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When did Melbourne first develop its large Greek community?
It’s doubtful the Greek population of Melbourne ever exceeded 300k; and the more Greeks assimilate, the harder that is to count. I think it could be argued that Chicago had a larger Greek population at least at one point. Thessalonica has a population over a million, so Melbourne was never the largest Greek city outside of Athens.
There was the occasional random Greek in Australia as far back as the 1820s. A discernible community in Melbourne dates from the 1890s (about 150 strong), and the first Greek church in Melbourne, the Church of the Annunciation, opened in 1901. Back then, the community was from a small number of Greek islands—Kalymnos, Ithaca, Kastellorizo, with one family member bringing another. Kalymnos and Kastellorizo were sponge diver islands, and diving was an initial source of employment for Greeks in Australia. (Hence the pearling houses of Paspaley and Kailis in Broome.)
The upsurge of the Greek population in Melbourne, and the rest of Australia for that matter, dates from 1950–1975, and was the result of mass migration of Greeks from impoverished post-war Greece (and in lesser numbers, Cyprus, Turkey and Egypt), to work in the factories and then small businesses of Australia. In my family, the earliest family member, my uncle George, came out to work as a carpenter in Sale in 1947; the latest family member was my uncle Andrew, who joined my father working in the fish ’n’ chip shop business in 1970.
Unlike the Italians, Greeks avoided becoming farmers in Australia, and stuck to the cities; for that reason, there was a healthy presence of Italians in rural Queensland, but the Greek population was heavily concentrated in the capital cities of each state. By far most Greeks ended up in Sydney and Melbourne; as of the 2011 census (Greek Australians), 30,000 people in NSW were born in Greece, and 50,000 in Victoria.
Melbourne was at the time the industrial powerhouse of Australia, and it needed factory fodder; that was one drawcard for early migrants, and I assume is what gave it the edge over Sydney. As with many other diasporas (and as indeed with the earlier Greek migration wave), family members brought other family members, and critical mass of the diaspora encouraged other Greeks to join it, as familiar territory. (The current Greek Financial Crisis wave of migration is conspicuous in Oakleigh, the current Melbourne Greektown, for both reasons.)
What is the plural of specimen?
The Latin plural is specimina. specimina – Wiktionary reports it as an alternative to specimens, but I have never seen it used. The examples it gives are from a 1949 textbook on colour perception.
What are some differences between the Greek of Greece and Cypriot Greek?
Cypriot Greek is one of the South-Eastern group of Greek dialects, along with Chios and the Dodecanese. So the differences between the Greek of Rhodes (in Greece) and the Greek of Cyprus are less far apart than the Greek of Athens and the Greek of Cyprus. In fact, if you aren’t finely attuned to the dialects, you can mistake someone from Rhodes as someone from Cyprus; that has happened to my dad in taxis in Crete.
But I’m going to assume the question is about Standard Greek vs Cypriot Greek. These are the first things that come to mind:
- Survival of word-final -n.
- Survival and expansion of double consonants. That includes word-initially (usually in loanwords from Turkish), where they are realised as aspirates.
- Deletion of voiced fricatives between vowels; so Standard Greek traɣuði “song”, Cypriot trauin.
- Fortition of θj, ðj to θc. So Standard ðia(v)ole “Devil!”, Cypriot θcaole.
- Palatalised velars become palatoalveolar (though that actually happens in most Greek dialects outside the standard).
- Some archaic verb inflections.
- Old French loanwords; e.g. tʃaera “chair”.
- Impressionistically, a few more Turkish loanwords than in Greece.
- Unmarked VSO word order instead of SVO.
- A deep love of cleft constructions. I have cited in a paper the phrase from a folk tale ίνταλος εν ποννα εύρω τωρά να γινώ γιατρός “How is it that I will work out now how to become a doctor”.
- A healthy survival of the dialect as the low lect in a diglossia; there is abundant Cypriot dialect written online, including dialect-specific ASCII romanisation.
Btw, I’ve just discovered that Google matches dialectal ίνταλος with Standard πώς in searches. I am impressed!
