Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

Petropoulos in his second edition accused the linguist Manolis Triantafyllidis of academic dishonesty, in the minimal information he gave about Kaliarda in his work on cants (which we saw included his important work on the builders’ cant Dortika, which is also based on Romani); he claims Triantafyllidis had researched Kaliarda extensively, but was too scared to publish anything.

Whether or not that is true, the information Triantafyllidis gives is indeed minimal, and what little he said seems to have led to some persistent misunderstandings. But his summary work on cants¹ is quite impressive when it comes to all cants but Kaliarda, as we saw in the previous post; and it’s the more impressive because it originated as a talk, given in 1947.

This is the glancing mention he makes of Kaliarda in that talk.

p. 315. In reviewing professional cants, Triantafyllidis found the following word counts for countries of origin—allowing for unclear etymologies, and for the regional variation in cants and the languages they were in contact with: 58 Slavic, 38 Aromanian, 10–12 Italian (mainly in the cants of Ioannina), 9 Turkish, 7 Arvanitika, 5–7 Romani, 2 Ladino, 1 Hebrew.

If we add Dortika and some others, the picture changes to the benefit of Romani and Italian. In mangika [= Koutsavakika] idioms, which were formed in urban centres, there are fewer foreign words. It is worth noting that Italian is sometimes used to express more abstract [“higher”] concepts, while Romani is mainly used for concepts relating to suspect business, and is usual in so called verba erotica.

Footnote: In Greek such words appear in the language of the effeminate and prostitutes, lubinistika (from Romani lubni). That idiom, outside of Greek words, also has Romani and Italian words.

… That’s it.

It’s not much, but it’s still interesting to comment on this, as another early witness to Kaliarda, 20 years before Petropoulos. (The following post on the paper by Minniti-Gonias, about Italian words in Kaliarda, has more to say about what Triantafyllidis said.)

• Triantafyllidis uses lubinistika to refer to Kaliarda, the same word Petropoulos first heard of Kaliarda as, a few years earlier. (1947 in fact is when Petropoulos was learning Kaliarda in the Great Salonica park. Triantafyllidis at Aristotle University would have been a few kilometres away.)² In fact, lubinistika does seem to be the most common word for Kaliarda before Petropoulos.
• Ioannidou’s 1977 report that Kaliarda was spoken by female prostitutes presumably originates here. Petropoulos dismissed it, but we have just seen a claim that was true from 1934. (And a future post will given even more direct confirmation, from an Athens policeman.)
• The claim which people keep having to refute, that Kaliarda is mainly a language about sex, also seems to have originated here, if only through the allusion that Romani is the language used for vocabulary about sex. As we have seen, Romani is used for a lot more than vocabulary about sex in Kaliarda, and Kaliarda in full flower was indeed a language that covered a lot of ground (though the vestigial use of the language in parodies and in emblematic use does focus on the dirty words).
• I didn’t mention it, but Kyuchukov & Bakker expressed surprise that Romani was the basis of a gay cant, given the traditional sexual conservatism of the Rom. The Rom working as prostitutes in the Ottoman Empire, that were at the start of Kaliarda, were of course working far from the censure of their relatives. Triantafyllidis’ blanket claim that Romani is used for criminal and sexual concepts doesn’t make much sense outside of Kaliarda—it’s not what the little Dortika he has published looks like; and it seems to be a superficial conclusion.
• Triantafyllidis mentions Italian and Romani, which Montoliu has established are the main sources of Kaliarda vocabulary, along with Turkish. He does not mention English and French. It is quite plausible that English only took hold in Kaliarda between 1947 and 1971, with the rise of English as a prestige language. French would have been harder to miss; there’s still less French than Italian, but I wonder whether Triantafyllidis ignored the French element because upper class Greek, too, had been deluged with French loans.

Kaliarda is unintelligible on purpose, although you need to see extended instances for that to be obvious: not the song parodies that Petropoulos put in his appendix, which are merely Kaliarda-coloured Greek, or the Kaliarda you can find now on YouTube, but pieces like Pavrianos’ song Kaliardosynes, or indeed Klynn’s skit “Won’t One Faggot Speak Out” (Ένας Πούστης Να Μιλήσει)—for all that its Kaliarda is bookish and outsider—and noone who actually spoke Kaliarda would be so sympathetic to The People³.

