Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

Just when I thought I was done.

Anna T’s article I just posted on mentioned Nicholas Kontovas’ 2012 M.A. thesis on Lubunca, the Turkish Gay Cant that until now I only knew of from Khyuchukov & Bakker’s 1999 paper.

The first 9 pp of Kontovas’ thesis are available online. They’re actually enough to answer a lot of questions about Kaliarda.

• The Turkish Gay Cant has a name, then, and lubunca, lubunyaca is the exact Turkish equivalent of lubinistika, the usual name for Kaliarda (at least by outsiders) before Petropoulos: “whore-language”, from Romani lubhni.
• It’s mainly used in Istanbul, but is spreading to other big cities (just as Kaliarda was an Athens and Salonica language).
• Its daily use is now limited to trans female sex workers in Istanbul; it was in common use among gay males in the late 20th century. (Kaliarda has also declined in Greek, although an attenuated version of it has picked up in emblematic use.)
• Sources on Lubunca are no earlier than 1981, and many of them are roundabout (translations of queer-themed French texts); the Lubunca Sözluk [Dictionary] appeared online in 2010, and the 2008 Büyük Argo Sözlüğü [Great Slang Dictionary] by Aktunç helped Kontovas sift Lubunca from other Turkish slangs. [The pre-Petropoulos attestations of Kaliarda were unearthed in response to my posts, by blog commenters with access to digitised Greek press archives; there may be treasures waiting to be found in the Turkish archives for Lubunca as well, and we know that Manganaras explicitly said in 1904 that he found the same Gay cant in Piraeus and Istanbul.]
• Petropoulos had a rich harvest of vocabulary for Kaliarda: 3000 headwords, 700 of them root words (and 52 of those Romani). There’s much less there for Lubunca: 153 lexemes, 85 lexical roots. That count is comparable to the 100-odd words (all root words) Triantafyllidis recorded for Dortika (and I’ve already commented that Lubunca as Khyuchukov & Bakker recorded it looked like a para-Romani, just as Dortika does).
• Lubunca is meant to be spoken with a stereotypically “gay” or ‘camp” intonation (just as Kaliarda is).
• We finally have an explanation for Kaliarda berde “money”, which looked like the Turkish-derived word for “curtain”. The Lubunca for “money” is belde, which is an anagram of Turkish bedel “price, cost, fine”. Metatheses are frequent components of cants, and Christodoulou had remarked on them in Greek slangs; they also appear in Kaliarda, but rather less frequently than for other slangs. The only two instances in Lubunca are bedel and şebzü < beşyüz “five hundred”.
• Lubunca also uses written puns: ellisekiz “(notorious) bottom” < “58”, which in Arabic numerals looks like an anus and an erect penis. That kind of pun is not alien to Greek: generations have tittered over <ῳ>.
• 26 of the 85 roots of Lubunca are Romani. We have a few additions from Khyuchukov & Bakker, and they explain a few more things about Kaliarda (particularly nakka):
  

  Lubunca	Romani	Kaliarda
  balamoz “old man”	balamo “non-Roma man; boss	balamos “client of prostitute”
  çavo “young gay male”	çhavo “Romani boy	cf. tekno “twink, child” < Rom. tikno “small”
  dik(el), tikel “to see, to glance, to look”	dikhel “he sees	ðikelo “to see”
  koli “sex”	kolin “chest, breast”	—
  matiz “drunk”	mato “drunk”	Older Kaliarda matalo “drunk”
  nakka “nothing, none, no”	na khan “not at all”	naka “nothing, none, no”
  tato “bath”	tato “warm”	—

• So naka is not a variant of Albanian nukë, although I suspect its synonym nuku is; a few Albanian words do turn up in Kaliarda, and Arvanitika was the pre-modern language of much of Attica, including parts of Athens itself.
• The Romani in Lubunca is at times heavily altered, and reflects a mélange of the variants of Romani common in the Balkans.
• The next contributor to Lubunca is French with five root words: turalamak “to stroll” < tour; pişar “a piss” < pissoire; lapuş, lapış “lips, mouth, kiss” < la bouche; albuş “a kiss” < à la bouche; lavaj “anal douche, enema” < lavage. There’s a lot of French in Kaliarda; these aren’t in there, and indeed the run-in articles suggest an oral acquaintance with French, whereas Kaliarda Francisms are meticulous and clearly learnèd.
• Greek has contributed four words, and the first is our old friend paparon, paparun, paparos “policeman”, from paparuna “poppy” (now truncated to runa in Kaliarda). We saw this was Koutsavakika slang as early as 1906; Aktunç’s slang dictionary explains it as a type of cigarette, and he is likely right.
• The other two Greek roots are nonoş “bottom, transvestite, effeminate gay man” < nonos “godfather”; and nafta “middle aged man” < naftis “sailor”. (Kontovas counts four Greek words, but gives only three.)
• English: gey < gay, malbuş < Marlboro cigarette, homoş < homosexual, and laki “morality police” < lackey
• There are also a few words from Armenian, Ladino, and Arabic. The word similya “penis” < Ladino semilya “seed” may be related to the Kaliarda sarmela “penis”.
• There are only one or two Italian lexemes: albergo “hotel” < albergo, and possible laçka “old bottom” < lascia “leave him”? That is a striking difference with Kaliarda, whose Italian component is massive, and which Montoliu explained as Levantine, i.e. Ottoman; it might be that Greeks had access to Italian vocabulary in a way that Turks did not, as fellow Christians.
• There is one word apiece from Bulgarian, Kurdish, and Russian.
• As with Kaliarda, there are a lot of words with uncertain etymology, and many of them are likely inventions meant to sound foreign.

Trying to wrap up this series, I’ve come across two more Kaliarda texts online.

The first is a chapter from a 2010 novel by Thomas Korovinis, Ο γύρος του Θανάτου [The tour of death], with nine protagonists in Salonica of the 50s. One of them is a trans sex worker, and her narrative has a lot of Kaliarda words, though from a quick glance, they all look to be taken from Petropoulos. The text is certainly more convincing than Klynn’s or Romvos’ though, both in historicity (because alas, authentic-sounding Kaliarda is now a museum piece), and in fitting words to context.

The second piece is much smaller, but both linguistically and sociolinguistically more interesting. It’s also from 2010, from a gossip magazine: A Kaliarda Dictionary: “Maria Perdikea reveals the secret language of socialites.” (Η Μαρία Περδικέα αποκαλύπτει τη μυστική γλώσσα των socialites: the article is part of the execrable mainstream Greek press habit, pioneered by the “lifestyle” mags of the 90s, of using undigested English.)

Linguistically, the snippets of Kaliarda here look to be in live use, rather than checked against Petropoulos’ dictionary, and there are a few deviations from the language as he described it. There’s also a bit more phonetic spelling than elsewhere: more careful writers recognise that Kaliarda has Greek inflections, and spell them correctly, but the magazine author has been reluctant to; so μπενάψι instead of μπενάψει, τζιναβοτί instead of τζιναβωτή.

Kaliarda words in bold.

