive in thinking this is just the indirect object accusative, transferred to άλλους? (I.e. without needing to appeal to the genitive-accusative merger, but purely as an indirect object.) Would this be possible in Pontic? Gotta say, didn’t blink about this one at all…


In general, it seems to me that Rumi and Walad’s poems present with more problems to the historian of Greek than solutions. :-S


We haven’t got much further on this: it’s hard to tell whether άλλους is an indirect object genitive, that has merged with the accusative morphlogically in the plural (as happens in Cypriot, and as Belléli thought was happening in the Torah); or whether Cappadocian is already using the accusative for indirect objects (as I’d assumed, and as the Proto-Bulgarian inscriptions were doing four centuries before). You’d need more texts to find out, and you won’t get more texts from Cappadocia. (You will get the odd church deed from the Pontus, but there will be very little vernacular there—I doubt there’d be enough to cast light on this issue.)

Placenames of Kievan Rus’

By: | Post date: 2009-05-11 | Comments: 6 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: ,

A culture confident in itself (or arrogant, same thing) will assimilate foreign place names and personal names, bending them to its language. Thus did Kshayarsha become Xerxes, and Shoshenq, Sesonchosis. Thus did Svyatoslav become Sphentísthlavos, and Dagobert Takoúpertos, and Saint-Gilles Isangéles. Thus did Hujr become Ógaros, and Ma’di Karib Badichárimos, and Kormisosh Kormésios. Thus, in late reassertion of confidence, did the clerks call Newton Néfton, and Darwin Dharvínos and Descartes (via Latin) Kartésios (and France Ghallía instead of Frántza, and England Anglía instead of Ingiltéra); while Makriyannis, no less confident on behalf of the people, call Armansberg Armaspéris, de Rigny Dernýs, and Washington Vásikhton.

Greece now is not that place; in fact, rather more often than not, they won’t even transliterate foreign personal names, so that there is now a whole lot of Latin script in any extended stretch of discourse. That projects several things; self-confidence (or arrogance, same thing) is not one of them. The advantage of transliteration though, is at least you’re not left scratching your head, wondering what the hell is being talked about. If you’re not forewarned, you need a lot of staring to work out who is meant by Γοίθιος.

If you’re working on earlier stages of the languages, there are even more traps for the unwary. Theophanes the Confessor, writing in the early 9th century with slightly out of date information, writes of Pippin the Short’s sons: p. 403 de Boor, οὗτος ὁ Πίπινος δύο υἱοὺς ἔσχεν, Κάρουλον καὶ Καρουλόμαγνον, τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ “This Pippin had two sons, Károlos and Karoulómagnos his brother”. Which one’s Charlemagne? Not Karoulómagnos: noone was calling Charles Great when he was running around in diapers. Charlemagne is Károlos, Charles (or, properly speaking, Karl): Karoulomagnos is his brother Carloman. Why on earth Carloman got distorted to Carlomagn, by the last people on earth prepared to call his brother Great, is a mystery to me.

Which leads me to my fun and games decoding Russian placenames last night. I was hoovering up by inspection the proper names of the registry of documents of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, an edition of various legal texts held by the patriarchate. Lots of these documents involve property and jurisdiction issues close to home; but a few documents involve setting up shop for the Orthodox Church in Russia in the 14th century.

Russia in the 14th century was a very different place than what it is now. For one, it wasn’t quite Russia as we know it: it was the Kievan Rus’, run out of Kiev: Muscovy is not even mentioned in the documents, and was only starting to be noticed by its neighbours. There was no distinction made back then between Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia. The important cities of the time are not all important cities in our time; and the map was being turned upside down constantly with the Mongol invasions. So a list of bishoprics in a 14th century document is not going to jump out of the page as familiar to an uninformed 21st century reader. Especially when the names have been through the wringer of Greek phonology.

What complicates things even further is that many of the old bishoprics are in the borderlands of modern Poland and the former Soviet Union, regions with a complicated history. The history of the towns once covered by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania has been written in Lithuanian, and Polish, and German, and Russian, and Ukrainian, and Byelorussian, and Yiddish. It was in one of those cities that a Litvak child in the 1870s dreamed of an international language to reconcile the dissonances around him. And those cities have changed names many a time—including 1945, and 1990. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the words are Grecified Russian to start with, their current names are Byelorussian or Polish that look different again.

I think I’ve worked out the lot, but some of them took some chasing, a lot of blank staring at the Wikipedia map of Kievan Rus’, and some inventive Googling. So Peremísthlin, by inspection, is: Peremyshl (ru uk)—Przemyśl (pl)—Prömsel (de)—Pshemishl (yi). And Mpriániskon is (by a lot more searching, because it wasn’t on the Kievan Rus’ map) Bryansk.

The one I almost didn’t get occurs in the following two passages:

259.54 (July 1361): περὶ μέντοι τοῦ ἱερωτάτου μητροπολίτου κῦρ Ῥωμανοῦ ὡς χειροτονηθέντα καὶ αὐτὸν Λιτβῶν διωρίσατο ὁ κράτιστος καὶ ἅγιός μου αὐτοκράτωρ συγκαταβάσεως λόγῳ καὶ ἅμα διὰ τὴν ἀνενοχλησίαν καὶ εἰρήνην τοῦ ἐκεῖσε τόπου ἔχειν σὺν ταῖς οὔσαις τῇ τῶν Λιτβῶν ἐπαρχίᾳ δυσὶν ἐπισκοπαῖς τὸ Πωλότζικον καὶ τὸ Τούροβον μετὰ καὶ τοῦ Νοβογραδοπουλίου, τοῦ καθίσματος τοῦ μητροπολίτου, καὶ τὰς τῆς Μικρᾶς Ῥωσίας ἐπισκοπάς

Concerning the most holy metrpolitan Lord Romanus, being ordained as bishop of the Lithuanians, my mighty and saintly emperor has appointed him by assent of word, for the peace and unperturbedness of that region, to hold as well as the two bishoprics in the district of the Lithuanians, Polotzikon and Tourovon as well as Novogradopoulion, the seat of the metropolitan, and the bishoprics of Little Russia.

262.9 (July 1361): Οἶδας, ὅπως συνέβησαν τὰ μεταξὺ τῆς σῆς ἱερότητος καὶ τοῦ ἱερωτάτου μητροπολίτου Κυέβου καὶ πάσης Ῥωσίας, κῦρ Ἀλεξίου, ἀγαπητοῦ κατὰ Κύριον ἀδελφοῦ καὶ συλλειτουργοῦ ἡμῶν, καὶ ὅπως διεκρίθη ψήφῳ βασιλικῇ καὶ συνοδικῇ τῆς ἡμῶν μετριότητος ἔχειν τὴν μὲν ἱερότητά σου σὺν ταῖς οὔσαις τῇ τῶν Λιτβῶν ἐπαρχίᾳ δυσὶν ἐπισκοπαῖς τὸ Πολούτζικον καὶ Τούροβον μετὰ καὶ τοῦ Νοβογραδοπούλου καὶ τὰς τῆς Μικρᾶς Ῥωσίας ἐπισκοπάς.

You know what took place between your holiness and the most holy metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia, Lord Alexius, our beloved brother in Christ and fellow celebrant, and that it has been decided by imperial vote and synodal vote by Our Humble Self that your holiness should hold, as well as the two bishoprics in the district of the Lithuanians, Poloutzikon and Tourovon as well as Novogradopoulon, and the bishoprics of Little Russia.

OK, Turovon is Turov—(ru)—Turaw (be)—Turava (lt). Polotzikon/Poloutzikon is Polotsk (ru)—Polatsk (be)— Polockas (lt)— Połock (pl). “Little Russia” corresponds vaguely to modern Ukraine.

But what on earth was Novogradopoul(i)on? Wee birdie of Novograd? Mr Novogradopoulos? No, it’s Novograd and some diminutive, so somehow, “Little Novograd”. Novograd would be Novgorod, “Newtown”. And there’s only one Novgorod, right? The first capital of the Rus’, the second city of Kievan Rus’, a city mentioned time and again in the chroniclers. (“Newtown” because the Old Town was Riurikovo Gorodishche, Rurik’s Citadel southeast of town.)

Well, there’s a slight catch to that theory. There was not just one Novgorod. There were several. And to differentiate the Big Novgorod from the rest, it was called (and recently re-called) Velikyj Novgorod: Newtown the Great. “Wee Novgorod” could be the Patriarch’s idea of a wee joke; but we don’t have a clear notion of patriarchs having that kind of a sense of humour.

Wikipedia, bless its socks, has a list of other Novgorods. They don’t solve the problem. Nizhny Novgorod? That’s “Lower Novgorod”. Novgorod-Volynsky? The region of Volyn is actually named in the registry (as Voloúnion), but that didn’t quite seem right. Novgorod Severskyj? Severia‘s a long way from Lithuania.

In desperation, I googled the combo of Turov and Polotsk; maybe something like Wee Novgorod would turn up. Have a look for yourselves at the googleage for Google straight and Google Books.

It turns out, our bishopric rendered in Greek as Wee Novgorod was also Wee Novgorod in Russian. It’s a town that has a fair few linguistic clothes: Novgorodok (ru)—Navahrudak (be)—Nowogródek (pl)— Naugardukas (lt).

There’s also a vague tie-in to Daniel Craig with Novgorodok: the Bielski partisans were active in the forests near the town, in what was then still Poland—as commemorated in the recent film Defiance.

The registry was edited by giants of Austrian Byzantine studies: Herbert Hunger, Otto Kresten, Ewald Kislinger, Carolina Cupane, Martin Hinterberger. Great and worthy scholars one and all (not least because one of them has included the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds in her curriculum). But would it have killed them to include an Index of Proper Names, and save me the googling?

Malamirovo, Bulgaria, 813

By: | Post date: 2009-05-05 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: ,

We have very, very, very little vernacular material from the Dark Ages, between Leontius of Neapolis in vii AD, and Michael Glycas’ Prison Verses from 1158. A couple of acclamations, the odd proverb, a song half-written down by Anna Comnena, a song reconstructed from a 16th century curse against mice, a few legal deeds from Southern Italy; that’s pretty much it.