EDIT: Added by Eutychius Kaimakkamis:
- The -n at the end of words is usually pronounced when it’s the ending word. When there’s another word after it, the -n just nasalizes the vowel behind it and by extension the consonant or vowel next to it.
- In many varieties (mainly in Tillyria and Kokkinochoria), θ and φ sometimes change to χ e.g. χαρκούμαι instead of θαρκούμαι or χιλούιν instead of φιλούιν. Sidenote: There’s even a satirical show with a a segment called “Τα άπλυτα στη χόρα” (instead of φόρα) where two football pundits talk with exaggerated Kokkinochoria accents and usually involves (poor quality) scatological humour like “να σου χέσω ένα χέμα” instead of “να σου θέσω ένα θέμα”.
- Voiced consonants often turn into unvoiced ones e.g. φτέλλα instead of βδέλλα or αυκό instead of αυγό.
The correct pronunciation of ‘H’ is aych, so why do people say ‘haytch’?
Is there a /h/ in aitch?
No?
Well, you won’t be surprised why someone thought it was a good idea to insert one, then. Every other letter names has something to do with the letter sound it represents. Even allowing for English orthography.
If you were the Byzantine emperor in the 14th century, what would you do to prevent the fall of your empire?
In 1300? That would make me Andronikos II Palaiologos.
Well, I’ve done the best I can with the Venetians and the Genoese. I’ve played them off each other, but I don’t have the money or the navy to get rid of them. I’ve done what I can with dynastic marriages as well. The Ottomans are starting to move on me, and I can only postpone the inevitable. Same goes for the Serbs. Hiring the Catalans certainly did not work out as a solution, but there’s a risk with any mercenary army.
There is one thing I can do though. Not just disown my grandson, Andronikos III Palaiologos. Have him blinded, the way my predecessors dealt with annoying relatives. The civil war between the two Androniki was where the fate of Byzantium was sealed.
Still, that would have likely only bought me a couple of decades. And Byzantium had a lot of lucky escapes over the following century, that it no longer deserved.
How can I, as an 18-year-old first year college student, help in Kumaoni language conservation?
There will be different answers depending on who speaks the language, where, what the community attitudes are to it, and what kinds of resources you have access to.
One starting point is Kat Li’s answer to How can modern society preserve dying languages?
From Wikipedia, it seems Kumaoni is in the same category as a lot of languages in Indonesia: being spoken by millions of people, but they’re unlikely to pass it on, because everyone is switching to the national language.
The most obvious think you can do, as an 18-year old student:
- Use it.
- Use it with other people.
- Make Kumaoni language clubs, to make its use visible in university.
- Use it online. And that includes texting in it.
- Use it in ways that can enhance its prestige. You know how better than I can.
- And don’t get too precious about the purity of Kumaoni. A Kumaoni with a whole bunch of Hindi (or English) words in it is still better than no Kumaoni at all.
What led to Ancient Greeks to create such a fascinating history and culture?
It’s a good question, and a question that has been posed and discussed by many before.
- The history of Classical Greece is more interesting than that of other places, because it had more conflict and more players: it wasn’t a steady-state, stable empire. (That came later, with the successors of Alexander.) Of course, being more interesting does not correlate to being happier.
- The history of Classical Greece has gathered more interest, because its historians were read more; its historians were read more, in turn, because its culture was so fascinating to its successors. There’s nothing intrinsically more interesting about the Peloponnesian War than any number of other conflicts in antiquity—except that the Peloponnesian War had its Thucydides.
- A key reason Jared Diamond identified for the West gaining technological supremacy was that it was decentralised, featuring a lot of small states in competition with each other during the Renaissance. You can say the same about Classical Greece, and I’m sure people have: lots of small city-states, acting as different laboratories of government and culture and technology, promoting trade and cultural exchange because they were not self-sufficient, and competing with each other.
- When we think Classical culture, we mainly think Athens. Athens prevailed for a small time (but a critical time) because it got its own informal empire going, it was open to immigrants (though it did not grant them full civic rights), it had confidence in its power, and its dramatists and philosophers had enough leisure to ask tough questions. Athens did not come out of nowhere though: it built on centuries of both its own political experiments and others’. And remember that much of the science of Classical Greece came from Ionia, which was much more comfortable with the Persians.