1. Όταν η Τζίνα μπεν στην άλλη μούτζα, τζίναψες η νάκατις; otan i Dzina ben stin ali mudza, dzinapses i nakatis? “When Gina talked to the other woman, did you understand, or [did you understand] nothing?”
   • I was surprised to see regular aorists of benavo and dzinavo, but of course if the verbs have regular presents, they are going to have regular aorists as well.
   • The Kaliarda-ism “X or nothing” = “is X true?” has turned up elsewhere.
   • The Kaliarda use of mudza “vagina” to refer to cis women has also turned up elsewhere.
   • nakatis instead of naka “nothing” is new. I presume an analogy with Greek katiti, katitis “something” < kati, tipotis “nothing”.
   • The other surprise is the use of an indeclinable root form of a verb, ben instead of benapses (the inflected aorist benapsi does turn up further down in the article.) This is something reminiscent of Dortika, which used the verb root dʒan “leave!” as a finite verb; Kaliarda does use dik! “look!”, but only as an imperative. This may have been an uninflected form lying low in Kaliarda all these years, but I suspect instead it’s an innovative truncation.

2. Nάκατις μπερντέ, τι μπεν να κάνω; nakatis berde, ti ben na kano? “No money, what do you think I should do?
3. • Again, truncated ben for benavis, and nakatis for naka
   • The epigrammatic “nothing money” for “I have no money” is typical of Kaliarda.
   • ti ben na kano lit. “What do you say I do?” is a calque of mainstream Greek ti les na kano, and is unsurprising. The speaker has not used to opportunity to conceal “do” as avelo.
4. Ντικ τις μούτζες με τα εξτέ, πώς δικέλουν το δικό μου, αν τολμήσει να του μπενάψι τίποτα θα μουτζοπιαστούμε dik tis mudzes me ta ekste, pos ðikelun to ðiko mu, an tolmisi na tu benapsi tipota θa mudzopiastume “Look at those women with the hair extensions, how they’re looking at my guy; if she dares say anything to him, we’ll have a catfight”
   • Unlike ben, the Romany imperative dik was recorded in Petropoulos, and is used as only an imperative, in contrast with the inflected ðikelun
   • Here the inflected aorist benapsi is used instead of the uninflected ben
   • ekste is not in Petropoulos, and is not properly Kaliarda; it is a truncation of the English loanword (hair) extensions, which is itself fairly recent. A non-Kaliarda sighting of the word is in this gossip column by Nasos Goumenidis from 2017:
     

     Μας κούρασες Μίνα. Οι κόλλες απο τα εξτέ και τα καρφιά στη μάνα του Παντελίδη. […] Και όλα αυτά με σέλφι που ξεχωρίζουν οι κόλλες απο τα εξτέ… σε πρώτη φάση… Πόσο σίκ ε;

     We’re sick of you Mina [Arnaouti]. Hair extension glue and sniping at Pantelidis’ mother. […] And all that with a selfie [on Facebook] where you can see the hair extension glue, right up close. How very chic.

   • No, I don’t know who Mina Arnaouti or Pantelis Pantelidis are, and I don’t care to find out.
   • The verb mudzopianome is also not in Petropoulos, but it’s transparent: Kaliarda mudzo “vagina; cis woman” and Greek pianome “grab each other” (in plural) = “grapple, argue”. Perdikea herself glosses it as “argue with a woman”, so the intended meaning is “woman-grapple”, not “grab each others’ vaginas”.
5. Ντικ μωρή, τη λάτσα, πόσο θεά, πόσο τζιναβοτί και δικέλι άφθονα dik mori, ti latsa, poso θea, poso dzinavoti ke ðikeli afθona “Hey you, look at that beautiful woman, how much of a goddess she is, how in-the-know, and she looks abundantly [= is abundantly good-looking?]”
   • θea “goddess” is not one of Petropoulos’ words, but it is used in current stereotypical gay discourse as praise for someone female; so it would nowadays be regarded as part-and-parcel of Kaliarda.
   • ðikeli afθona “looks abundantly” is a puzzle. Perdikea glosses afθona as “to excess” (στην υπερβολή του), so it should be read as a superlative (which is not surprising). The only way I can make sense of it is replacing the Greek transitive meaning “looks” with the English intransitive meaning, “she looks amazing”. That’s absurd in Greek, and I don’t think it would be much less absurd in traditional Kaliarda, for all its parsimony. But maybe this actually is a calque from English. In these days of hair exte, that would not really surprise me.

   So linguistically, we have a contemporary use of Kaliarda that is not informed by Petropoulos or checked against him, and that is not even confident enough to spell Kaliarda endings like the Greek that they are. Petropoulos’ work is extremely well known in Greece and beyond; indeed I suspect it is why the lect is known now as Kaliarda rather than Lubinistika, the name Petropoulos first heard of it as (and the only name that turns up before him). For a writer to write about Kaliarda and not seem to be aware of Petropoulos is linguistically refreshing. Still, it is odd to see the article conclude like this, after Perdikea provided a small Kaliarda glossary:

   As you can understand, we cannot reveal any more, as those who know Kaliarda well would crucify us for revealing the secret dialect which makes their live easier.

   Triantafyllidis’ consultants were mobbed by their neighbours in 1915, so he wouldn’t reveal the secrets of their cant (unaware that they were transparent to any Roma, and to any gadjo who had read Paspati’s grammar of Romani). But we’re not in 1915. We’re not in the late 30s, when Police Captain Bourganis had already compiled his glossary of Lubinistika for the Vice Squad, or 1971, when Petropoulos had published his dictionary, or even the mid 70s, when political theatre would use Kaliarda to try and sneak songs past censorship (the vlakopsaliðu “stupid scissors chick”).

   Kaliarda, secret? In 2010?

   There’s another couple of noteworthy things with Perdikea’s article.

   The cant is described, not as the language of sex workers, or gays, or trans people, but as the “secret language of socialites”. (With socialites in English, no less.) We are now a long way away from the ftoxobineðes “pauper bottoms” (street queans) who spoke Kaliarda in the 1920s. Whatever social niche Kaliarda is filling now, the emphasis is no longer on an embattled minority protecting itself. It’s merely a secrecy language; like Greek used in the diaspora in public. (Gkartzonika’s ethnography came up with a similar conclusion.) This is how Perdikea sets the scene for it:

   There are moments I rejoice that our beloved Kaliarda dialect exists, and me and my girlfriends can communicate perfectly without anyone else understanding a thing. It’s different speaking in code with someone, and having access to key-words and speaking without fear or passion. Your sociability remains sky-high, you’re on good terms with everyone, while at the same time you insulting them seven ways to Sunday; and they just smile at you and wonder “whatever are those girls saying?

   It’s great, I suppose, that Perdikea feels that there’s a huge emotional difference between skulking in code, and yelling out and proud in code. But any difference is in the head of the manumitted speakers; they’re still very clearly speaking in code, and those onlookers smiling at them are well aware that they’re speaking in code—and likely speaking in code for good reason. I’m not convinced they’re getting away with as much as they think they are—especially with Petropoulos’ dictionary so widely known.

   I say that the Kaliarda of “socialites” is a long way from the pauper bottoms of the 1920s; but the late 60s were already a long way away too. Trans sex workers in the 70s and 80s like Paola Revenioti, Betty Vakalidou and Nana Hatzi who spoke Kaliarda were just as marginalised as their counterparts of the 20s; but Petropoulos also found former government ministers speaking Kaliarda, and we also found slang.gr commenter aias.ath recollecting that when Petropoulos’ dictionary came out, the well-to-do gays next door were annoyed that he could now understand their conversations.

   I’m left with one conundrum with Perdikea’s article. I can’t tell who she and her girlfriends are.

   Gkartzonika wrote in her master’s thesis that Kaliarda was still a gay/trans language, with only slight usage outside the LGBTQ community; Christodoulou on the other hand says that (cis) women have now started using Kaliarda as well, “to express their autonomy from men”.