Note how much of those texts is in red, the colour I used for Romani. As Montoliu was perceptive enough to pick up, Kaliarda deliberately builds new words on Romani bases, to maintain unintelligibility, and it uses its vocabulary parsimoniously, to keep it autonomous from Mainstream Greek. That means it is indeed artificial: the comparison with Esperanto was made in passing in a comment to Revenioti’s trailer on YouTube by Panos Panagis, and it’s fair. Indeed, for reasons of protecting its autonomy, Kaliarda is much more schematic than Esperanto, which itself is highly schematic among auxiliary languages. (Schematic in interlinguistics means “using a small vocabulary and compounding to maintain ease of learning”; the opposite pole is naturalistic, which involves using internationally common or familiar wordstock.)

A better comparison is the variant vocabularies that adults have to learn in societies, which rely on keeping their vocabularies low for learnability.

Like initiate languages: they can do some prodigious collapsing of lexical categories to keep vocabulary down. Kaliarda doesn’t quite do that—but the multiplicity of meanings of avelo, as a root verb (never mind its use as a light verb) is certainly unusual, and arguably artificial. As Montoliu again perceptively said, avelo would never have ended up with that range of meanings, if the speakers of Kaliarda had remained Rom: it happened because it was a Rom vocabulary taken over by gadjos as an artificial code.

… Or pidgins: Kaliarda is still Greek, and thus still flexional, so the comparison with isolating pidgins is not immediately obvious; but the prodigious compounding is the kind of thing you’d see in pidgins.

… Or, much more to the point, like cants. Which, after all, is what Kaliarda is.

I’ll come back to Triantafyllidis’ 1947 talk on cants,⁴ for its glancing mention of Kaliarda. But its mention of the parsimony with which cants use their vocabulary describes Kaliarda even better than the cants like Dortika which he did document.

Cants (συνθηματικές γλώσσες “password languages”) have a characteristic idiosyncrasy: given their relatively poor vocabulary, many words express concepts generically, which are kept distinct in normal speech. Dortika uses grast [< Romani grast “horse”] for horses, but also mules, and any beast of burden. The meaning “beast of burden” is most relevant, and the hearer can understand what exactly is meant from context or circumstance; or maybe they don’t, but that doesn’t really matter anyway. So the very few verbs are particularly multivalent. It’s as if the practitioners of secrecy languages worked out centuries ago the method launched in our time by English linguists and educationalists through Basic English:⁵ mangono [in Koutsavakika] means “take”, but also “steal”, and, followed by “a woman”, “marry”. praxalno [in Kudaritika, Epirus Builders’ Cant] is “work”, but is said of various things one can do: praxalnao ligrova “prepare food”, i.e. “cook”; but also “twirl” one’s moustache, or “strike” a bell. (p. 316)

We have seen this generic usage time and again in Kaliarda; not just with avelo meaning everything a verb can do, and dzazo meaning everything avelo does not, but also with nouns and adjectives; latsos for example being both “good” and “beautiful”. We noted that the Turkish Gay Cant was much closer to Romani, in having more concrete meanings to its words. Triantafyllidis exemplified genericness with Dortika grast; but Dortika is still closer to Romani than Kaliarda, in having more specific and less schematic word usage. For example, Dortika constrasts dʒala, dʒan with naʃto for “leave”; it has a distinct word for “sick”, mirelos < Romani merela “he is dying” (cf. Kaliarda baro “heavy thing”); it contrasts sumnal beautiful, healthy” and ʃapano “good” (cf. Kaliarda latsos for both). Recall that Dortika is a secrecy language, but its transmission was less artificial than for Kaliarda: its speakers are believed to have been hellenised Rom, as opposed to ethnic Greeks who took over a Romani idiom and elaborated on it.

It would be proper to speak here of periphrases occurring when a single-word rendering is not available. For example, absent a word for “be hungry” [Standard Greek pino], they will see θelo na tsaxtaiso “I want to eat” [in Alifiatika, Tinsmith Cant of Murgana, Epirus].

The Kaliarda use of avelo as a light verb is a logical outcome of that trend; we have indeed seen Pavrianos’ song lyric where “I am hungry” is rendered as avelo xalxalo “I want eat-eat” (or “I do hunger”, if xalxalo refers to hunger.) Kaliarda is not merely paraphrasing verbs, but systematically supplanting them with light verb locutions.