- As I’ve said elsewhere, a major reason why the West finds Ancient Greek culture fascinating is that it traces its intellectual heritage back to Greece. It does so, because Rome does so. Rome did so, partly because of its direct contact with the Greek colonies in Italy, but also, and likely more so, because of its contact with the Greek Empires of Alexander’s successors, the Seleucids and Ptolemies and whoever it was that was running Greece. Politically, these empires were nothing to do with Athens and Sparta; but Athens and Sparta and Ionia is where they drew their culture from.
In Early Modern English the pronunciation of “housewifery” was /’ʔɤzɪfɹəi/. What caused the apparent (partial) reversal in modern pronunciation?
Why did housewifery used to be pronounced uzzifrie, and now it’s pronounced house-wife-ree?
Well, let’s look at housewife itself. I’m looking up OED.
OED reports that the usual pronunciation in the second half of the 18th century of housewife, as given in pronunciation dictionaries, was /ˈhʌzwɪf/, huzzwiff, with its start matching hus-band (which has the same prefix). Often the w dropped off as well; cf. Warwick, Greenwich (hence huzzif); and the initial h would have dropped off in some dialects (hence uzzif, and uzzifry).
housewife started being pronounced like it is spelled, with an initial house, a bit later. hussy is a development of housewife (> hussif > hussy), and scholars suspect housewife changed to its modern pronunciation to differentiate it from hussy:
This diphthongal pronunciation became more common in sense 1 in the 19th cent. (it is either the preferred or the sole pronunciation in this sense in most late 19th-cent. pronouncing dictionaries), and is entirely predominant from the early 20th cent. onwards. While N.E.D. (1899) records the pronunciations (hɒ·zwif) /ˈhʌzwɪf/ and (hɒ·zif) /ˈhʌzɪf/ as frequent in sense 1 (and also records for the plural (hɒ·z(w)ivz) /ˈhʌzwɪvz/, /ˈhʌzɪvz/); D. Jones Eng. Pronouncing Dict. records /ˈhʌzɪf/ as ‘rare’ in this sense in 1917, and for the last time (as ‘old-fashioned’) in 1947; Webster (1934, 1961) gives it as still occasionally used in sense 1.
So the old pronunciation huzzif died out as late as the 1940s, though it was already marginal by 1860. housewifery would have followed the pronunciation of housewife.
Answered 2017-02-26 · Upvoted by
and
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
What are some characteristics of the Greek dialect spoken by Sarakatsani?
Stand back everyone, I’ll handle this one. 🙂
The Sarakatsani are traditionally nomadic shepherds in Northern Greece and Bulgaria, who speak Greek. Their origins have excited interest, because the Vlachs are traditionally nomadic shepherds through the southern Balkans, who speak Aromanian, and there has been speculation about whether the two populations are related.
The most complete study of Saraktsan dialect I know of is Carsten Høeg’s PhD Thesis, Les Saracatsans: Une Tribu Nomade Grecque. I: Étude Linguistique. Paris: Edouard Champion. 1925. His fieldwork was done in 1922 in Papingo, near the Greek–Albanian border, but the also visited Macedonia and Thessaly, and thought that the Sarakatsan of all three areas was very similar.
Høeg, and almost all other scholars cited in Wikipedia, believe the Sarakatsani are not hellenised Vlachs. Their dialect has Aromanian loanwords to deal with pastoralism, and the words for “uncle” and “father”, but their dialect does not have any grammatical features that look like Aromanian. He contrasts their language with that of the Kopachars, a group of linguistically hellenised Vlachs, whose language has much clearer signs of Aromanian influence.