   Is Maria Perdikea one such cis woman? Or is she identifying with the traditional gay and trans speakers of Kaliarda (whether or not she is trans herself)? It’s actually surprisingly hard to tell.

   My default assumption was that she was cis; that’s a cis-sexist assumption, though, based on the fact that she’s writing in a gossip column, rather than a consciousness-raising blog.

   She and her fellow speakers of Kaliarda are identified as “girls”; but Kaliarda speakers always identified themselves as feminine, and the use of feminine gender is a consistent marker in Kaliarda.

   The “goddess” of Phrase #4 is “a new and very beautiful [man]”; Perdikea glosses latsa “beautiful (fem.)” as “a good looking boyfriend” (ωραίος γκόμενος). That’s not how a straight cis woman refers to attractive men, unless it’s a straight cis woman consciously queering her discourse (which is what Christodoulou implies women are doing with Kaliarda, and something Gkartzonika also implies with “metrosexual” use of Kaliarda). But it’s completely unsurprising among ibne speaking Kaliarda, and that does remain the more plausible alternative, whether Perdikea is speaking from experience or out of empathy.

   Phrase #2 is spoken to “your (male) buddy” (κολλητό, masc); phrase #3 to “your (female) buddy” (κολλητή, fem). Phrase #3 is about the speaker feeling threatened by women (γυναίκες) expressing an interest in her boyfriend (γκόμενου); that sounds cis straight, but it doesn’t have to be. What does sound cis straight is the use of mudzopianome “minge-grapple”: the verb is reciprocal, and just as we minge-grappled would in English, mudzopiastume implies that both the rival woman and the speaker are cis women—they both have a minge.

   The distinction between cis women and ibne (the conflation of gay bottoms/cross-dressers/trans women) is baked into Kaliarda, at least as Petropoulos recorded it. The lubines referred to themselves in the feminine gender in Kaliarda consistently, but they did not have minges (it’s doubtful bottom surgery was available to them before the late 70s), and they did not refer to themselves as minges. They had forty-odd different word in Kaliarda for themselves; irakli “woman” does not appear to have been one of them either. In fact, while Nana Hatzi said she was one of the few cross-dressing sex workers in 70s Salonica who actually identified as a trans woman, she also made a point of referring to cis women as minges: “The moudzes (= minges) in our groups would ask trans women for advice on how to dress, how to put on makeup, how to have their breasts stick out.”

   So I would not expect a traditional speaker of Kaliarda to use the verb mudzopianome “minge-grapple”. But of course Kaliarda was recorded by Petropoulos 45 years ago, before trans Greek women started to have access to bottom surgery. And even in the version recorded by Petropoulos, “Haritakis’ Wife the Cunt-Bumper” (Η Χαριτάκαινα η Πλακομούνα) was so called because she was married to a cis woman; so an ibne could be called a lesbian and a minge-haver, even if jocularly. So maybe things are blurrier now with gender categorisation than they were in Petropoulos’ day; and maybe Petropoulos’ own gender categorisations were not the ones Kaliarda speakers were actually using. At least not consistently (Hatzi being the obvious counterexample).

I’ve left till late a comparison of Kaliarda with Dortika, the earliest researched of the Greek para-Romani cants; and the points to be made here have already been substantively made elsewhere, including in comparison with the Turkish Gay cant (which is also clearly para-Romani), and in Sechidou’s article on Greek para-Romanis. Kaliarda is different from para-Romanis: it takes a more schematic, artificial approach to Romani vocabulary, and it was elaborated by speakers who did not particularly identify with or speak in Romani.

Information on Dortika has been provided at length by Triantafyllidis:

• Triantafyllidis, Manolis. 1915. Τα “ντόρτικα” της Ευρυτανίας. Συμβολή στα ελληνικά “μαστόρικα”. [The Dortika of Eurytania. A contribution to Greek craftsman cants]. Δελτίο Eκπαιδευτικού Oμίλου 5. 219–231. Collected Works: 2: 33–45.
• Triantafyllidis, Manolis. 1924. Eine zigeunerisch-griechische Geheimsprache. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschungen 52. 1–40. Collected Works: 2: 46–85.
• Triantafyllidis, Manolis. n.d. Griechische Geheimsprachen. Collected Works: 2: 90–140.

The most useful thing to do from a Kaliarda perspective is to compare the base Romani vocabulary of Dortika with Kaliarda where they have words in common, and comment on some of the more glaring gaps in core Romani vocabulary in Kaliarda. The etymologies that Triantafyllidis provides in his 1924 work, based mainly on Paspati’s (1870) work on Ottoman Romani, are also very useful to reproduce for Kaliarda. I’m using the Romani spelling given by Triantafyllidis’ sources.

By way of supplement, I’m adding to the table of comparisons words from a second para-Romani, the Romka of Epirus, as recorded in Soulis (1929).¹

Common words with Kaliarda:

Observations:

• As noted, Dortika verbs are uninflected; Romka and Kaliarda verbs are inflected.
• There is much less meaning shift in Dortika and Romka: vela only means “to come”, bakro has expanded from “lamb” to “goat”, but has not shifted to “hair”, mol has not become “water”.
• The one clear meaning shift is of baros from “big” to “rich, householder” in Romka and in other Greek cants.
• We have already noted that Kaliarda using a 1sg form for benavo, dzinavo < phenav, džanav is not what you’d expect of someone who actually knew Romani; the expected 3sg form phenel is what underlies Dortika uninflected pxinela, Romka piniliazu < peneliazo.
• Soulis corrects Triantafyllidis, deriving patsarxa, patsare from a word for clog, batsari; I can’t find it on ROMLEX, but it appears related to paćarel “to wrap”.
• There’s a clear narrative behind Kaliarda balamos “boss, gadjo” < “client of prostitute”. There’s just as clear a narrative behind the Dortika speakers, so eager to assimilate, using the word for non-Roma as the generic word for “man”, and certainly for themselves.
• Dortika preserves distinct Romani words for “food” and “to eat”; both Romka and Kaliarda only use the verbal form for both.

The Romani words Kaliarda has not taken up, which Dortika and Romka have, are more revealing:

Kaliarda has jettisoned basic Romani vocabulary such as “eye”, “fire”, and “meat”, in favour of Italian, Turkish, (possibly) Albanian, onomatopoeia, generalisations (water > wine) or circumlocutions (“seen thing” for “eye”, “gone mind” for “mad”, “heavy” for “sick”). Being an urban language, Kaliarda also doesn’t have use for rural vocabulary Dortika considers core, such as “wood”, “milk”, or “horse”. And in pursuit of schematicism, Kaliarda has jettisoned several basic verbs in favour of its two defaults: avelo “come, [have]” replaces Romani verbs for “take” and “give”, and dzazo “go” replaces the verb for “leave”. (However, Kaliarda daˈvelo “take” might be related to dela “he gives”, or even lava “to take”.)