Except for:

  • Beševliev, V. 1963. Die Protobulgarischen Inschriften. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

These are the inscriptions placed around Bulgaria by the Bulgars in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Bulgars still spoke a Turkic language: they had not yet been assimilated to the Bulgarians they ruled. There are a few Turkic words in their inscriptions, but for the most part, they are in Greek. The presumption is, they were carved by Greek prisoners of war.

So these inscriptions potentially mark the earliest instances of Modern Greek—which is assumed to have formed exactly during that period. Maybe, maybe not: the phonology is certainly Modern Greek and accurate, except that υ and οι are still conflated as /y/ (λυπά). (The first evidence we have of them switching to /i/ is from around 1030.) Only some prepositions have switched from the genitive to the accusative. The texts are the earliest evidence for the Northern Greek use of the accusative in indirect objects (έδοκε[ν] αυτόν ο θεός). But they aren’t particularly rich syntactically, so they don’t tell us as much as they might.

The proto-Bulgarian inscriptions (to use the Bulgarian name for the Bulgars) don’t get a lot of airplay in histories of Greek. Part of the reason is, they’re not literary texts. Surely part of the reason is, they are texts unabashedly hostile to the Greeks. And the illustration I’m posting is particularly chilling: it’s Krum, boasting of his victories against the Byzantines between 811 and 813, and then going back to recounting the atrocities of Nicephorus I, emperor of “The Lower Land” (modern Eastern Thrace). After the Battle of Pliska in 811, likely commemorated at the end of this inscription, Krum drank wine out of Nicephorus’ skull. A year after the inscription, Krum himself was dead.

The inscription, Beševliev no. 2 was originally found in a hill near the village of Hambarli (now Malamirovo), and is now in the archaeological museum of Varna.

This is an inscription, and some of you may not be familiar with the conventions for transcribing inscriptions. Quoting from the first site I googled:

[ ] Square brackets enclose letters which are thought to have been originally engraved but which have been lost through the breaking or defacement of the stone.

( ) Round brackets enclose letters which have been added by the epigraphist to complete an abbreviated word; or, less commonly, which have been substituted by him to correct a blunder.

< > Angular brackets enclose letters which the epigraphist believes were included in error.

| A vertical bar indicates the beginning of a fresh line on the stone.

Ạ A dot placed under a letter indicates that it is not fully legible (through decay or erasure). (Your font may mangle that to a blank square.)

[ο Κρουμος ο] [ά]-
ρχον Ϲ̣ΒΗΝΝΟ. ε-
ξήλθεν ης (Κονσταν)ηνόπο-
(λη)ν (με τον λαόν) αυτού.

or:

[Ομουρταγ ο] [ά]-
ρχον Ϲ̣ΒΗΝΝΟ. ε-
ξήλθεν ης (την πό)λην ο πα-
(τ)ήρ (μου με τον λαόν) αυτού.

[κ]ε ο αδελφός αυ-
[τ]ού ουκ εληθάρ-
[γ]ησεν αυτόν κε εξήλ-
[θ]εν κε έδοκε[ν]
αυτόν ο θεό-
ς κε τόπ[ου]ς κ[ε]
κάσστρα ερ-
ήμοσεν [τ]άδε
<ϹΕ> την Σερδη-
κήν, την<ν> Δεβελ-
τόν, την Κονστα-
ντήαν, την (Βερσ)ηνι-
κίαν, Αδρηαν[ού]-
πολην. Το̣ύτα
(ερυμνά) τα
κάστρα [έ]λαβε-
ν. τα δε λυπά κ[άσ]-
τρα έδοκεν ο θε[ό]ς
φόβον κε ά[φ]ηκ-
[α]ν κε έφυγαν κ-
ε ο κά[τ]ου τόπος (ουκ) λ-
ηθάργησεν τον τό-
πον τούτον, <τ> όπου ε[ξ]ή-
λθε(ν με) τον όλον λαόν κε
έκ(α)ψ(εν τα) χορήα ημόν<ν> α[υ]-
τό(ς) ο γέρον ο βασηλεύ[ς]
ο φαρακλός [κ]ε επήρεν
όλα κε τους όρκους ε-
λησμόνησεν κε εξ-
[ή]λθεν επή (αυτόν) ο άρχον <ο ά>
ο Κρο[υ]μος προς [τ]ο πολ(εμήσε)
[κε τον βασ]ηλέ[α] ε[νίκησεν? εφόνευσεν?]
ΟΝ̣Ε .. κε απήλθεν ήνα
…… [κ]ε ερήμ(ο)σα την

… Lord Krum … went forth to Constantinople with his people [Or: (Krum’s son) Lord Omurtag … my father went forth to the City with his people.] And his brother neglected him not, and went forth, and God granted to Krum, and so he laid the following places and fortresses to waste: Serdica [Sofia], Debeltos, Constantia [location uncertain], Versinicia, Adrianople [Edirne]. These strong fortresses did he conquer. The other fortresses, God gave them fear and they left and fled. And the Lower Land—he did not forget that land, whence the old bald emperor himself came out with all his people, and burned our villages and took everything away, and forgot his oaths. And Lord Krum went forth against him, to make war on him, and he has (defeated? killed?) the emperor, … and he left to … and I have laid to waste the (Lower Land).

Tsakonian song online

By: | Post date: 2009-05-05 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: ,

For our next text in our tour of Greek linguistic oddities: this collection of Tsakonian songs has been online for something like ten years, and it’s about time I tried to translate the one song in Tsakonian.

Before I do, a trap for the unwary. The first song, Σου ‘πα, μάνα, πάντρεψέ με “I told you mother, marry me off”, is not in Tsakonian but standard Greek. It is however the song to which the Tsakonian dance is danced. At least one Internet denizen who didn’t know Greek and found the song on YouTube was misled to say how she liked the sound of Tsakonian.

Our Tsakonian song, posted without translation, is this. Exercise to Greek readers: do you have any idea what this says? Coz if not, Tsakonian is a language distinct from Greek.

Απατζά τσυρά Μαρούα
Απατζά το Μαρασία
Απατζά το Μαρασία
Τσ ‘ ακατούσε τθάν Ελία
Τσ ‘ ακατούσε τθάν Ελία
Εκεί έχα τθα κουνία
Ζατσ ‘ οβού τσυρά Μαρούα
Ζατσ ‘ οβούε τθαν Ελία
Ζατσ ‘ οβούε τθαν Ελία
Τσε κατσούτσε τθα κουνία
Τσίντα βου τσυρά Μαρούα
Τσιντα βούα κακομοίρα
Τσιντα βούα κακομοίρα
Πε κατσούτε α κουνία
Πε κατσούτε α κουνία
Πφού θα ζάει το τσίε Λία

OK, lemme try and make sense of this. I’ll use my transliteration (which is pretty much the lay translation plus my hobbyhorse τχ), and I’ll put a literal Greek gloss next to it to illustrate how the Tsakonian happened.

  • ρζ [r̝, ʒ] < [rj]
  • σχ [ʃ]
  • τσχ [tʃ]
  • τθ [tʰ]
  • πφ [pʰ]
  • κχ [kʰ]
  • ννι [ni] < /ne/
  • νι [ɲi] < /ni, mi/
  • λλι [li] < /le/
  • λι [ʎi] < /li/
  • τχ (or τζ) [tɕ] (or [tsʰ] < [c]
  • ντζ [dz]

My Tsakonian rendering Greek crutch
Απαντζά (α) τχυρά Μαρούα
Απαντζά το Μαρασία
Τχ ‘ ακατούσε τθάν Ελία
έκι έχα τθα κουνία
Ζατχ ‘ ο βού’ τχυρά Μαρούα
Ζατχ ‘ ο βούε τθαν Ελία
Τχαι κατσχούτχε τθα κουνία
Τσχίντα βου’ τχυρά Μαρούα
Τσχίντα βούα κακομοίρα
Πφ’ έ’ κατσχούτε α κουνία
Πφού θα ζάει το τσίε Λία

όπᾳ-αντί (α) κυρά Μαρία
όπᾳ-αντί το Μαραθία
και κάτωσε σταν Ελέα
ήτο έχουσα στα κωνίς.
Διάβηκε ο βους κυρά Μαρία
διάβηκε ο βους σταν Ελέα
και τσάκωσε στα κωνίς
τσίζουσα βοών κυρά Μαρία
τσίζουσα βοώσα κακομοίρα
που ένι τσακωμένο α κωνίς
πώς θα διαβείς (σ)το zio Ηλία
Standard Greek

English

Απέναντι η κυρά Μαρία
απέναντι το Μαραθία
και αποκάτω στην Ελέα
είχε (σ)τη στάμνα
Πήγε το βόδι κυρά Μαρία
πήγε το βόδι στην Ελέα
κι έσπασε τη στάμνα.
Λύπηση–κλάψα κυρά Μαρία
λύπηση–κλάψα κακομοίρα
που είναι σπασμένη η στάμνα
Πώς θα πας στο μπάρμπα-Λία.

Opposite—Lady Mary—
opposite Marathias
and under Elia
she had a jar
The ox went, Lady Mary,
the ox went to Elea
and broke the jar.
Sorrowing and lamenting, Lady Mary,
sorrowing and lamenting poor thing
that the jar is broken.
How will you get to Uncle Elias?

Not terribly confident in the emendation of the transcription, but that’s what I’ve come up with. There are alternations of τo “the” and τθο “to the” in the text given which don’t make sense, and I’ll put down to mishearng? Note that κουνία “jar” is *not* κούνια “cradle” (which also exists in Tsakonian). οβού is likely ο βού, but βούε is the plural oxen, which doesn’t make sense after singular article ο: poetic license, or utter misunderstanding on my part? In Tsakonian κακομοίρα should be only κακόμερε according to Costakis’ dictionary (feminine as well as masculine), and κακομοίρα is a loan from Standard Greek which matches the metre; so the song would have been composed with Standard Greek influence on the vocab. I’m hoping I got τσχίντα βούα right as the active participles “sorrowing and lamenting”, which is not at all a Standard Greek way of saying things.

[EDIT: Translation confirmed.]