At the end of the book, Høeg gives a list of loanwords. The largest list is Latin and Italian, and there are not many surprises there. There’s more Slavic and Albanian than I recognised, but as I found in exchanges with Dimitra Triantafyllidou, that applies to Northern Greek in general. There’s about as much Aromanian as Slavic, and the list is not overwhelming:
- αλαμπούμπουρδα, βετούλι, βίτσα, βλάχος, γκαβός, γκέσο, γκόρμπο, γκουργκόλια, γκουργκούτσια, γριμπός, ζούρα, κανούτο, κάτσινο, κλιάστρα, κόλλα, κρεπιτούρα, λάλας, μανάρι, μηλιόρα, μίγγος, μοαμπέτι, μούργκος, μπάλιο, μπάρτζο, μπάτσος, μπούκα, μπουμπούκι, μπουμπουνίζει, μπουσουλώ, μπούτινα, μπράσκα, σαρμανίτσα, σιγκούνι, στουρνάρι, τάτας, τσιντζιά, τσιπούνι (?), φλέτουρα, φλετουρώ, φλώρο, χαζός. pell-mell, one year old goat, rod, Vlach, blind, chalk, black, pebbles/potatoes, ?, curved, stain, grey goat, orange-faced sheep, colostrum, sheet of paper, boulder, uncle, lamb fattened for slaughter, one year old ewe, ?, entertainment (< moabete < Turkish mühabbet), dark grey, animal with a white spot an a black head, goat with a ruddy brown head, slap?, jaw, bud, thunder, crawl, butter churn, toad, cradle, woollen coat, flint, daddy, ?, overcoat, butterfly, to fly, white, stupid.
- Høeg does not define all of these in Vol I which I have, and I was helped out by http://karditsas.blogspot.com.au…
Høeg regards Sarakatsan as an independent branch of Northern Greek dialect, not closely related to the dialects of their sedentary neighbours—which therefore proved to him that they were not “recently embarrassed villagers”, as the Sarakatsani themselves preferred to believe, but longtime nomads.
EDIT:
Høeg does list 13 particularities of Sarakatsan:
- Consonants softening before s, l: Kostakis > Kushtaks
- Deletion of /v/ in provato “sheep”: prota, pratina
- Stressed /e/ becomes /æ/
- Use of tun as a nominative clitic: pu tun ini (Standard Greek πού ’ν’ τος)
- Pronouns aftinus, ikyos (Standard αυτός, εκείνος)
- ña, miña (Standard μια)
- θana (Standard θα)
- Columnar stress in verbs: ˈkaθumasti (Standard καθόμαστε)
- 1st sg verb ending in -ú (buˈru, Standard μπορώ)
- Conjugation aniw, anijs, anij, animi, aniti, anin (Standard ανοίγω, ανοίγεις, ανοίγει, ανοίγουμε, ανοίγετε, ανοίγουν)
- Passive of contracted verbs –jomi, -josi, -joti, -jomasti, -josti, -jondi; e.g. aɣapjoti (Standard αγαπιέται)
- 2nd pl imperfect and aorist active –itan, e.g. ˈmaθitan (Standard μάθατε)
- 1st sɡ imperfect passive –man, 2nd –san: ˈkaθuman, ˈkaθusan (Standard καθόμασταν, καθόσασταν)
One further peculiarity is accenting of the vocative particle o, and the lack of accent on the following name: ώ μανα, ώ Κωστα “Oh mother, Oh Kostas”.
I didn’t find any clear archaisms.
What names were historically used to refer to your spoken language before assuming their current form?
As Names of the Greeks – Wikipedia details, the name that the Byzantines gave themselves, and the name that Modern Greeks traditionally gave themselves as a result, was Romans: Romioi, with Hellene reserved for the Ancient Greeks (or for pagans in general).
It follows that the name Greeks traditionally gave their vernacular was Roman, Romeika, with Hellenic reserved for Ancient Greek. And this term entered 18th and 19th century English as Romaic.
In fact this book written in 1855 explicitly contrasts Romaic and Modern Greek: Romaic and Modern Greek. Romaic is what Greeks called Demotic, the spoken language; “Modern Greek” is what Greeks called Katharevousa, the diglossic written language.
Romaic passed out of usage by the end of the 19th century in English, as Demoticism gained ground and as Greeks grew uncomfortable with anything Greek being called anything but Greek. Romeika is obsolete now in Greek too, though many will still remember when people used to say “am I speaking Romaic to you?!” (same meaning as “English, m*thaf*cka, do you speak it?”). That’s “am I speaking Hellenic [Greek] to you?!” now, of course.
Answered 2017-02-23 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK. and
, Master of Arts, Linguistics, UC Davis