This lexical impoverishment is one of the reasons that they often come up with synoptical phrasing, in telegraphic style: [Dortika] posa stale to mas? “how much money the meat?”, i.e. “how much does the meat cost?” [Cant Not Specified] tsiukas kaloerepse “sun has turned monk [retired]” i.e. “night has fallen”. Yet cants also display the opposite phenomenon: lexical multitude. Thre are many words with identical meaning for the same thing, for concepts which are particularly emotionally salient for cant speakers. Of the 120 words I have recorded for Dortika, four are for ouzo/raki: atie, kias, mars, piki. We find that phenomenon elsewhere, e.g. in French argots. This richness in very concrete concepts has also been noted in cultures with a lower level of civilisation.

Yes, it was 1947. Petropoulos’ counting of synonyms in Kaliarda may well have been motivated by that observation: he makes a point of counting 45 synonyms for “gay [bottom], 10 for Kaliarda itself, 8 for “sperm” and “leave, escape”, 7 for “train, gossip, paederast [= top]”, and so on.

Triantafyllidis then goes on to note (p. 317) that “leave, escape” is the concept with the most synonyms in his records of cants, and on p. 315 he smirks “that’s spot on, isn’t it?”—speakers of cants are people who need to make a run for it, when whatever they are keeping secret is no longer a secret.

Kaliarda, as we have seen, is more artificial and more semantically underspecified than other cants. A lot of that artificiality has to do with its use of compounding, typically Romani-based, which is quite prodigious—and which does not seem to be paralleled in other Greek cants.

Compounding in Kaliarda—even three-part compounding—can be quite utilitarian. Take for example the listing of words relating to “death”. “Death” itself has a compound word in Kaliarda. The English idiom for dying, kick the bucket, has the Standard Greek equivalent τινάζω τα πέταλα “to fling one’s horseshoes”; it relies on the same notion of a dead body jerking straight, but refers to horses rather than people. Kaliarda brings it back to human shoes, with τζάζω τα τιραχά dzazo ta tiraxa. dzas-tirax- in turn becomes a productive morpheme for “death”:

• dzastiraˈxaðiko “kick-the-bucket shop” = “funeral parlor”
• dzastiraˈxas “kick-the-bucket-ist” = “executioner”
• dzastotiraˈxakis “kick-the-bucket person (diminutive)” = “criminal, murderer”
• dzastiraˈxokuto “kick-the-bucket box” = “coffin”
• dzastiraxoˈmazema “kick-the-bucket gathering” = “funeral”
• dzastiraxoˈbenama “kick-the-bucket speaking” = “eulogy”
• dzastiraˈxosvoli “kick-the-bucket ashes”, dzastiraˈxospira “kick-the-bucket pellets” = “koliva, wheat ritually given out at funerals”
• dzastiraxoseˈkeri “kick-the-bucket sweet”, dzastiraxoˈsolo ibid. = “poison”
• dzastiraxoˈtrupa “kick-the-bucket hole” = “grave”
• dzastiraxofiˈtevo “to kick-the-bucket plant”, dzastiraxoˈxono “to kick-the-bucket hide” = “to bury”

The words looks pretty elicited of course; you can see Petropoulos asking “so what other words are to do with death?” You can see a smirk in a lot of these: “planting” for “burying, for example, or “death sugar” for poison. Then again, my earliest exposure to Pidgins included “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” in Tok Pisin as mi kam long plantim Siza long graun, no long mekim laulau bilong em. Granted, that was from Brush Up Your Pidgin, which does not take Tok Pisin terribly seriously; but if you had to make up a word for “bury” or “poison” with deliberately limited resources, those coinages are not necessarily absurd.

And yet, some of the compounds are truly coloured with a darkly cynical sense of fun; and the fun-making is certainly not limited to sex, as people often assume of Kaliarda. We already saw Klynn (somewhat clumsily) insert the word for “benefactors” into his skit; this is the full cynical sequence:

• dzaz-berde “throw away money” > “make a donation”
• dzazberdepuros “throw-money old-man” = “national benefactor, philanthropist”
• dzazberdepurotsarðo “throw-money old-man hut” = “public building founded by a national benefactor, such as the Zappeion Hall.