Belléli vs. Hesseling

By: | Post date: 2009-05-03 | Comments: 6 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Literature, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , , ,

I said last post that I would scan whatever was on Belléli’s review of Hesseling and put it online. I won’t, the printout is very hard to read, and the Hebrew and the French italics are recoverable only from context. (My Hebrew, of course, is context-free.) The bad quality of the printout is not so much the fault of the microfilm, although microfilm is not the most convenient of formats to begin with. It’s the fault of a dud microfilm machine, with wonky focus and a dark bottom fifth of the screen. Then again, are there any non-dud microfilm machines around these days, with libraries no longer even in the book business?

I was convinced by the anti–book-business propensity of libraries that a digitised Revue des Études Juives would be the right recourse; to my surprise, nothing of the journal has been digitised before 1995. (At least the journal seems to have escaped the axe from the French government. Though they’re no longer in the journal support business.) I mean, what good is the generosity of Jewish philanthropy, if I can’t get a copy of the 1897 Jewish Studies Journal at my desktop? Oh right. Without Jewish philanthropy, I wouldn’t have found out about the review from the digitised Jewish Encyclopaedia to begin with.

Instead, I’ll post here a summary of the exchange between Belléli and Hesseling. Belléli’s response does describe gotchas that anyone using Hesseling’s edition should know about, and should be more widely available. The exchange is:

  • Belléli, Lazare. 1897. Review of Hesseling, Dirk C.: Les cinque livres du loi. Revue des Études Juives 35: 132-155.
  • Hesseling, Dirk Christiaan. 1897. [Response to Belléli]. Revue des Études Juives 35: 314-318.


Belléli’s review was not composed in the kindest frame of mind. Belléli had been busying himself with the Judaeo-Greek Torah for ten years, and intended to start work on publishing it himself: he’d gone to Paris in 1894 to work on the copy there when he found out Hesseling had already signed a contact with a publisher. Belléli was somewhat knocked off schedule already—by the fact that half the Jewish population of Corfu had to flee the blood libel of 1891, which killed 22 Jews. (Belléli represented the Jewish community in the subsequent trial, which was a whitewash.) To be beaten to the press by some Dutch gentile with ill-informed notions of how Hebrew script worked, must have been especially galling.

So Belléli’s response, as Hesseling puts it, “exceeds the framework of a mere book review”: it’s a nastygram, and like the other exemplars of the nastygram book review genre, it combined insightful criticism, pedantic pettiness, and gratuitous sniping. I must say though, having read through it, it’s more insightful and helpful than is usual in the genre. As happens in academia when a book gets a nastygram review, the editors of the journal gave the author the right of reply. You can tell Hesseling is pretty annoyed too (and not as classy as I first remembered—though he ends well. Almost.) To my admitted surprise, I’ve found that Belléli being a native speaker of Greek (I think that’s a safe assumption, even if he was a member of the Italian Jewish community) means he gets a lot right that Hesseling didn’t. But his insistence that his native speaker judgements overruled any seeming archaisms in the text was wrong, and justified Dirk going ahead and publishing.

The refutation of Hesseling’s transcriptions by Belléli is pp. 132-144. Pp. 145-154 talk about the liberties the translator took with the Hebrew, relying mostly on the old Targum Onkelos and his own wits (and misunderstandings—he struggles most with the poetic passages of Numbers, but ends up guessing throughout the text). The translator does not even seem to have made much use of Rashi. The main value of the listing of these errors, Belléli concludes, is to show how important the modern tradition of scholarship was in making sense of the Jewish scriptures. I don’t know anything about the field, and the Hebrew is unreadable in the printout (not that I read Hebrew anyway); so I won’t do that section justice, and will probably not summarise it online unless asked to. (I’m making a couple of exceptions.)

The post includes all the passages Belléli thinks are in error. I’m going to recast the exchange between the two in iChat format, because I can. I’m also going to recast the exchange in more informal terms than the academic French of 1897: it is an argument, after all. Dirk Hesseling gets to have the avatar of Amsterdam Ajax: he was actually a prof at Leiden, and I have no idea where he was born, but surely a hellenist would be sympathetic to a Classically named soccer team. Being of the moiety that drove Belléli from his homeland, I have to be cautious about what avatar I choose for him; since he’d spent so much energy on the Torah, and in fact published the beginning of Genesis before Hesseling, I thought Bereshit “Genesis” was a reasonable choice.

I was curious when I opened up Dirk’s edition, and closed it with “a certain feeling of being cheated”.


Lazare has written a rather extensive discussion, including (as he is quite right in saying) “a small chapter in the history of Biblical exegesis”. I trust it was only a concern for brevity that led him to enumerate only the bad stuff about my book—and to bypass not only my bibliographical research and my studies on the vocab, but also my conclusions on the translation’s language.


If you’re going to publish this kind of text, you need to know both the Hebrew of the original, and the Greek of the translation. Not just Greek in theory, but as it’s actually spoken nowadays.


I’m not going to abuse the journal’s hospitality to defend myself against the omissions (?) of my good stuff in Lazare’s review. I admit he’s right about my Hebrew sucking. I said as much in the book. Does that mean I should not have even tried to put out the edition? Maybe, but this book was too important to wait for the improbable arrival of some Hellenist who knows Hebrew backwards. And you know what Lazare? From what I’ve seen of your transcriptions in the Revue des Études grecs, you’re not that Hellenist: you are clueless about Early Modern Greek. Chatzidakis has already sonned you on your knowledge of linguistics in Athena 3:625ff anyway.


As the following comments make clear, Belléli was adamant that the 1547 Torah should be in the same language as spoken in 1897 Athens (and Corfu), and did not allow for the fact that Greek, even highly vernacular Greek, had changed in the past five centuries.


I have been “placed in unfavourable circumstances in Corfu, far from libraries and great centres of studies.” My Dutch colleague has been luckier.


Lazare has spent years on the text, but he could not get a publisher. Shortly after he got to Paris, I heard it on the grapevine that circumstances would not allow him to complete the work—and he pretty much admits as much. I was already under contract, and I figured my work (“conceived with laudable intentions”—that’d be just about the only good thing Lazare had to say about it) was too useful to Greek Studies to keep out of print. Even if my Hebrew does suck. And printing this thing was a bitch (my printer was low on Greek characters), which is why my intro has several last minute fixes.


Having an idiot printer does not compare in the hardship stakes with a pogrom. And running out of Greek characters? The thing did get published fascicle by fascicle, and Dirk admits that he changed his mind on how to transcribe as the fascicles came out.


There’s several bits of the text that don’t make sense unless you know Hebrew. At the least, you’d expect that the Hebrew names would be rendered faithfully. But Dirk has voiced the sch’vas of Μααλαλεελ, Μιεταβααλ (?), Νιμεροδ, Σινεαβ, Θιδεαλ, Μαμερε. He mutes the second segol in two-segol words, giving Ιεφθ, Πελγ, Περζ. He comes up with Ισασκαρ, λεβιμ, and (straight out of the Septuagint) Νεφθαλι. He always renders kaf as k, giving Χανοκ, Ερκ, Βεκρ. How can we trust his rendering of Greek when he gets the Hebrew script for Hebrew names wrong?


It’s defensible if Dirk was doing a strict transcription; but Dirk doesn’t leap to defend himself here.


A lot of what looks odd in the Greek of the translation is due to the transcription in Hebrew script. There was a “tacit convention” allowing the transcription to be just approximate, so it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, at the expense of positing impossible Greek.


Despite what Lazare says, I still believe the translator knew the Greek alphabet, even if he’d never heard of ancient grammar and literature. His transcription is not as phonetic as it would be if he’d never heard of the alphabet; why else would someone write [timboli] as /tin poli/?


That’s the problem with writing about linguistics in 1897: people still haven’t worked out what phonology is. Lazare is right here (especially as he tries to carry the analogy to other languages), and Dirk is wrong: people have an intuitive understanding of phonology, and they don’t need to be trained in a particular alphabet to suppress allophones in their writing. A Romaniote who’d never seen την πόλιν could still write טן פלי <tin poli> in Hebrew.


As everyone knows, Sephardim don’t distinguish tav with and without a dagesh (ת /θ/, תּ /t/). The Romaniotes traditionally did distinguish the two, but the distinction is dying out because of Sephardim taking over the teaching of Hebrew: the only Romaniotes preserving it in Corfu are recent arrivals from Epirus, and even their children are dropping it. The Torah was published by Sephardim, so we would expect them to confuse ת and תּ on occasion in the Judaeo-Greek.


So Romaniote Hebrew, like Yemenite, preserved pronunciation distinctions with the dagesh that Ashkenaz and Sepharad Jews didn’t. Ashkenazi ת is /s/.


So it’s absurd for Dirk to think (p. xl, xlvi) that θ in the Judaeo-Greek μουσθάκι, εδαπανεύθην proves familiarity with learnèd Greek. I think he would welcome the explanation that θ is confused with τ: not only does it explain the erroneous Φιλισθιμ, Ναφθαλι, but also impossible Greek forms like θέλειος, θελειώνω, ξεθελειώνω, δεκαθέσσερεις, είκοσι θέσσαρες; and τάφειο should be read for θάφειου.


Yup, those thetas are looking pretty indefensible.


Oh, and defending the intermittent reading χαθώς for καθώς (כּ /k/, כ /x/) is embarrassing.


μετά did remain as μετ’ before pronouns in particular, and in fact was extended to other prepositions by analogy: γιατ’ εμένα; αντιτά in the Torah. This doesn’t prove familiarity with learnèd Greek either: in fact the Torah line-breaks as both μετά σεν and με τασέν, so they clearly don’t recognise μετά as the original form of the preposition in /metasen/. And μετά is never used before nouns.


Lazar’s right again: nothing necessarily learnèd about a pronominal μετά σεν.


Other syllable breaks of compound verbs are on ancient prepositions, e.g. προς-φορά; but that doesn’t prove much. Any unlettered peasant in Germany would do the same kind of syllable break. And if the translator had any exposure to learnèd [Christian] Greek, he’d have followed the Septuagint expressions that had become commonplace: he wouldn’t have come up with δαρμοί for πληγαί του Φαραώ, σκήφτρα for φυλαί του Ισραήλ, σύτροφο for αγάπα τον πλησίον σου, πουλιά for χερουβίμ.