The most Romani a lot of Greeks will have ever heard is the chorus to the 1990 song Balamos (lyrics: Dionysis Tsaknis; the music is traditional, ):

Νάς̌ μπαλαμό, νάς̌ μπαλαμό
και το λουμνό τ’ αφεντικό
νάγια ντόμλες ατζ̌έι μπαλαμό

Naš balamo, naš balamo
and that lubhni boss
naya domles adjei balamo

Get lost, gadjo, get lost, gadjo
and that disgusting boss
Don’t put up with that gadjo

That’s Romani; and some of it is Romka or Dortika; but very little of it is Kaliarda, and the way that it is not Kaliarda tells you how Kaliarda is not Romani:

• naš “leave!”, displaced in Kaliarda by the more generic džav “to go”.
• balamo “non-Roma, gadjo”, transmogrified in Kaliarda to “client of prostitute” (so referred to by the first speakers of Kaliarda, Roma sex workers, servicing gadjos)
• lubhni “whore” (applied to men and women; the Greek gloss you’ll see for the word in that song is πρόστυχος “vulgar”); used by the sex workers who originally spoke Kaliarda as their self-designation, and by the gays who ended up speaking the language as one of their self-designations.

Domenica Minniti-Gonias’ study on “Italian and Heptanesian words in Greek slang” (specifically in Kaliarda)² is significant because the Italian component of Kaliarda is one of the two core differentiators of Kaliarda from other Greek cants. (The other being its schematic approach to Romani vocabulary.) Montoliu already identified that Italian is a large and old component of Kaliarda vocabulary, and that it places the origins of Kaliarda in the Ottoman Empire, when Italian rather than French was the default Western language. (Frustratingly, no Italian turns up in the early records of Kaliarda that we have seen from 1904 through to 1938; but it doesn’t make sense that Italian would have been introduced into Kaliarda in 20th century Athens.)

Introducing Italian is how Kaliarda got to be the polyglot exuerbance it is—rather than remaining a para-Romani based on just Romani and the gadjo language, as was the case with Dortika, as seems to be the case with the Gay cant of Istanbul, and indeed as may well have been the case with the Lubinistika of sex workers.

So the study is important, and its glossary of Italian words in Kaliarda is welcome.

Though I have to say, I don’t think Minniti-Gonias got Kaliarda. She keeps referring to the “argot”, generically; but of course Kaliarda is not generic Greek slang, it is a cant of a particular subgroup (that she doesn’t say much about), and the Italian in it is not the Italian you’ll find anywhere else in Greek, and did not get there the same way it got there anywhere else in Greece. Because of that, I don’t think she makes the right historical judgements about how Italian works in Kaliarda.

Minniti-Gonias’ study wants to see Heptanesian influence, and not just Italian influence, in Kaliarda. The Ionian Islands (Heptanesa) were highly cultured, and had a disproportionate effect on the development of Modern Greek literature, particularly as they got a head start on Demotic. (And I’m not only referring to Solomos.) But I’m sceptical that the Heptanesa had that much of an effect on the language spoken in Athens. While we account for Standard Modern Greek as a dialect koine, for example, the elements that look Heptanesian (particularly verb inflections like –ome) are more readily accounted for as archaisms shared with Puristic, with Puristic as the far likelier point of origin. Likewise in this case, the fact that Kaliarda Italianisms look like Heptanesian words seems to me not borrowing, but coincidence: if early Kaliarda speakers knew Italian and wanted their words to sound Italian, they would inevitably end up generating the same words as a dialect of Greek that had had uninterrupted contact with Italian for six centuries. It does not mean that early Kaliarda speakers learned their Kaliarda from Heptanesians.

… although it should be said, Kaliarda speakers were certainly aware of Heptanesian history. A criminal record is called in Petropoulos the libro d oro; the reference is to the Libro d’Oro, the Venetian directory of noblemen—which loomed large in the history of the Ionian Islands as a means of social stratification, and that was burned ceremonially when the islands were conquered by Napoleon’s armies in 1797. But of course, Kaliarda speakers were clearly well-read in general.