The much longer series of words prefixed with vakul- “church” display both parsimony and anticlerical humour:

• vakulaɣlaˈrizο “church non-dozing” = “attending a church vigil”
• vakuloˈɡastroma “church pregnancy” = “church dome”
• vakuloˈkerasma “church treat” = “holy communion”
• vakulokreˈmala “church hanging noose” = “marriage” (from the mainstream slang “hanging noose” for “marriage”)
• vakulolutsopuˈros “church light old man” = “beadle” (“church light” = “candle”)
• vakuloˈbuki “church book” = “Bible”
• vakulomasˈtura “church being-stoned” = “incense”
• vakuˈlomolo “church water” = “holy water”
• vakulonisesˈte “church clothes” = “cassock”
• vakulodavaˈdzis “church pimp” = “bishop”
• vakulopuˈros “church old man” = “priest”
• vakulofeˈrofusta “church iron skirt” = “church bell” (“skirt” from the shape of bells)

I look forward to giving a list of the funniest of these, but I am still groaning under a wealth of material I’m unearthing on Kaliarda (and that commenters on Sarantakos’ blog are unearthing for me.) There will be posts on:

• Minniti-Gonia’s paper on Italian in Kaliarda
• Sechidou’s paper comparing Kaliarda with other Romani cants and Greek Para-Romani. (I’ve rushed this draft out, because at first glance it looks like she’s already anticipated what I’m saying here.)
• Triantafyllidis’ papers on Dortika
• Triantafyllidis’ glancing comments on Kaliarda
• Spatholouro’s find of police attention to Kaliarda from 1963
• A snippet of Kaliarda remembered from Larissa in the 1970s
• A summary of the funniest and linguistically more salient words of Kaliarda

I’ve found the paper by Kyuchukov & Bakker on the gay cant of Istanbul.

Spatholouro’s find and Montoliu’s had built up my expectations that this would be a carbon copy of Kaliarda, with the same polyglot amusements and compounding hilarity. Maybe it was; but the vocabulary Kyuchukov & Bakker recorded is just straight Romani words—like Kaliarda would have been at its very earliest stages. And a lot of the vocabulary is not shared with Kaliarda.

(I’m switching to acutes here, since they are combined in the article with Turkish orthography.)

Dortika, again for comparison, from Triantafyllidis, M. 1924. 7. Eine zigeunerisch-griechische Geheimsprache. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschungen 52: 1–40. Reprinted in Άπαντα [Collected Works]: 2: 46–85.

p. 96. Although Romani has largely died out in Turkey, some subgroups in Turkey use Romani vocabulary. Romani musicians in Üsküdar use the following:

p. 97. The paper only lists Romani words from the gay cant. Other words were of Kurdish or Slavic origin, or unknown; they do not mention Italian, French, or English, the other major sources of Kaliarda words.

The paper identifies lubunja “gay” as Slavic, from liubima “darling”. We have seen the equivalent Kaliarda lubína, and likely the older Kaliarda labuní, were derived from Romani lubhni “whore”. A Slavic etymology is not impossible, especially if there are other Slavic words in Turkish gay cant; but there are no Slavic words that I know of in Kaliarda, and the Romani word looks more plausible.

p. 98 phuri preserves Romani aspiration, and baare, piiz vowel length; both are alien to Turkish. By contrast, Kaliarda phonology is thoroughly assimilated to Greek. Dortika, too, preserves Romani phonetics: pʰinela for Kaliarda benavo, kʃier “house” < kher, kxer.

The Kaliarda Romani vocabulary is clearly more parsimonious, which corroborates its greater artificiality: lačho also does the work of šukar, džav the work of nas.

A surprising number of words have no Romani-derived equivalent at all in Kaliarda, or have picked different Romani words (e.g. çangal vs tiraxo). The list of common words (even if we include the calque “sister”) is in fact quite small: “pretty, vagina, old, big (grown up), very, theft, food”.

We know that matalo used to be in Kaliarda; and it would be implausible to suggest an independent genesis of Kaliarda from Turkish Gay cant. But the complete absence of Italian in Turkish Gay cant is striking, given that Montoliu argued it represented the Ottoman, Levantine past of the idiom. Whatever was the case in the past, this is now only a vaguely related cant. And as the comparison with Dortika shows, it is also much closer to its Romani origins than Kaliarda is.

Katerina Christodoulou’s 2016 thesis A lexicological analysis of slang vocabulary of Modern Greek is a thorough analysis of the morphology, semantics and pragmatics of multiple Greek slang variants, old and new, and of the colloquial use of obscenities. Kaliarda is one of the old variants studied; while most attention is given to contemporary youth slang (not without the assistance of data from slang.gr), Kaliarda comes up several times, and is discussed separately.

p. 87. Kaliarda is unusual among Greek marginal lects, in that other marginal lects seldom borrow from it, because of the stigma of being gay. Recently women have been using Kaliarda words to express their autonomy from men.