Was the translation intended for liturgical or educational use? We can’t be sure, but the sabbath pericopes at least are read in Ottoman and Greek synagogues in the vernacular, in the midday or later services at least: Ruth, pirke abot, Lamentations, allegorical commentary on Song of Songs (the Jews fleeing Arta from Corfu in the latest war recited it in synagogue), and certain haftarot: Jonah in particular is known to us in Judaeo-Greek from several manuscripts. And these were all chanted; but the edition of the Torah has virtually no cantillation marks, other the marking the ends of verses. (So the translation was not intended for liturgical use.) Dirk is clueless about all of this, as his punctuation shows, disfiguring the meaning of passages.


Had Dirk known Hebrew better, he could have also dealt with the bad typography of the Torah, such as confusions of ב /b/ and כ /x/ or ד /d/ and ר /r/. So Num 30 has εμπόδισεν not εχώρησεν. (Btw, the Hebrew has /ebodisen/, so I’d rather transcribe it as ε(μ)πόδισεν.) Dirk faulted me doing this kind of phonetic transcription: but by writing φε(γ)γίτες, I was clearly intending the reading /feɡites/, not /feʝites/.


That’s the problem with trying to stick to historical orthography while doing phonetic transcription. Greek does not distinguish with μπ between [b], [mb], and [mp]; they’re not phonologically distinct ([b] ~ [mb] is an isogloss dialectally, and a sociolinguistic distinction in the standard language); though words may be borrowed with [mb] or [mp], spoken use tends to merge them. Cretan Renaissance poetry, written in Latin script, distinguished between <mp> and <mb>; I’ve seen an edition in Greek script use a diacritic on the pi to differentiate them. I will say though, Lazare’s transcription is awkward.


Dirk confuses clitic pronouns with the homonymous articles (του, της, τους): more care in “decomposing the Hebrew words into their constituent parts” would have addressed this.


I don’t see how it would. They’re both clitics, I can’t see how the Hebrew would tell you which is the proclitic and which the enclitic.


Dirk makes up a verb πειάτε Gen 20:13; this is merely πε γιατέ εμέν.


More clearly, πε για-τ’ εμέν.


In “a complete lack of attention by the editor”, Dirk confuses the tribe of “Dan” with δεν το, δεν την in Gen 49:46-47. And the misreading makes no sense.


στώφλια Gen 6:46? What’s that supposed to mean? It’s just στο πλάγι της.


σκατηλάχω Num 11:23? That’s σε καταλάχη.


I admitted that I could make no sense of this reading in the Wroclaw edition. Whether by guessing or a clearer copy, Lazar comes up with σε καταλάχη. Better, though there is the slight problem that there has never been such a verb as καταλαγχάνω in Greek. I’m pretty confident about emending that to σε καταλάβη, swapping כ /x/ with ב /v/.


There are too instances of καταλαγχάνω, including one in Digenes Acrites Escorial 1407. The verse reads (in Modern understanding of the text, NIV) “You will now see whether or not what I say will come true for you.” The Kriaras glosses for καταλαγχάνω are, “meet someone”, “happen to be somewhere”, and… “realise, find out” (διαπιστώνω). Which matches “see whether something comes true.” And the passage demonstrating this sense? Judaeo-Greek Elegies 164 εγώ είδα κ’ εκατάλαχα τους ξένους πώς τους κλαίνε “I have seen and realised how they lament for strangers”. (Papageorgios, S. 1901. Εβραιο-ελληνικαί ελεγείαι. Παρνασσός 5: 157-174.) Lazare’s right again. We don’t know if it was a lucky guess, or whether this was a peculiarly Judaeo-Greek sense of the word that Lazare knew (and Dirk didn’t).


A verb πικέρνει Gen 40:21? The noun πικέρνης is already used all over the chapter.


Pretty indefensible, that.


Because of the similarity of פּ /p/ and פ /f/ (again, with and without dagesh), επήγεν and έφυγαν, and πάη and φάη, are often mixed up.


βογγίζει “moans” should be βογίζει = βοΐζει < βοή “shouts”.


The editor should be making the text readable. There are a lot of Hebraicisms in the text, but the majority of the target audience for the edition doesn’t know Hebrew. Dirk should have highlighted the Hebraicisms in each chapter, and listed them. “Without some device of that sort, the text often presents a mass of unintelligible words, like minerals in a mine shaft which have not yet had the attention of a metallurgist.”


True, but I’m sympathetic to Dirk here: that would have been too long a wait.


Dirk does not sift through the Hebraicisms, and dismisses as Hebraicisms phenomena which can be explained within Greek. He thinks Gen 50:47 συ(μ)πάθησε το φταίσιμο σκλάβους θεού του πατρός σου has σκλάβους in the accusative, and this somehow reflects the construct genitive. But only the nominative is used for the construct genitive. Anyway, the genitive has been dying out in Modern Greek.


The accusative in Gen 50:47 could be under the influence of the verb, so it looks like an object. But the text is full of genitive plurals anyway; the singular genitive is alive and well in the Modern language, with only the plural genitive retreating; and the translator had no problem with chains of genitive like τα λόγια του Εσαυ του υιού της του μεγάλου Gen 27:42. Nope, these are Hebraicisms.


Greek dialect does do this kind of thing (in fact I’ve corresponded about this kind of thing with a doctoral student with regard to the Walad text). But without a definite article, it’s harder for me to read it as genitive.


Apposition does not prove Hebraicism either. He emends Ex 6:13 τον Φαραώ βασιλιάς της Αίγυφτος (as I read the London copy) to βασιλιάς, and the nominative is a modernism, but the Hebrew doesn’t differentiate between them (eth- is not regular and does not affect the form of the noun).


There’s dozens of these appositions, and they’re Hebraicisms too. From Lazare’s illustration of the apposition (Τον είδες το Τζώρτζη; “Did you see George [accausative]?” Ποιος Τζώρτζης “Which George? [nominative]”), I don’t think he quite gets what an apposition is. Actual appositions have to agree in case by definition.


I doubt this is true by definition; but given how Greek works, I think Dirk’s right.


The translation is literal enough to preserve the distinction between the Kal and Hiphil conjugations. That’s why the future is να + subjunctive. (I’ve changed my mind since my 1890 Revue des Études grecques paper.) As Psichari found, all Greek futures are based on θέλω; the translator has elided out the θέ in θε να and kept the να as closer to the verb, and getting rid of the “verbal debris” of θε. Dirk has cluelessly attributed to the tense a recent interpretation of the tempus imperfectum, when the original sense of the tense was merely future.


Right. Like someone who, like Lazar says, “has never picked up a book in Greek”, can tell what verbal debris is.


As Dirk had already pointed out in his book, να-futures were the original Byzantine form: they were the norm until 1400, and I’m not surprised to see them in this text. (That doesn’t necessarily prove the text is substantially older than 1547. But I’m not going to the garage to check Panayiotis Pappas’ work on the future particle, it’s already 1 AM on a schoolnight.)


Dirk should also have checked with a Hebraicist about του ειπεί, του ερτεί. Indirect objects are preceded by le “to”; the translator is merely rendering le in the same way when it precedes an infinitive (given that the genitive was used for indirect objects in Greek). If there is another particle instead of le in the original, you get forms like από του ειπεί, preserving the dative/genitive article. (Dirk said prepositions always take the accusative, but ignores that in his own transcriptions. But this του is a dative, not a genitive.)


This is a known archaism in Byzantine Greek (where the genitive really is genitive), but the translationism makes sense as an explanation.


Not convinced by the examples of accusative indirect objects: they are pronouns without a distinct genitive, such as ανάγγειλες εμέν, επήρα αυτήν εμέν για γεναίκα. If the genitive εμενός wasn’t a one-off in the text, you’d see it used in this context.


The indirect object test works for με vs. μου, not εμέν(α). If that’s all the examples Dirk can find, then Lazare’s right, the text is clearly genitive.


The Hebrew cannot render palatalisation by inserting /i/. The translator does write κεφαλιτίκια with two /k/s, “but he was not late in perceiving the inexactitude of this transliteration. This concern tormented him for a long time”, so you’ll see transcriptions like απλίσεψε for απλίκεψε, παραζειλιά for παραγγειλιά. That makes things even worse. So he goes back to a [phonemic] transcription, which is exactly the “tacit understanding” I mentioned before. But Dirk fails to explain several forms in that way (i.e. with <k> and <x> standing for both /k, x/ and /kj, xj/ = [c, ç]), leading to δικό for δίκιο, φτωχά for φτώχια, κουφό for κούφιο, βρακόνι for βραχιόνι, πλάκα for πλακί. Ex 15:27 should not be classical φοίνικες, but Modern φοινικιές. Also παρα(γ)γειλιά, μεριά, not παραγγειλά, μερά; the [j] is not always distinctive in pronunciation.


Maybe I was wrong in places; but better to overtranscribe than to undertranscribe, and lose linguistically interesting phenomena. I’ll concede I was wrong about /t/ for /θ/ being linguistically interesting; but Lazare would level: χλόγιη, χλογίση to χλόη, χλοΐση Gen 1:11, ορανού to ουρανού Gen 1:17, πετάει to πετά Gen 1:20, να ιδή to να δγή Gen 2:19, συγκολληθή to συκολληθή Gen 2:24, είπεν to είπε Gen 3:1, εμέν to εμέ Gen 3:12, έγνεψεν to έγνεψε Gen 4:5, &c. The whole point of our linguistic interest is in the phonetics. And some of the forms Lazare thinks impossible in Modern Greek show up in the current language, per Hatzidakis—and even in his own transcriptions: χωρίζει Gen 1:6, σερπετεύγει Gen 1:21, ζωγής Gen 2:7, η-γι-αδερφή Gen 4:22.


Clearly in previous work Lazare was as bad as Valetas in insisting on no final /n/, and no epenthetic [j]. In other words, expecting that 1547 Greek should be identical to 1897 Greek. That alone vindicates Dirk.


Accents are handled arbitrarily: όχτω and έκατο almost always, ασπρός, no distinction between αρχός and άρχος. Πόλεμου, σύντροφου, άθρωπου should have been accented, as nouns, on the antepenult (πολέμου, συ(ν)τρόφου, αθρώπου).