• p. 86. Minniti-Gonias has identified 660 headwords as Italian, including both root words, and compounds and derived words. Judgement calls need to be made on whether words are French or Italian, based on the morphological behaviour of the words in Greek.
  • By contrast, Montoliu identified 152 base words as Italian, 318 non-derived compounds, and 105 derived words: 575. Recall that Montoliu found more root words from Italian than Romani: 152 vs 52. There are 405 non-derived compounds and 153 derived words from Romani; 610 in total. So Italian and Romani are comparable in word count; the more clearly Romani character of Kaliarda is because of the concentration of Roman word stock in core vocabulary, and the greater use the Romani word stock has been put to in compounding.
• p. 87. Several words Petropoulos has listed as Italian are uncertain, as their morphophonology is not consistent. Compounds have not been taken apart, because of the uncertainty around the underlying words: poetolakrimaro “to lament” could be derived from poeta “poet” or from poetare “to act like a poet”.
• p. 88. The more assimilated terms could be Heptanesian. [I’ve indicated I’m unconvinced by this].
• The etymology of words has been sought in Boerio’s 1856 dictionary of Venetian, because Venetian was the primary input into Heptanesian, as well as Italian cants. [But Venetian was the primary input for Italian loanwords into all of Greek, and presumably also for Italian as used in the Ottoman Empire, both until the 19th century. So we would expect Venetian anyway.]
• There is not a lot of Italian in Koutsavakika, and what Italian there is is used identically to the same loanwords in Standard Modern Greek—whereas there has been significant semantic change of Italian words in Kaliarda. For example, verdzinos “virgin” > “penniless”, kangelo “rail” > “metal”, karo “cart” > “vehicle”, skuro “dark” > “banknote”.
  • verdzinos “penniless” is mainstream slang (as she concedes in the glossary); Kaliarda has words directly related to “virgin” and “maiden”—virdzino “girl, virign”, virdziniazo “to close” (with reference to female virginity), virdzinoskriva “stenography” (one of the few professional outlets for women in those days)
  • skuro “dark” is indeed the Kaliarda for a 1000 drachma note, because of its colour; but Petropoulos notes that in Koutsavakika it was called kafeti “brown” for the same reason. So this is not evidence of Kaliarda doing something different from Koutsavakika: skuro is already the normal Modern Greek for “dark”.
  • The other two words are Kaliarda schematic generalisations, and are used mainly in compounding.
• Minniti-Gonias concludes from this that the slang recorded in Zahos’ dictionary (based on Koutsavakika) has been assimilated into Standard Greek, whereas Kaliarda represents a more discrete cant. I don’t think that follows at all: criminal cant was bewilderingly rich in metaphor with Greek words, as we saw in Thomopoulos’ 1934 instance of sex worker cant. The difference was that Koutsavakika did not prioritise polyglot language play, the way Kaliarda did.
• p. 89. Core Italian vocabulary:
  • Body parts: vokio, bratelo, oki, sango, spala, testa, fatsa
    • vokio is possibly derived from bocca “mouth”, but in Kaliarda it means “window”
    • bratelo “arm” < Venetian brazzo (> Greek bratso) or It. braccio
    • oki “ear” < It. occhio “eye” (?!)
    • sango “blood” < It. sango
    • spala “bone” < Standard Greek spala “shoulder plate” < It. spalla. In this case the generalisation is likelier of the Greek word than as an Italianism
    • testa “head” < It. testa
    • fatsa “face” < Standard Greek fatsa < It. faccia. Because the word is already in colloquial Standard Greek, there is no special Italianism necessary going on here. Minniti-Gonias concedes that spala and fatsa are core Greek vocabulary.
  • Nature: lutsi, mol, soɣi, sielokapnila
    • lutsi “light” < It. luce
    • mol “water; drink”: Minniti-Gonias derives this from It. molle “soft, damp”, but the Romani etymology  > mol “wine” is obvious
    • soɣi “light” < It. sole “sun”
    • sielokapnila “cloudy day” < It. cielo “sky” + Greek kapnila “smudge”
• The secrecy function is clearly at work, and dictates a lot of the borrowing; cf. also mondotera “globe, Earth” < It. mondo “world” + It. terra “land”; tempoxorxora “heat wave” < It. tempo “weather” + onomatopoeic xorxora “fire”. “Indeed, one could say that almost each foreign language term, and specifically every Italian term, is a metaphor.”
• Obfuscation is achieved with metonymy (Libro d’Oro) and antonyms (kudzinos “brother” < It. cugino “cousin”, oki “ear” < It. occhio “eye”)
• p. 90. Cants also exploit learned elements as obfuscation. Italian cants use Latin, and in fact Ancient Greek. In almodotoris “psychiatrist” < It. alma “soul” + It. dottore “doctor”, alma is learnèd Italian. popilobuso “bus” < It. popolo “people” is a calque of Learnèd Greek leoforio “people carrier”.
• Loans are “always subject to the distinctive transformations of slang”; e.g. kameliodona, using donna “woman” rather than dama “dame”.
  • kameliodona “tuberculosis” is an allusion to the novel Camille (La Dame aux Camélias, “The Lady with the Camellias”), and the derived opera La Traviata, whose protagonist died of tuberculosis.
  • This is not a “distinctive transformations of slang”, but yet another instance of Kaliarda schematicism. In Italian, the novel is La Dama delle Camelie. But Kaliarda speakers did not take the novel name from French or Italian: they translated it from Greek Η Κυρία με τας Καμελίας. And when they sought to dress that phrase up in Italian garb, they didn’t care about the niceties of Italian differentiating between “lady” and “woman”; they just grabbed the most readily available Italian word, which was the generic word “woman”.
• “Cants mostly derive their lexicon from dialects.” Uh, they do? They mostly derive them from colloquial, informal variants of language, obviously, but that’s because they are oral languages; they are not going to go out of their way to access dialect material, unless their speakers have ready access to that dialect. This is a preface to her claim of susbstantial Heptanesian influence on Kaliarda, which again I think is just coincidence of there being a lot of assimilated Italian in both. Singling out Corfu and Zante as loci for Kaliarda really looks to be a stretch to me.
• Minniti-Gonias is reminded of Zante Speeches and the play Babylonia, both of which are comic popular texts with lots of exaggerated Italian and witticisms. Kaliarda is a witty language with Italian vocabulary. Of course she would be reminded of them; that’s no proof that Kaliarda speakers knew them.
  • In fact, Minniti-Gonias herself notes that Italian cants use -oso a lot to form neologisms, and that Greek cants from Epirus use the same suffix, in the form -us. This does not prove that either Italian cants or Epirot cants contact with Zante, of course; it proves that cants like derivational morphology, for reasons of lexical economy (schematicism), and that Greek cants particularly like foreign derivational morphology.p. 91. Minniti-Gonias is struck by the frequent use of the suffixes -ozos, -atsos < It. -oso, -ace to form adjectives; this reminds her of Zante dialect. Many such adjectives are in Zante dialect, and have clearly (προδήλως) been taken from there into Kaliarda: vivatsos “lively” < vivace, ɣulozos < goloso, kurɣiozos < curioso [Only vivatsos is in Kaliarda.] But in Kaliarda, they end up as nouns (amitsioza “friendship” < It. amicioso “friendly”, ofitsiozos “officer” < It. officioso “officious”, primatsos “prime minister” < It. *primace “primary”). Like Zante Greek, Kaliarda also uses Italian adjectives (mezzo) to form compounds: Zante medzoprovio, medzotraɣio “middling condition”, medzoluto < It. mezzo lutto “light mourning”; Kaliarda mesodzorna (calque of Greek mesi-meri and It. mezzo-giorno, both “mid-day”), midlanote (calque of Greek mesa-nixta and Italian mezzanotte “mid-night” with English middle).
  • Again, the presence of Italian endings that look like what Zante Greek does doesn’t mean that at all: it means that Kaliarda will exploit to the maximum any derivational mechanisms it can find in its source languages, as part of its obfuscation and its language play. The notion that Kaliarda had to wait for Zante Greek to borrow vivatsos from Italian, so that it could use it, is implausible: Montoliu’s Ottoman polyglots are not. (And Kaliarda never borrowed goloso.) Note that the -oso, -ace adjectives end up as Kaliarda nouns: Kaliarda is getting as much value it can wring out of the endings, and has no problem making words up (primace is not Italian, and an officer in Italian is ufficiale). The mezzo prefix seems to be used much more schematically in Kaliarda, too.
• The mixing of Greek and Italian vocabulary aims towards comedy and impudence—with a footnote on Weinreich’s observations on the uses of macaronic language in literature. [Macaronic is of course exactly what Kaliarda is, and the polyglot chaos of “kularo tin esantes presanda” (Romani+Italian, Greek, Romani+Greek, Italian+French calquing Turkish) is the kind of thing you’d expect to find muttered in The Name Of The Rose.] The fact that Cretan and Heptanesian literature was also macaronic with Italian is true, but is merely a correlation with Kaliarda, not a causal relation.
• p. 92. In comparing Kaliarda with the Italian furbesco cant, Minniti-Gonias finds interesting similarities and differences. [I don’t find them interesting at all: all they prove is that Kaliarda has Italian words in it, and there is only one metaphor shared between the two.]
  

  Kaliarda	Furbesco
  altros “other”	altro “other” > “carabinere“
  amitsiozos “friend”	amico “friend” > “partner in theft”
  kudzinos “brother”	cugino “cousin” > “workmate, blood brother”
  pantofla “wallet” (Standard Greek: “slipper”)	pantofola “slipper” > “wallet”
  pekulis “miser”	pecogna “money”
  trotaro “to travel”	trotta “police patrol”

• p. 93. Minniti-Gonias takes issue with Triantafyllidis’ blanket claim that Italian is used in cants for “higher concepts”, in contrast to Romani being used for “suspect business”. I agree that this is a superficial thing to say.
• There aren’t that many sexual words in Kaliarda, and they are used indirectly, for secrecy. Hence amorozos “lover” < It. amoroso; modernizo Kaliarda “to have sex in a modern fashion” (Standard Greek: “to act modern, to innovate”). [I guess, though these are not great examples.]
• There is a deliberately hyperbolic use of words that sound worse than they are, for sarcastic purposes (i.e. words that are ostensively sexual, but are used for benign meanings). So skulamentozos < It. sculamento should mean “someone suffering from gonorrhoea”; in Kaliarda it just means “someone with a cold”. vizita < visita in mainstream Greek slang means a visit to a prostitute; in Kaliarda it just means what it means in Italian, a visit (with Kaliarda speakers very much aware what it means in mainstream Greek).
• p. 94. The same pejoration applies to “criticism of attitudes and behaviours contrary to popular mores (χρηστά λαϊκά ήθη)”. Hence fabrikopartuzis “business partner” (maybe because his profiteering has become a fabrika (mainstream slang: factory; con job”; florotsarðo “villa”, maybe because the rich become effete (modern Greek slang: flori.)
  • In principle, Minniti-Gonias is correct. There is plenty of social criticism in Kaliarda, although any suggestion of moralising (χρηστά λαϊκά ήθη) is comically out of place with the deeply cynical cant. In the specific examples, I think she’s off base.
  • It’s true that fabrika means a “con job” in mainstream slang, but the Italian component of Kaliarda is old enough for a more literal meaning of fabrika (Italian fabbrica “factory”). In fact, Kaliarda has simply generalised the meaning of fabrika from “factory” to “profession”; hence fabrikadzis “professional”, afabrikos “unemployed”, fabrikaro “to have a profession”. And in the case of fabrikopartuzis, the wink is not so much in the first component of fabrika, “factory” < “business, profession” (mainstream: “con job”), as in the second: the word for “partner” derives from partuza < French partouse “group sex”. So this is not a moral judgement against businessmen, it’s a hyperbolic pejoration of business partnerships, talking about them like gang bangs.
  • As for florotsarðo, the literal meaning is “flower hut”, and flori is used routinely in Kaliarda in the meaning of “flower” (e.g. florokuto “flower box = flower pot”, florosfina “flower wedge = thorn”). Petropoulos accordingly explained florotsarðo as “house with flowers”. Minniti-Gonias is thinking of contemporary slang floros “pansy, effete young man”. But that is anachronistic: the term does not seem to be any older than the 80s. And while floros is more about effeteness than effeminacy, the trans women and crossdressers speaking Kaliarda would be the last people to criticise anyone for being a floros.
• The secrecy terms are used by cant speakers not so much out of a need for secrecy, as for a coquettish and provocative attitude towards outsiders. There is a tendency to reverse established word meanings, making it count as an antilanguage. [Yup.]
• Minniti-Gonias notes Triantafyllidis’ observation that Greek speakers of professional cants resorted to Italian thanks to the commercial opportunities Italy offered them for business, whether as travelling salespeople, artists, or the like. “By analogy, we could suppose that contemporary economical, social and cultural conditions (e.g. mass tourism) made contacts easy for argot speakers in the reverse direction, i.e. from Italy to Greece, and mainly the bordering Ionian Islands.”
  • … Contemporary? Mass tourism? Heptanesa? No. The Italian in Kaliarda is old; it’s not the recent layer that French and English are, and 70s package tourism does not explain a layer of Kaliarda that likely dates from a century earlier. The Ottoman languagescape, and the common Venetian and Italian layer in vernacular Greek, are a better explanation for what is going on.

In the Italian glossary, the following etymologies are worthy of attention, as not being obvious.

• avrakiazome “to be enraged”. Petropoulos correctly worked out this was “get out of my underwear” (vraki) as a calque of the standard Greek “get out of my clothes = be enraged”; it turns out Italian has the same idiom in sbracciarsi.
• asiɣuro “acquaintance”. Petropoulos derives it from “uncertain” (where siɣuros is itself Italian); Minniti-Gonias derives it from It. assicurare “to ensure” or Ven. seguro “commitment”.
• vakuli “church”. Petropoulos’ appendix derives it from Ven. bagolo “brothel”, but the word is not in Boerio, and Minniti-Gonias thinks it is Romani.
• ɡrosovotsiazo “to scream” < far la voce grossa “do a loud voice = yell at someone”
• ɣutsa “year” < Southern Italian goccia (di tempo) “a moment, lit. a drop of time”? English watch? [Not convinced by either, but English watch has been borrowed into Kaliarda as ɣotsi]; pisketoɣutsa “second (of time)” < Sardinian pischeddu “young gay” + ɣutsa “year” [Clearly a stretch]; teknoɣutsa “minute” lit. “child (of) year”
• ðelonɡa, deloɣo “police”: Cretan deloɣo, Zante ðeleɡu “immediately” < Genoese de longo. (The police are referred to in Greece as “immediate action”, Άμεση Δράση.) If de longo did not survive into mainstream Italian, its presence in Greek dialect makes it likely to have been known by Levantines.
• koɣiona “comedy” < Ven. cogionar (It. coglionare) “to mock”
• kontrosol “kiss” < It. contra “against” + sol < rosolo “tongue”. Quite possible, but sol means “sweetness” in Kaliarda, and it would be easier to derive kontrosol from it directly.
• koza stakoza “so-so”, a distortion of the actual Italian così cosà; stakoza “so, thus”: ditto; both feature the pseudo-Italian prefix sta-
• kularo “to defecate” < It. culo “arse”. No, it’s Romani khul “shit”
• latsovengera “soirée” < Romani lačho “good” + Greek vegera “nighttime visit” < It. dial. vegghera.
• leradzaro “to study” < It. leggere “to read” + Greek lera “filth” as obfuscation
• linga < It. lingua “language” vs rosolo “tongue” < rosoli “saliva” < rosolio “rosewater liquer”. Kaliarda differentiates “tongue” and “language”; Greek does not.
• lugimia “vegetables” < It. legume “legumes”
• manduana “insignificant” < It. mantovana “pelmet, covering for a curtain rail”? (… But why?)
• menato “dawn”: anagram of It. mattina or likelier [given the vowel] French matin
• mokola, mokose (Koutsavakika moko) “be quiet!” < Old It. moco “nothing”
• mol “water” < Ven. molo “damp, soft”. Minniti-Gonias says Romani mol “wine” can’t be ruled out; I’d say it’s definite.
• mutsevo “to cheat” < Old It. mucciarsi “to dissemble”; she does not rule out a Romani etymology
• biselo “to sleep” < appisolarsi “go to sleep”? The Romani proposal is pašlav “to put to sleep”
• burgante “enema” < It. purgante
• naka “not, without”, stanaka “not at all” < neanche “nor, not even”? (We have to explain both naka and nuku, and nuku is presumably < Albanian nukë.)
• dopa “after” < It. dopo
• pasiozos “past” < It. passare “to pass” [clearly made up within Kaliarda]
• privatos, privetos “owner” < It. privato + French privé “private”; the meaning is absent from Italian; but it is preserved in privos “my own”
• retaro “to lose” (Koutsavakika: to stutter) < It. arretare “to retreat”
• runa “police” < Heptanesian runias “downfallen” < It. rogna “lice”. The old metaphor paparuna “poppy = police” is of course much more plausible.
• spikramento “speech” < It. sprecamento (di fiato) “wasting (one’s breath)” according to Petropoulos; Minniti-Gonias also sees English speak + Italian -mento at work here, and I think that’s the only interpretation needed.
• sta: pseudo-Italian prefix, turns up in stanaka “not at all”, stapikola “a little”, statuta-dzorna “today” < Greek tutos “this” + It. giorno
• stringula “administration” < It. slang stringere “arrest”, stringitore “interrogator”
• strusi “street”: Petropoulos guesses this is from German Strasse; Minniti-Gonias thinks the influence of Neapolitan struscë “parade of would-be brides” (νυφοπάζαρο), It. struscio “stroll” “is clear”.
• sfilatsi “rope, spool” < Ven. sfilazzi “loose strands”
• tuvali “handkerchief” < It. tovaglia “tablecloth”, Ven. tovagiol “handkerchief”
• finedzaris “betrothed” < It. fidanzato “betrothed” + Greek finetsatos “refined” < It. finezza
• floki “sperm” < Standard Greek flokos “jib; lint” < It. fiocco “snowflake”. The meaning is also attested in Koutsavakika, but not in Italian
• xalogamela “bag for storing food” < Romani xal “eat” + It. gamella “vessel for transporting food”

Commenter Kostas on Sarantakos’ blog offered the following recollection of Kaliarda from the 1970s:

I’ve already written this on another past. This is what a passive homosexual used to say, as I recollect it:
—dziˈnavis ta javerˈda?
—ˈama ðen ˈpesi o berˈdes ðen ˈexi kuraˈverta
—θa su kuraverˈtaro ke tin ˈpulia

He went around the ouzo bars of Larissa, the regulars would make fun of him, and treat him the odd ouzo, and he’d say his own thing in a strange language. He’d say other things too, but I don’t remember them.(Nov 30)

[After my translation, and admission that I had not seen the term javerˈda.]