Lazarus is right about some of the misaccentuations, which are my stupid printer’s fault. But Hatzidakis has shown there’s nothing wrong with πόλεμου, σύντροφου, άθρωπου.


The text does not present the spellings βασιλεάς, αετός, γονεών, ελαιές; the translator knows no etymology, and these should just have been written βασιλιάς, αϊτός, γονιών, ελιές.


Both of them are doing historical orthography, and historical orthography had not yet settled on how to deal with /e/ > [j]. The modern orthography has gone with Lazare.


The origin of έκατσε and έτσι are obscure; we don’t see them at all in the first three books, but they are used regularly in the last two. I think this was because the Spanish publisher was unfamiliar with /ts/ from Spanish: the translator went along with this in the beginning, and avoided /ts/, but then insisted, and indeed started hypercorrecting /s/ next to /ts/: hence κάτσητς instead of κάτσης.


“Anakites” in Num 13:22, 33, Deut 2:10, 11 is rendered as Ελλήνου, Ελλήνων. Why “Hellenes”? Maybe from a midrash. Num 13:22 says that Talmai was the offspring of Anak, and the Rabbinic literature associated Talmai with the Greek Ptolemies.


The translator understands the word for “spring, first months of the year” as somehow relating to the word for “father”, and renders it as πρώιμο. Dirk gives it in Ex 34:18 and elsewhere as το μήνα των πρώιμων, which he understands as “the month of early fruits”. But “early fruits” are rendered in Ex 34:22 as πρωιμάδια.


As Lazare argues elsewhere, the translator is bloodymindedly literal enough that he always renders the same Hebrew word with the same Greek word. But I don’t see what πρώιμος means if not “early (as of fruit)”: I’m not seeing evidence of the translator’s misderivation of the Hebrew word from “father”.


Dirk’s α(μ)πελές in Gen 25:16 is his hurried reading of εις τις αυλές τους. Ex 27:8 κουφοπλακώνει is just κούφ(ι)ο πλακ(ι)ώ, and adjective and a genitive plural noun. Num 5:27 χτίστε should be να χτιστή. αλογή “aloe” should be read in Deut 29:17. να άρχουνται Num 5:29 should be να αρνούνται. κουκουτσίνα μη φάη Num 6:4 is not a new-fangled noun, but κουκούτσι να μη φάη. Num 11:26 is ανατέθην, transposing the /t/ and /θ/ of the Constantinople edition; Dirk couldn’t cope with /ainaetiin/, and invents απλίκεψεν. (I’m not sure what that first /i/ is doing there either.)


Editing such a text for the first time is like editing a manuscript for the first time: there’ll be lots of bad first readings. Such as Perles, Fürst, and for that matter Belléli. I see my mistaken αμπελές, and raise you your nonsensical και γλαυβράδα Gen 3:24. Only I’m not concluding you were “hasty”; an easy blunder to make, which I fixed to κ’ εγλαμπράδα ( < έκλαμπρος). Which matches the Hebrew exactly.


Dirk records the reading αναθέτην in the Paris copy; he didn’t just invent απλίκεψεν, and would have seen it in the Wroclaw copy (which Lazare did not see). So this is bona fide textual variation. I’m not convinced the emendation of αναθέτην is necessary, given the uncertainty the modern language has had about τίθημι.


Lev 25:47 άρριζον is literally a “rootless” newcomer. I don’t know where Dirk gets his reading έρριζον from, the British Museum copy is clear.


The translator does not realise that eth- can indicate accompaniment, as well as the accusative. He translates Gen 26:10 as επλάγιαζεν… με τη γεναίκα σου, but Num 5:19 as αν δεν επλάγιασεν ανήρ εσέν—as if πλαγιάζω is a transitive verb.


Kriaras records transitive πλαγιάζω as “capsize”, “lay someone down to sleep”, and “have sex with”; but all the examples of the last are from the Torah. It’s so ill-fitting in Greek already, that I don’t doubt it is a literal translation of what looks in Hebrew like a transitive. Of course, lay in that sense in English is transitive too, so we needn’t conclude “lay” in Hebrew isn’t transitive. The point is though, this is a translationism.


Gen 8:21 ingeniously uses φύση; Dirk uningeniously reads this as ποίση, but there’s no such noun, and learnèd ποίηση does not count.


Dirk did intend a noun by this; he’d have written the verb as ποίσῃ. NIV has “every inclination of [man’s] heart is evil from childhood”; Lazare brings up the fact that the translator was guessing at the “inclination” word, and came up with “nature”. Dirk came up with ποίση “creation”, which is awkward (ότι ποίση καρδι̯ά του άθρωπου κακή [Paris: κακό] από τα παλληκαράτα του).


Deut 18:27 has the correct ληνό, a press, which the Dutch editor misconstrues as λινό, linen.


“violate, desecrate” is often rendered by a verb λιτώνω, which I had derived from λίθος in 1890, and Dirk had gone along with me. I now think it’s λυτώνω, from λυτός “loose”; cf. γλυτώνω.


Kriaras has λιτώνω, etymology unknown. This book review is not in Kriaras’ bibliography—which is otherwise all-encompassing; and the post-1997 hiatus volumes of Kriaras no longer have corrections to earlier entries. There’s a reason I’m blogging this stuff.


Apart from ολιγώτερο Deut 7:7, there are no comparatives in the text; the translator is happy to use a periphrastic construction in Greek (adjective + από) to match the Hebrew literally. The exception was to avoid the misconstrual of εσείς το ολιγώτερο από όλα τα έθνη, if it were rendered as εσείς το ολίγο από όλα τα έθνη. κάλλιο is no longer apparent as a comparative, and Dirk’s examples of πλια Ex 10:29 and Lev 27:26 are temporal adverbs, not comparisons.


What, to avoid the reading “you, slightest of all nations” as “you, a little bit of all nations?” I know the latter reading would sit ill with the Ancient Hebrews’ panic over miscegenation, but would the expression λίγο απ’ όλα “a bit of everything, a mix” been current yet? Lazar’s right on πλια (Contemporary πια), probably right on κάλλιο.


I’ll give the closing statements of the two scholars entire. Pardon my crap French.

But the linguistic value of this ‘monument of the word’ is incontestable, as it has the merit of showing us a language which has in no way undergone the influence of learnèd efforts. Noone will any longer believe, I hope, that our translator had been educated with anything even slightly literary in his Greek. Like his coreligionists, he had a shut-in life in the recesses of the ghetto, without ever coming into contact with the Christian Greeks living in Constantinople. Nonetheless, the Greek usage of the first Jewish inhabitants of Constantinople was quite old: it dated from a time when persecution and mutual distrust had not yet become a daily fact. Except for some religious terms which they had to have as their own—just like the Christians did—the Jews of that region spoke the language common to all the people before entering the Byzantine stage. They underwent with the others the same phonetic changes and evolutions in morphology and syntax. Though the new segregation laws separated the two races, isolation was neither strict enough nor continuous enough to decide different linguistic developments.

We have tried to show in the first part of this study that in phonetics and morphology, there are no phenomena distinct to this text; we will do an even better job of this when we come back to this text, in studies which will treat in more detail questions of direct interest to linguistics. Our task here has been to deal with issues more specific to Hebrew. For syntax, we were the first to warn Hellenists that there is much of the original language left, but we cannot at all agree with Dr Hesseling in dismissing as Hebraicisms any fact which needs some effort to be explained. Particularly the issue of the genitive plural, which tends to be represented as an accusative, deserves more of our attention. Certain irregularities—and unfortunately they are not a few—are only apparent, and are merely due to the haste with which the Dutch editor went about his work. With more time and circumspection, many difficulties would have been made clear without too much effort. Dr Hesseling made his edition without become familiar beforehand with the language of the original: he has seen chasms where they’re aren’t any, but there are also bumps in the ground which he hasn’t realised, and he has run up against them—not without damage. And concerning Greek itself, he has not always been right: within him theory has not been accompanied by practical knowledge of the language, which would have clarified obscure points and removed so many doubts.

In brief, his work, though conceived with laudable intentions, has not reached its goal, and realises in only a very incomplete fashion the desire of so many scholars to finally have a readable edition of the Greek Torah of Constantinople.


Such examples as these show that arriving at a perfect understanding of such a text as this requires capabilities which are rarely sufficient in a single person. For my part, I confess that reading Mr Belléli’s not exactly benevolent article has provided me with clarifications on several points. And even though in his critique he does not seem to have gleaned anything good from my work, for my part I have no hesitation in recognising that I am indebted to Mr Belléli’s study for precious information.


Apologia pro Anglico suo

By: | Post date: 2009-05-01 | Comments: 10 Comments
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In which the author ratiocinates in Greek wherefore he writes not in Greek in a blog on Greek linguistics that would only make sense to someone who already speaks Greek
Ή κατά το κακεντρεχέστερο (για να κάνω μνεία και του Χατζιδάκι), «Διατί ήμην ελληνιστής αλλά δεν γράφω εις την ελληνικήν».

I reserve the right to codeswitch in posts and blogs, though I undertake not to do so gratuitously, and I’ll save the codeswitches to Klingon for the personal blog.

Είναι κάτι που διερωτήθηκα όταν είδα το Νίκο το Σαραντάκο να μου ‘γκινιάζει τα σχόλια εδώ στα εγγλέζικα, και ξανά όταν εγγλέζικα σχολίασε και ο Δύτης των Νιπτήρων. (Για το Γιώργο Μπαλόγλου δεν μου ‘κανε και τόση εντύπωση, τον έχω συναντήσεις εις Αμέρικας περισσότερες φορές απ’ όσες εν Ελλάδι.) Και κάτι που ξαναδιερωτήθηκα, όταν απόρησα πόσα από τα λογορροιακά μου χαμπαριάζουν οι φίλοι που έμαθαν τα ελληνικά ως δεύτερη (ή μάλλον ειπείν πέμπτη) γλώσσα—ο Φίλιπ, ο Σήφης—ή και μόνο ακουστά ως γλωσσοδίφες—ο Τζων—ή οι περαστικοί από το Google που έψαχναν Ρουμή ή την τιμή του ψωμιού στην Αθήνα το ’30, και που βλαστημούν τη μοίρα τους γιατί η Μικρή Γραμματική της Πρώιμης Νεοελληνικής τους παραείναι μικρή (και πρώιμη).