I may not have heard or recalled it well. javerˈda, it might also have been kaliarˈda.

But it’s no small thing for me to understand forty years later what exactly he was saying! If only it had occurred to me to write it all down and have him explain it to me himself. I might have been able today to make a small contribution to the decoding of Kaliarda. (1 Dec)

So what did he say? Kaliarda words in normal typeface.

“Do you understand Yaverda? [= Kaliarda?]”

“If no money drops, there’s no fucking.”

“I’ll fuck your arse too.”

Notes:

• The sources on Kaliarda reiterate all the time that this was a language of major cities—Athens and Salonica. Kostas’ recollection would seem to be a counterexample: Larissa is not a small town, but it’s a lot smaller. Yet the eccentric figure of a wandering bottom in a country town, talking Kaliarda to straights who have no idea what he is saying, and treat him to pity drinks, suggests someone very far from home.
• Assuming Yaverda is either a mishearing or an unattested synonym of Kaliarda (and there were dozens), the pride in understanding the initiate language is still at the forefront of the Larissa speaker’s discourse: no differently to Lapathiotis in 1938, the verb dzinavo “understand” is a big deal.
• Petropoulos records “fucking” as kuraˈvelta, from the verb kuraˈvalo; but the sound change /lt/ > /rt/ is quite normal in Modern Greek.
• Since the word for “money” is the Turkish for “curtain” (and Greek for “stage curtain”—and it’s recorded in Danguitsis’ and Zahos’ slang dictionaries anyway), there could be a pun here about curtains dropping; but “money drops” = “someone pays money” is already idiomatic in Greek.
• In distinction to what Petropoulos recorded, the verb “fuck” is derived from the noun: (kuraˈvalo >) kuraˈverta > kuraverˈt-ar-o. As Sechidou has just argued, we’re used to seeing that (Italian) denominative suffix -ar- on non-Romani stems in Kaliarda; the example she gave was berθ-ˈar-o “to give birth”, and in fact, on the same page in Petropoulos, you will see kuor-ˈar-ome “to fall in love” < Italian cuore “heart”. I don’t think this means the speaker was forgetting his Kaliarda, and reinventing the verb; I think that speaks to the fluidity of the language.
• Properly “arse” is ˈpuli; ˈpulia is “the Pleiades” (which is also a feminine singular), and this could easily be a mishearing or misremembering by Kostas, or a jocular alteration by the speaker.

Irini Sechidou’s recent paper³ compares Kaliarda with three para-Romani languages of Greek—that is, mixed languages with some core Romani vocabulary, but which use the grammar of the gadjo language. (She does not use the term para-Romani in this paper, but she does elsewhere). The three languages are Dortika, the builders’ cant of Eurytania; the less well documented Romika of Epirus; and the still extant Romika of Finikas, Salonica, which she has worked on. (I’ve hesitated to call Dortika para-Romani, because its speakers no longer appear to have identified as Romani; but linguistically, it falls neatly into that category.)

The recurring conclusion in her paper (which Montoliu had anticipated going on just Kaliarda) is that Kaliarda is not like the others: it is not a para-Romani, but an artificial language which exploits Romani vocabulary for secrecy and language play.

Sechidou, truth be told, finds the para-Romani variants more interesting; I’m going to restrict myself to what she says about Kaliarda.

p. 561. Kaliarda is not a mixed language like Romika and Dortika, because part of its secrecy vocabulary comes from Greek or other non-Romani languages. Kaliarda is a Greek secrecy languages, which utilises vocabulary from Romani and other languages.

p. 563 Kaliarda, as a typical cant, uses a lot of word creativity and word games, including Greek neologisms.

p. 564. Dortika has over 100 content words of Romani; Finikas Romika has over 200.

Greek Para-Romani has some unassimilated Romani words (the imperative naš “go away” used with a light verb: na kanume nas “we should do naš“), and it can use Romani plurals: balame “bosses”.

p. 565. Finikas Romika also uses some phonetic transformations, appending the Romani demonstrative to conceal Greek words: ɣat-akalu “cat”, ðermat-al “leather”.

Tzitzilis (2006)⁴ has identified 20 core Romani words in Kaliarda; those loans are used as the basis for deriving dozens more lexemes, so that the the actual count of Romani-based vocabulary is more than 300. (Recall that Montoliu counted these more systematically, and came up with higher numbers.)

p. 566. So the basic strategy for Kaliarda vocabulary is not Romani core vocabulary, as it is for para-Romani, but neologisms through derivation and compounding, using both Greek and non-Greek vocabulary. Phonetic transformations are also used in Kaliarda (ksalimari < maksilari “pillow”, vuelo < avelo.)

Romani has a privileged role among source languages for Kaliarda: it is the source of its basic and light verbs (avelo, ðikelo, xalo, benavo, dzao “do, see, eat, speak, leave/expel”), which are highly productive. In particular, dzao has grammaticalised into the prefix dzas- “without”, e.g.

• dzas-kanis “lame” < Kaliarda kania < Greek kani “cane”
• dzas-futis “lame” < English foot
• dzas-bratelos “armless” < bratelo “arm” < Italian bracetto?
• dza-testos “mad” < Italian testa “head”
• dzas-bar-iarikos “curative” < baro “heavy > “disease”
• dzas-provia “hair removal” < Greek provia “fleece”
• dzas-tekno “abortion” < Kaliarda tekno “child” < Romani tikno “small”

(And the dzas-tirax- “kick the bucket = death” compounds I had already posted about.)

Only Romani has contributed verbs directly to Kaliarda; verbs from other languages are mediated via nouns; e.g. English birth < berθa “birth” < berθ-aro “to give birth”.

p. 567. This indicates greater contact with Romani, and that Kaliarda speakers learned Romani through direct contact with Romani speakers.

In para-Romani, there is some Romani morphology, notably Romani plural suffixes for nouns, indeclinable singulars for inanimate nouns, and uninflected verb loans. (As we already saw in Triantafyllidis’ study, there is also some Romani phonology in Dortika.) In Kaliarda, the only Romani grammatical contribution is some free function words, such as apokate “over here” and axatos “this one” < akate “here”. [Once again: Kaliarda is not a Romani language, the way para-Romani languages are.]

p. 569. Para-Romani verbs, when inflected, are mostly based on the frozen 3sg form: Romani dzanela “he knows” > Romika dzanel-izo.

Sechidou does not discuss this, but Romani verbs in Kaliarda are based on either the 3rd sg form (kurav-al-o, x-al-o, av-el-o, ðik-el-o) or the 1sg form (dzin-av-o, ben-av-o). The 1sg forms are not what you would use if you were a Romani speaker, and wanted to map your native language verbs to Greek; this is yet another inconsistency that suggests that Kaliarda was elaborated by people who didn’t speak Romani well. (In fact, it suggests that Kaliarda did not go through a para-Romani phase at all—that Greek speakers jammed Romani “I know, I speak” into Greek verbs without caring about a consistent approach to Romani morphology, the way a Romani-speaker would do instinctively.

p. 570. In his writing on mixed languages as identity vehicles, William Croft⁵ considers mixed languages positive acts of identity, because they assert a distinct identity via the minority language whose elements they preserve. Polyglot idioms like Kaliarda, Croft identifies as negative acts of identity: because there isn’t a primary language that the idiom aligns with, those idioms are not asserting a distinct (ethnic) identity, but are only used to exclude outsiders. He treats secrecy languages using transformations of an ethnic language in the same way.