Πρώτα απ’ όλα λοιπόν, κακά τα ψέματα, πιο άνετα μου ‘ρχεται να γράφω εγγλέζικα. Τέσσερα χρόνια έκανα μικρός στην Ελλάδα, και όλη μου η υπόλοιπη παιδεία και εντρύφηση είναι αγγλόφωνη. Ιδίως τώρα που δεν διαβάζω και τόσα στα ελληνικά (τώρα που δε διαβάζω δηλαδή), το ύφος μου στα ελληνικά παίρνει σίγουρα την κατηφόρα.

Δεύτερο, ε μην εκθειάζω και όλα μου τα κόμπλεξ εδώ, ας αφήσω και κάτι για τα Οπουτζουλούκια, αλλά έχω και ‘γω ως μη-μητροπολιτικός έλληνας ένα κάποιο άχτι. Εγγλέζικα παναπεί, λοιπόν, κι οποιανού του αρέσει. Για αυτό εξάλλου και κόμπλαρα όταν απάντησε εγγλέζικα ο 40κος, γιατί εκείνου τι άχτι να έχω;

Το άχτι μάλιστα το επιδεικνύει και ο μικτός τουρκικός/φωνητικοαλφαβητικός τίτλος opɯcɯlɯklɑr. Ή το όταν έδωσα ομιλία σε διαλεκτολογικό συνέδριο, σε ταχύτατα και ιδιωματικά αυστραλέζικα—να σημειώσω πως η μόνη ανακοίνωση στα ελληνικά ήταν από ιταλίδα, γιατί στον παν/μειακό τομέα επαγγελματική κατοχύρωση σου κάνει τέλος πάντων η χρήση της αγγλικής· και όταν ρώτησα έναν από τους καλύτερους παριστάμενους τι εντύπωση είχε από τα λεγόμενά μου, με κοίταξε αργά και μου είπε «ε είσαι και native speaker…»

Υπάρχει και κάπως σοβαρότερος λόγος, που δένει με τους τυχαίους γκουγκλώντες από την Αίγυπτο και τη Γουατεμάλα. Ο λόγος δένει και με τον απώτερο σκοπό του ιστολογίου, άμα τον καταλάβω με το καλό κι εγώ ο ίδιος· διότι δεν θα με γέμιζε το κύριο μέλημά του να είναι κουτσομπολιά περί φαγωμάρας Δέφνερ–Περνό ή Μπελέλι–Χέσελιγκ. Αλλά όχι, σοβαρότερο είναι πως, όσο να ‘ναι, υπάρχει ένα κενό στον ιστό για την νεοελληνική ιδίως ιστορική γλωσσολογία και διαλεκτολογία, που θα ‘θελα να μειώσω.

Στην ιστολογοσύνη (ή κατά κόσμον ιστολογόσφαιρα) για την νεοελληνική γλώσσα, το Ηλληνιστεύκοντος μάλλον περιθωριακό φαντάζει (η θα φάνταζε, αν είχε ήδη σαφή σκοπό). Τα περισσότερα ιστολόγια ασχολούνται ή με θέματα γλωσσικής ρύθμισης και διαμάχης, ή σε δαυλοπλήκτων αναιρέσεις, ή σε ετυμολογία. Τα της ρύθμισης δεν με ενδιαφέρουν τόσο όσο όταν ήμουν μικρότερος, ιδίως όταν έχω χάσει επισόδια (από πότε δηλαδή αβγό😉 Για τους δαυλόπληκτους συνέβαλα και γω τον οβολό μου στην αναίρεση του Λερναίου Κειμένου· αλλά τα σχόλια περί 40κου σε λημέρι των σταλινιστών γλωσσονειρώκτηδων μου δείχνουν πως όποιος το ‘χει χάψει το χάπι, δεν το ξερνάει, που να τον βαράς με και τους δύο τόμους του λεξικού του Ποκόρνυ. Και καλή η ετυμολογία, αλλά νομίζω πως την καλύπτει καλύτερα και πιο ψυχαγωγικά ο 40κος από ό,τι θα τα κατάφερνα εγώ. Εγώ μάλλον μεταξύ φωνολογίας και σύνταξης θα αιωρούμαι.

Το κενό δεν είναι παντελές, ευτυχώς, και υπάρχουν πρωτοβουλίες σαν την Ανέμη ή την Πύλη για την Ελληνική Γλώσσα ή την Πρώιμη Νεοελληνική που διοχετεύουν υλικό και ενημερώσεις. (Και βέβαια οι παλιότερες ιστολογίες και βικιπαιδολογίες του Ντόκτωρ Μώσε.) Πάντως παρότι σαφώς και συνεχίζεται η δραστηριότητα στα πεδία αυτά, η πολλή δουλειά που έχει γίνει είναι προπολεμική, εκτός ιστού (non in rete sunt, non leguntur), και μάλλον ντεμοντέ (όπως ντεμοντέ είναι και η ινδοευρωπαϊκή ιστορική γλωσσολογία γενικά). Με το να παρουσιάζω κείμενα και αξιοπερίεργα—και κουτσομπολιά, ξαναφέρνω ελπίζω και εγώ στην επιφάνεια κάποια πράγματα που αδίκως παραμερίστηκαν από το χρόνο. Και ο πιο αποτελεσματικός τρόπος να έρχονται πράγματα στην επιφάνεια στον ιστό είναι ο αγγλόφωνος.

Έτσι ίσως εξιλεώνομαι κάπως που εγκατέλειψα τα γλωσσολογικά. Κι αυτό είναι μια μεγάλη και τεθλιμμένη ιστορία που μάλλον στα Οπουτζουλούκια πρέπει να καταχωρηθεί· αλλά μάζεψα στην πορεία της διατριβής μου (και του βιβλίου μου με το Γιώργο) αρκετό υλικό, που κάθεται παραχωνιασμένο κάτω από τη σκάλα ή στο γκαράζ. Καλό κάνω στο κάρμα μου να τα επισκέφτομαι πού και πού και να ανταποδίδω και κάτι στο σύμπαν. Δεν έχω πειστεί πως το υλικό το εκμεταλλεύτηκα όσο έπρεπε, ίσως δώσω έναυσμα αλλού. (Και πού και πού και στον εαυτό μου.)

Σε κάποιους που μάλλον δεν θα ‘ναι γλωσσολόγοι, γιατί οι γλωσσολόγοι έχουν τα συγγράμματά τους και τα συνέδριά τους και τα περιοδικά τους και το καθιερωμένο peer review, οπότε έχουν τον τρόπο τους ήδη να ανταλλάσουν πληροφορίες. Αλλά έτσι όπως έχει εξελιχθεί ο κόσμος, με το Τείχος Της Ηλεκτρονικής Συνδρομής να αποκλείει τα περισσότερα επιστημονικά περιοδικά από ελεύθερη πρόσβαση, ένα ιστολόγιο γίνεται πιο αποτελεσματικό στο να διοχετεύει πληροφορίες στο google (καταπώς έχω ήδη προσέξει). Σαφώς όχι πιο επιστημονικός: είναι κομμάτι θλιβερό, την περίτεχνη επιχειρηματολογία ενός καλού γλωσσολογικού άρθρου να την εκτοπίζει λόγω blogspot, ξέρω γω, κάποιο επιφανειακό σχόλιο τύπου «μπας και το μετά χαράς ήταν καθαρεύουσα της εποχής;» Αυτό όμως σημαίνει απλά πως χρειάζονται περισσότερα ιστολόγια, που έχουν κι αυτά το ρόλο τους—και περισσότερα άρθρα Ανοικτής Πρόσβασης. Δεν αναιρεί την επιστημοσύνη το ιστολόγιο κατ’ ανάγκην· μπορεί να την συμπληρώσει. (Ευτυχώς ο Νότης καταλαβαίνει τι εστί ιστός, οπότε δεν εκτοπίζεται διόλου: Toufexis, Notis. 2008. Diglossia and register variation in Medieval Greek. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 32: 203-217.)

Και τέλος, το να γράφω στα αγγλικά για τα ελληνικά όλο και κάποιες καινούργιες επαφές και ανταλλαγές θα προκαλέσει. Κάποια στιγμή, κάποιος πέρσης ή ισραηλινός θα συνισφέρει κάτι σχετικό σε μια συζήτηση, που αν γινόταν μόνο στα ελληνικά δεν θα την εντόπιζε. Για να μην ξεχνάμε κι ότι αν μπω περισσότερο, όπως σκοπεύω, στα χωράφια των παλιότερων σταδίων της ελληνικής, θα θέλω να τραβήξω στην κουβέντα και ειδικούς που τους είναι πιο οικεία η αρχαία παρά η νέα ελληνική. (Αυτό ιδίως αν ασχοληθώ με τη λόγια βυζαντινή, που την έχουν φτύσει οι πάντες ως τεχνητή γλώσσα. Κάτι που δεν ξενίζει όσο ίσως θα έπρεπε έναν παλιό θιασιώτη της Εσπεράντο, της Λόζμπαν και της Κλίγκον…)

Judaeo-Greek Genesis 11:1-9

By: | Post date: 2009-04-30 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Literature, Mediaeval Greek
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What text to publish as a sample of the 1547 Judaeo-Greek Torah? The obvious Genesis 1 has already been scanned in by the Jewish Languages site. And a good thing too, because my photocopy of that page is really crap. Valetas included Genesis 9, the story of Lot.

Well, if you’ve been trained as a linguist, there is only one text to do. Gen 11:1-9: to wit, Tower of Babel.

You’ve been warned about it being a word for word translation…

1. και ήτον όλη ηγής γλώσσα μνι̯α και λόγι̯α μόνα.

2. και ήτον όντεν εσυνεπήραν από ανατολή και ευρήκαν κάμπο εις την ηγή της Σινεαρ και έκατσαν εκεί.

3. και είπαν ανήρ προς το σύντροφό του· κονόμησε να πλιθι̯άσωμε πλίθους και να κάψωμε εις καψιμό. και ήτον εκείνων η πλιθά ι̯α πέτρα και η λάσπη ήτον εκείνων ι̯α πηλός.

4. και είπεν· κονόμησε να χτίσωμε εμάς κάστρο και πύργο και η κορφή του εις τον ορανό και να κάμωμε εμάς όνομα πρόςποτε να σκορπίσωμε ιπί πρόσωπα όλης της ηγής.

5. και εκατέβην ο Κύρι̯ος να ͜ιδή το κάστρο και το πύργο ός έχτισαν παιδι̯ά του άθρωπου.

6. και είπεν ο Κύρι̯ος· ιδού λαός ένας και γλώσσα μνι̯α εις όλους τους και ετούτο οπού εχέρισαν να κάμουν· και τώρα δε θέλει εμποδιθεί [Paris: να μηδέν εμποδισθή] από εκείνους όλο ός ελογάρι̯ασαν σαν να κάμουν.

7. κονόμησε να κατέβουμε και να ανακατώσωμε εκεί τη γλώσσα τους ως να μην ακούσουν ανήρ γλώσσα του σύντροφού του.

8. και εσκόρπισεν ο Κύρι̯ος εκείνους από εκεί ιπί πρόσωπα όλης της ηγής και έπαψαν να χτίσουν [Paris: του χτίσει] το κάστρο.

9. ιπί έτσι έκραξεν το όνομα της Βαβελ ότι εκεί ανακάτωσεν ο Κύρι̯ος τη γλώσσα όλης της ηγής, και από εκεί εσκόρπισέ τους ο Κύρι̯ος ιπί πρόσωπα όλης της ηγής.

Judaeo-Greek Torah, Constantinople, 1547

By: | Post date: 2009-04-30 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Literature, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: ,

I’d earlier mentioned in passing Dirk Hesseling’s publication of the Judaeo-Greek Torah (published 1547, not 1543); so I thought I’d regale you with a passage. First, though, a lot of digression.

We don’t know a lot about Judaeo-Greek at all; Julia Krivoruchko (who contributed the online description of Judaeo-Greek) has been working in the area, but there’s not much to work with. To her bibliography, add another publication from Our Guy:

  • Hesseling, D.C. 1901. Le livre de Jonas. Byzantinische Zeitschrift 10: 208–217.

1263 from memory, from Crete. That is damn old. Will have to post some of that too; Jonah’s short.

Also, check out the entry on Judaeo-Greek and Judaeo-Italian by Lazarus Belléli in the 1901 Jewish Encyclopaedia, with a couple of Judaeo-Greek songs.

We don’t know much about Judaeo-Greek (or as it’s become popular to call it, Yevanic, after the Hebrew for Greece). Noone really cared to record much in the language of the Greek-speaking Jews (the Romaniotes) until the language had died out, after the Holocaust and the Aliyah.

Fun facts from Wikipedia that aren’t massively relevant, but it’s my blog: Gabrielle Carteris’ father was Romaniote. On Beverly Hills 90210, she was Ashkenazed to Andrea Zuckermann. Rae Dalven, who had translated Cavafy (and wrote much about the Romaniotes of Ioannina), may be a Romaniote better known to Greeks; then again, these days, perhaps not. And Hank Azaria’s were Sepharad Jews from Salonica—the Sephardim were the majority of Jews in present-day Greek territory. Lazarus Belléli was from Corfu, which presumably makes him an Italian-speaking Jew—the third Jewish community of Greece.

It appears there was a distinct Judaeo-Greek accent, and the obligatory loanwords from Hebrew, but otherwise Jewish Greek wasn’t that different from Christian Greek (as Belléli confirms): this wasn’t like Yiddish, which changed so much en route from Alsace to Lithuania. The Judaeo-Greek Torah published in Constantinople has the shibboleths of Constantinopolitan Greek—in particular, the subjunctive διώ instead of δω for “see”. Belléli thought it’s Epirot, which would be consistent with Ioannina being a major Romaniote centre, but Hesseling and Chatzidakis said nay. Hesseling thinks it’s a dialectal koine, and works out it’s Constantinopolitan—but didn’t know that διώ is a Constantinopolitanism: it was early days in Modern Greek dialectology. The text has both accusative and genitive indirect objects, with a few more genitives; so it doesn’t come down either side of that isogloss.

This wouldn’t be a Hellenisteukontos post if it didn’t have gossipy digressions, so here’s another two. First, the Ottomans did not allow initially books to be published in Greek script in the Empire—all the early modern printed books in Greek script come from Venice. The ban did not apply to Greek in Hebrew script—it was about the millet (confessional community), not the language; so this was the first book printed in Greek in the Levant. Some more stuff from Hesseling’s introduction:

  • The Hebrew frontispiece says it was a translation “into the Greek language and the Foreign language, the two languages used by the people of our nation in captivity”. It had only been 55 years since the Sephardim arrived in the Ottoman Empire: their language was still Foreign.
  • Belléli thinks the Torah’s two centuries older (because it doesn’t know about “Western European exegetes”, and has no Turkish words). But given that he says the translator’s command of Hebrew is pretty poor, would they have been up to date on Western European commentaries anyway? Not convinced about what the relative lack of Turkish words proves, either. Hesseling found a few Turkish words, though you might have expected more.
  • Hesseling proclaims himself unable to say anything relevant about the Jewish history and religious aspects of the translation, deferring to Belléli’s papers mentioned in the Judaeo-Greek bibliography. What he said.
  • Er, eek. Just found out from linked bio that Belléli thought Hesseling’s transcription of the Torah sucked (“severely criticizing”). Uhoh. Revue des Études Juives “xxxv. 132, 314” is only available on microform at MelbUni; I’m scanning the bastard and putting it online, because people aren’t exactly rushing to do a new edition of the Greek Torah, so it’s the only correction I’ll find. Thank you, Kopelman Foundation, for making the 1901 Jewish Encyclopaedia available online, because noone in Modern Greek philology seems to have noticed this. Apparently Hesseling included a facsimile in his edition, but in my photocopy—Hebraea sunt, non leguntur 🙁 —the facsimile has been left out.
  • Even more infuriating, this discovery from said Jewish Encyclopaedia: there was also a 1576 Judaeo-Greek Job. Sadly, at least according to Belléli, it’s vanished.
  • Ooh, Belléli was intending to do his own edition of the Torah in 1894, and had already gone to Paris to read the copy there, but got beat to the post by Hesseling. I got the impression they didn’t like each other, that explains some things.
  • The few printed copies available to Hesseling differed, and Hesseling thinks they were being corrected as they were being printed (Wroclaw and London vs. Paris and Oxford copies). This happened with Shakespeare as well—a few decades later.
  • Post-World War II, there’d be fewer copies around of the original edition still; not optimistic about the Wroclaw copy. At least there were three copies in the British Museum and the Bodleian.
  • Someone else has published the Ladino translation in the ’80s.
  • Sounds like this was as much a typographical extravaganza as the Complutensian Polyglot: it also included the Targum Onkelos and Rashi’s commentary. 390 pp.
  • The construct genitive is rendered in Greek by nominative + nominative.
  • The infinitive absolute construction (infinitive plus finite of the same verb, for emphasis) is emulated in Greek with a nominalisation; often a made-up nominalisation. So Exodus 21:5 ειμμό να πη “to say a saying = to say indeed”, where ειμμό is made up from είπα. (I thought ειπωμός does exist as a nominalisation, but it’s not online or in my dictionaries.). Similarly Exodus 22:15 προικιμό να προικώση “to dower a dowering = to dower indeed”. (The Septuagint and Vulgate have echoes of the Hebrew construction as well.)
  • The semantics of the words used is carbon copied from Hebrew, not just the syntax.

Second digression: obligatory anecdote lambasting lame Antisemitism. George Valetas, bless his over-excitable red socks (the bio link being to Rizospastis), was a literary scholar who edited many a Modern Greek text, including an anthology of Early Modern Greek prose:

  • Βαλέτας, Γ. (επιμ.) 1947. Ανθολογία της Δημοτικής Πεζογραφίας. Τόμος Πρώτος: Από το Μαχαιρά ως το Σολωμό (1340–1827). Αθήνα: Πέτρος Ράνος.

Like everyone in Greece at the time, Valetas was éngagé in the Great Diglossia Wars, proudly and leftistly on the Demotic side. And because he was a literature scholar and polemicist, and not a linguist, his anthology is conscripted to his polemic: to prove that Demotic Is Beautiful, and Has A History. And if his texts didn’t sound Demotic enough, he’d make sure they did: he made a point of dropping the final /n/s in the texts he anthologised.

The vernacular dropped its final n’s en masse; this is one aspect where Puristic did not really succeed in bringing about a reconquista of archaic features in the standard language—although there is still some debate about whether any n’s can appear after masculines at all. Of course, anyone literate in Greek before 1970 was literate in a form of the language that kept its final n’s; so final n’s would gravitate to Greek in print, however colloquial the author was trying to be.

In volume II of the anthology, Valetas acknowledged the criticisms of those who said he really had no right to play God with the texts as they had originally been published. He acknowledged them by saying THEY WERE REVANCHIST TROGLODYTES WHO SHOULD KEEP THEIR CLAMMY HANDS OFF THE SPOTLESS PURITY OF OUR PEOPLE’S LANGUAGE. (I may be exaggerating for effect, but he does spend a full page of his introduction, vii-viii, defending stripping the nus, and comparing it to archaeologists stripping ancient statues clean. Probably not the best analogy to make, in retrospect.)

His discussion of each of the works he excerpts is just as excitable. Every text is a masterpiece of the popular spirit, pulsing with the lifeblood of Romeicity. With some unpleasant consequences when he gets to the text by the translator he chooses to call The Constantinopolitan Writer (Πολίτης Γραφικός):

Ο μεταφραστής είναι Έλληνας, που γνώριζε τα εβραϊκά, κι αυτό φαίνεται απ’ τη γλωσσοπλαστική και γλωσσοδυναμική του. Υποχρεωμένος να μεταφράσει λέξη με λέξη και στη σειρά το εβραϊκό, στριμώχνει και τσακίζει το ελληνικό, κρατάει όμως το ύφος και μας δίνει την πιο ζωντανή δημοτική που γράφτηκε ως τότε.