We saw that police reporter Spiros Leotsakos reported in 1963 that police officers Paxinos and Bourganis had recorded the underworld slangs of their time, and compiled glossaries. And one of those slangs, which Leotsakos says Bourganis recorded, was Lubinistika—as the language of female prostitutes rather than gay bottoms.

The Lubinistika he recorded may not have been identical to the gay cant now better known as Kaliarda; in fact, I strongly suspect they weren’t, even in the 30s. But Kaliarda likely originated with Rom male prostitutes (balamo “non-Rom man, boss” > Kaliarda “client of prostitute”); so the two will have had a lot in common—the more so as Petropoulos reports that gay bottoms worked as support staff in cis female brothels.

The commenters at Sarantakos’ blog have kept at it, and we have three additional pieces of information. The first, found by BLOG_OTI_NANAI, is Bourganis’ obituary, which dates his occupation with Lubinistika to 1930–1941 (when he held the rank of hypastynomos, “Police Lieutenant”.)

Former Police Captain (A.M. 727) Efstathios Bourganis, son of Dimitrios, died on 1981–12–25.

The deceased was born on 1900–02–15 in the village of Kytopina, Xiromeros, in Aetolia & Acarnania prefecture. He joined the police force as a constable on 1923–06–02. He was promoted to Police Lieutenant II on 1930-08–18, Police Leutenant on 1934–09–04, and Police Captain II on 1941–03–04. He retired by his own request on 1949–04–23. His funeral took place in his home village.

The deceased was one of the most distinguished officers of the corps, and his activity has remained notable in its annals. Before World War II he was part of the team neutralising Italian spies in our country. During the Occupation, he joined other brave officers of the corps in striking many blows against the German conquerors through superhuman efforts, and undertook hundreds of sabotages against the occupying army. (From Αστυνομικά Χρονικά, Jan–Feb 1982, p. 166.)

The second, found by Spatholouro, is a study on cants published in 1930: Konstantinos Faltaits. 1930. Περίεργες λαογραφικές σελίδες: οι μυστικές συνθηματικές γλώσσες στην Ελλάδα [Curious pages of folklore: secrecy languages in Greece] Αλεξανδρινή Τέχνη [Alexandrian Art] 4.9: 289–292. He has little to say about Lubinistika specifically, but he confirms its association with female prostitutes:

Mangika [Koutsavakika] is a popular secret language, just like Koudareika [Epirot Builders’ Cant], Lupiniarika [= Lubinistika?], Korakistika [Crow-Talk, schoolyard Greek counterpart to Pig Latin], Kombogianitika [Traditional Healers’ Cant] and so many others. (p. 289)

The language used by livestock sellers is based on Romani. That is also the case for the language spoken by women of easy virtue. It appears that formerly Romani had served as the basis for many professional jargons in many parts of the world. Such languages still survive in Europe, but the number of those that learn them or know them is steadily decreasing. (p. 290.)

(Not that it’s relevant, but fascinatingly, while his surname makes him sound like one of the Bavarians that came to Greece with King Otto, Faltaits’ surname is an alteration of his grandfather’s Faltagis (Φάλταγης), the family being recorded in Skyros since 1643. Konstantinos’ father Russianised the surname to Faltáyich while working in Odessa and Tagnarog.)

The third find, also found by Spatholouro, is a newspaper report on the glossaries compiled by Police Captain Paxinos and Police Sergeant Mavrotas, that appeared in Acropolis newspaper, 1933–05–15, page 1 and page 2. It was written by “Th-s” = Stathis Thomopoulos, whose 1934 report on female sex worker Lubinistika we have already seen. I have no idea if Bourganis’ glossary was part of their more general project, ranging across underworld cants, but the time frame is right.

The article speaks of the cants as if they are the one slang with multiple names—though the ensuing discussion makes it clear that they are distinct. The “professionals of five fingers” (i.e. pickpockets) refer to their cant as “Romika”—that is, Romani. Lubinistika is the name of the cant of “the world of easy women and procurers”; and the generic term for cants was “Masonika”, by analogy with the secret practices of Freemasonry.

Commenter (and friend of this blog) Diver of Sinks thought that Romika indicated an awareness that Kaliarda is Romani-based, something that seems to have been forgotten by Petropoulos’ time. I think that’s a misleading impression given by the loose wording of the article: Romika was not the name given to Lubinistika but to pickpockets’ cant, familiar to us from Rebetiko song: it is used like “Masonic” to indicate that the language is secret, since the use of Romani-based cants like Dortika was clearly well-known. It does not necessarily mean that people realised that Lubinistika was such a cant.

These are the words of Lubinistika reported, with their somewhat florid glosses; I put Kaliarda words next to them.

Notes:

• As elsewhere, iraˈkliðes has been spelled with a folk-etymological eta. The plural ending is consistent with a feminine in -i that was recently borrowed, so that Greek-speakers would have been reluctant to give the normal -es ending; but that tends to happen to masculine recent nouns, not feminines, and I wonder if the author didn’t simply supply his own fanciful Heraclids as the “daughters of Heracles”.
• We saw ipuri in Thomopoulos’ 1934 piece too; the initial i- presumably came from the same place as the initial i- in irakli, as a metanalysed Greek feminine definite article.
• In the 1934 piece, latsi was rendered with its normal adjectival meaning as “beautiful”.
• kapsuris is Koutsavakika; there is a rebetiko song titled Ο Καψούρης “The Lovelorn” written by Giannis Papaioannou, and first recorded between 1943 and 1945. It is now mainstream colloquial Greek.
• papaˈrunes “poppies” does not appear to be Koutsavakika, somewhat to my surprise.
• τσακίρ in Greek is now only known in the collocation τσακίρ κέφια, Turkish çakır keyif, çakırkeyif, the peak euphoria reached on a night out. It was difficult enough to find a gloss online for çakır that I suspect the word is obsolete in Modern Turkish. The derived form tsakirˈdzis could have been formed within Greek (or Lubinistika), since the borrowed Turkish suffix is productive in colloquial Greek with reference to professionals or people characterised by something (taksidzis “taxi driver”, banistirdzis “peeping tom”.)

The listing continues directly with non-Romani words which do not look like Lubinistika at all, but are clearly underworld slang; some of them have survived in Greek slang to this day (ˈkarfoma “betrayal” lit. “nailing”; ˈxina “1000 drachma note” lit. “goose”, via phonetic similarity with xiliˈariko). The one word which does appear to relate to Kaliarda is duˈlaki “5 drachma coin”, a diminutive of *duˈlo. The singular duˈlo and the plural tuˈla turn up in Kaliarda as “money, coins, loose change”, and ˈdula as “5 drachma coin”. (Hence, inevitably, dulakuˈbu “money touch chick” = “bank”, duˈloprufa “money letter” = “tax query; cheque”; duˈlotsarðo “money hut” = “mansion; multi-storey building”; and dulotsarðopliviˈas “money hut pleb” = “builder, cementer”.) This is presumably Romani (slang.gr also suspects so for both duˈla and tuˈla), but I’m not seeing an obvious Romani etymon (yet).