The translator is Greek and knew Hebrew; that is apparent from his dynamic and inventive use of language. He is obligated to translate the Hebrew word for word and phrase by phrase, so he squeezes and creases the Greek; but he retains the style, and gives us the liveliest Demotic written down to date.

How very Stormfront. (Valetas is actually using stuff Hesseling said on p. vii, but that’s not where Dirk was going with this.) It would not occur to Valetas of course that the reason someone might know Hebrew yet be fluent in Greek was that ROMANIOTE JEWS SPOKE GREEK. As their native language already. Why did he think the Torah was translated into Greek to begin with?! Then again, there’s only so much one can expect of someone who, describing Simon Porcius/Portius (glancing mention of his 1638 grammar), writes:

Ο Πόρκιος, αν και καθολικός, ήταν μεγάλος Έλληνας, από τους πρόδρομους και θεμελιωτές του νεοελληνικού πολιτισμού, τους ζηλωτές της εθνικής λαλιάς, που στη μελέτη της αφιέρωσε τη ζωή του.

Porcius, despite being Catholic, was a Great Greek, one of the forerunners and founders of Modern Greek culture, the a zealot of the national tongue, who dedicated his life to its study.

And Valetas has an odd notion of what “style” means. What’s actually happened is that the phonetics and morphology of the Judaeo-Greek Torah are surprisingly colloquial sounding, precisely because they were written in a script where Classical Greek had no purchase, by Greek-speakers not all that beholden to Plato. (Um, Greeks, actually; but not in the way Valetas meant the word.) But the syntax is unreadable, precisely because it is a word for word translation. (Jonah was the same.) This was after all intended as a crutch for Romaniotes and Sephardim to better read the Hebrew.

They’re not completely un-beholden to Plato, it must be said. What happened with relativisation, in both translations, is pretty revealing. The Hebrew relativiser is asher, which like the Greek που originated in a locative:

  • Givón, T. 1991. The Evolution of Dependant Clause Morpho-syntax in Biblical Hebrew. In Traugott, E.C. & Heine, B. (eds), Aproaches to Grammaticalization: Volume II Focus on Types of Grammatical Markers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 257–310.

So it would be nice if asher, which originally meant “where”, were translated by οπού, which also originally meant “where”. It isn’t. [EDIT: Or rather, it isn’t often enough.] It’s translated by an indeclinable ὅς: the Classical relativiser, which would have been already dead no small number of centuries ago. The indeclinability, they got from the inflexible literalness of the translation; the ὅς, they got from Learnèd Greek. That Jonah does it too suggests this had become a convention for translations of the Bible in Judaeo-Greek (or that the Torah translation is as old as Jonah; but ὅς was dead in 1263, too.) But it’s too cold in my garage for me to go check against the even earlier translation fragments from the Cairo Genizah

  • de Lange, N. 1996. Greek Jewish Texts from the Cairo Genizah. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

[EDIT: Checked. The Genizah Ecclesiastes translation, dating from “earlier than the 11th century, perhaps much earlier”, also has ὅς. So it looks like this had become a conventional feature of late Jewish translations of scripture into Greek.]
Oh, and wouldn’t you know it. In his reprinting of Genesis 9, Valetas emended ὅς to οπού. Because No True Greek would write ὅς, or something…

Michael Deffner, scoundrel

By: | Post date: 2009-04-26 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
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In what little you get about Tsakonian online, you will on occasion see reverent references of Michael Deffner (1848-1934), renowned Tsakonologist, who so loved Tsakonia that he made his home in Leonidion, who wrote the renowned 1881 Grammar of Tsakonian and the renowned 1923 Dictionary of Tsakonian.

The problem with what little you get about Tsakonian is, it hasn’t been written by linguists. So no, Michael Deffner is not renowned among linguists: he was a clunky amateur, and anyone who mentions his name before Hubert Pernot either knows nothing about the linguistic study of Tsakonian, or is giving their patriotism precedence over their science. Costakis long superseded his dictionary. Pernot says about the phonetics of the grammar and the dictionary that “Mr Deffner, as the Greeks would say, has ‘made a sea’ of the phonology of the language”; and those Greek-speakers among you who have just mentally translated τα ‘κανε θάλασσα know how contemptuous Hubert is being. And as for his impassioned defence of the Doric heritage of Tsakonian, those fascinated by the Spartans (and not by what is truly interesting about Tsakonian—how much it has been restructured away from the mainstream of Greek) owe a far greater debt to Pernot than to Deffner. Deffner never saw a connection too tenuous to Doric. Pernot on the other hand started out in the 1890s a Doric skeptic, and if he admits any Doric in his 1934 grammar, it’s because it really is uncontroversial and tested.

Now that isn’t reason enough to castigate Deffner. He was early on the scene (though hardly the first—Deville’s thesis on Tsakonian is 1866); he was an archaeologist and not a linguist; and well, he cared. I find the anecdote relayed on YouTube about him creepy and not praiseworthy, but it does demonstrate commitment. (Deffner’s song son died in Prastos. When Deffner went up from Leonidion, he stopped outside, transfixed by the Tsakonian laments, and started transcribing them.)

No, two little episodes have made me resent Νιχάλη Δέφνερ. The first was what he did when Dirk Hesseling suggested Tsakonian might be a creole. Dirk Hesseling is someone who does not get enough appreciation in either fields he worked on. He was a hellenist by trade; his most important contributions to Modern Greek linguistics have been his publication in 1897 of the 1543 Torah in Judaeo-Greek, and his publishing with Pernot of the Ptochoprodromos poems in 1910.

Hesseling was interested, as a Hellenist, in how the Hellenistic Koine came about from the dialects of Greek; this led him to study creoles, and made him one of the first to do so. He doesn’t get enough love in creolistics either, because he was a generation too early, and he published in Dutch. Peter Muysken and Guus Meijer, Dutch creolists who publish in English, has written a couple of appreciations of his work, which can be retrieved from Radboud University’s repository (whose cafeteria I have dismissed elsewhere): “On the beginnings of Pidgin and Creole Studies: Schuhardt and Hesseling”, and their introduction to a volume of Hesseling’s work (D. C. Hesseling, On the Origin and Formation of Creoles, Story-Scienta, 1979.)

The Radboud U caf is not the closest I’ve gotten to Muysken. In my historical linguistics lectures, I’d namechecked his work on mixed languages. A couple of years later, I was crawling under a desk trying to find an IP for him as a visiting scholar. But my professional disgruntlements are for another post.)

So Dirk Hesseling was one of the first people to invent a hammer; and it was only natural for him to look for other nails in the history of Greek. One such nail that his friend Pernot had identified was the oddball development of Tsakonian, a language that both morphologically and phonologically looked a lot simpler than Standard Greek. Mightn’t creolisation have taken place here too? The Peloponnese has had many a stranger walk in over the centuries; Hesseling pinpointed the Avars as a likely candidate, and went to press:

  • Hesseling, D. C. 1906. De Koine en de Oude Dialekten van Griekland. (Comptes rendus de l’Academie d’Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde, 4th series, part 8.) Amsterdam. 37 pp.

Deffner’s response was to call a town meeting of Leonidion, to condemn the anthellenic outrage. As Pernot sniffed years later, “That’s not the proper way to conduct linguistic scholarship.” But whether Hesseling was right or not (and creolisation isn’t the only reason for grammatical structures to melt down), what Deffner did was not scholarship.

Even that, you might give a pass on; Deffner was engagé, virtually a local; and this was hardly the last time that Greek scholars reacted to external debate with a vote of condemnation. What he did in 1921, however, was a sin against the Holy Spirit. You know, the unforgivable type.

Laographia, the journal of the Greek Folklore Society, has been the main place where Greek dialect texts have been published. The folklorists weren’t doing so to be linguists; but because the linguists of the time deemed linguistics to end at the word boundary, the folklorists were the only Greek scholars to publish sentences longer than four words until well after the Second World War. And since Laographia was a Greek folklore journal, you’d expect what it published to reflect, well, Greek folklore.

Which brings us to:

  • Deffner, M. [Δέφνερ, Μ.] 1921a. Δείγματα Τσακωνικής (Samples of Tsakonian.) Λαογραφία 8. 159-180.

This publication was reprinted in the same year as the self-published Α πεντάμορφο του κόσμου. Παρανύθι για τα καμπζία Τhα Τσακώνικα γρούσσα. (The Five-time Most Beautiful in the World. A fairy tale for children. In the Tsakonian language). Athens; and again in 1926 included in Επτά Ωραία Παραμύθια (Seven Beautiful Fairy Tales.) Athens. It was also submitted to the Philological Society of Constantinople as ms. 495. (The Philological Society collected dialect data, and had lent some manuscripts to the Historical Dictionary in Athens. When 1922 happened, Athens held on to what it had. I have no idea what happened to the rest of the manuscripts; I wouldn’t automatically assume they were destroyed, but they haven’t turned up to my knowledge.)

Now, when you read Deffner’s text, the Tsakonian strikes you as somewhat odd, compared to the rest of the Tsakonian corpus. I was of course looking for relativisers, being an opoudjis; it struck me that this text did not use πφη, like every other Tsakonian text, but πφου—which looked like πφου(ρ) “how”. And which also looked a lot like Standard Greek που. And the content was Snow White; of course the Grimm tales were common currency throughout Europe, but this version seemed a lot closer to Disney than I’d have expected this far south.

You’ve worked out what’s happened, right? I don’t even know if Deffner intended this as deliberate fraud; he didn’t outright say “I collected this in the field” instead of “I cooked this at my desk in St Lenid, with the mixed Tsakonian of the learnèd St Lenidians around me”. But if you’re submitting the translation to the Philological Society of Constantinople and Laographia, what the hell were you expecting people to think?

Something for Deffner to ponder in the hereafter.

Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll end up lower down still than him. If I’m to judge from reactions to the Klingon Hamlet such as this (screw you, Christie St Martin), or this (screw you, Fark commenters), or this, or…. blah blah. Whatever. Btw, however ideologically unsympatico I may find Jonah Goldberg, I found his analysis of Klingon fandom pretty insightful. But all that is a topic for a non–Greek-linguistics blog…

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