p. 93. Kaliarda are linguistically autonomous, having even distinctive pronouns (imandes “we” < Romani mande “me”) and adverbs (karbone “together” < Italian carbone “carbon (copy)”).

p. 94. Kaliarda are dying out because the associated prejudices are dying out; but many Kaliarda words survive in contemporary slang: kulo “shit” < “nonsense”, tekno “young man” (twink or toyboy); xalastra “ruin, loss”.

p. 95. Notable loans:

• radaro “read” < English read or radar;
• sevdotekno “young pop singer” < Turkish sevda “love” + Kaliarda tekno;
• midlanota “midnight” < English middle + Italian notte

Ingenious compounds:

• viðobladorufa “leech” < viða “screw” + English bloody “blood” + rufo “suck”;
• kuorokuravelta “love” < Italian cuore “heart” + Kaliarda kuravelta “sex act”.
  • G. Kastouda suggests for the latter kulo “shit” + averta “openly, with abandon”. One could just as well propose c(u)ore + averta, but that would be too romantic for Kaliarda. Or alternatively, one could just check Romani as Poniroskilo at slang.gr did, and find kurela “to have sex”, presumably with the verb avelo suffixed
• retsinoparfuma “incense” < retsini “resin” + Italian parfuma “perfume”
• talirokatarieme “to give the moudza gesture” (spread palm) < taliro “five drachma coin” + katarieme “to curse” (because the curse is given with five fingers spread)
• sarmeloxamoɣelo “sex” < Kaliarda sarmela “penis” + xamoɣelo “smile”

Onomatopoeia:

• xorxora “fire”
• tsuxtroklaka “whip” < tsuxtra “jellyfish, stinger” + klak
• sursuru “injection”

p. 96. Productive stems:

• purevo “grow old”
• pureklo “old woman”
• purozeles “old man” < phuro + zeles “jelly”
• purokumando “military command”
• puromarioneta “old paralysed man” (lit. “old marionette”)

p. 97.

• compound: matsoberdeðokuto “cash register, fund” < matso “cash” < Italian mazzo + berde “money” < Romani parne + kuti “box”
• derived: afroðito “prostitute” < Aphrodite
• derived: verɣoniaris “shy” < Italian vergogna “shame”
• truncation: runa “policeman” < ɣuruna “pig” (Montoliu derives it from paparuna “poppy”
• metathesis: lostre “mad” < trelos
• metathesis: ksalimari “pillow” < maksilari
• phrasal compound: antikoti prufa “domestic letter” < antikotos “distant” + prufa “letter”
• “idiom”: turla susta “dizziness”

p. 151. Examples of of Kaliarda survivals into modern slang: kolobaras “top, active partner in gay sex” < Turkish kulampara; lubina “passive homosexual” < Lumpen(proletariat). The latter is clearly wrong, and the correct Romani etymology lubni “whore” is given for lubinia “deceit”.

My note: The Turkish etymology kulampara of kolobaras was a surprise to me. I’d assumed (as did Zahos’ 1981 dictionary of slang) that it was formed internally to Greek, substituting the first element of Farsi zan-pare “woman-fancier, heterosexual” with Greek kolos “arse”. (And I was curious how Greeks knew enough Persian to do so, when they’d only heard of the word via Ottoman Turkish.) Per Nişanyan, the word is already attested in Evliya Çelebi in the 17th century, and derives directly from Persian ġulāmpāre “boy-lover”. So there was no analogy on zan-pare necessary: the word does come straight from Farsi, and the folk-etymology “arse-fancier” in kolobaras is yet another happy coincidence, of the similarity of Arabic غلام ḡulām “boy” and Greek kolos.

At any rate, kolobaras was obviously used a lot by Kaliarda speakers, but I have little reason to think it was ever exclusive to Kaliarda: it was merely the Ottoman expression for tops, and Kaliarda was not the only language variant in which tops were spoken of. See e.g. discussion in Mehmet Ümit Necef: Turkey on the Brink of Modernity: A Guide for Scandinavian Gays—a discussion of traditional norms of gay sex that will be quite familiar from foregoing discussion:

In contrast to ibne [bottoms, Greek bines, who often cross-dressed, and now can be trans], kulampara [top] does not constitute a special type of man. Any married man “too full of lust” or separated too long from his wife looks for prostitutes, mistresses, animals (dogs and donkeys) or ibneler. Nobody would consider himself as “abnormal”, “perverse”, “sinful”, let alone “homosexual” for fucking an ibne. He would not identify himself with a (minority) group of “men-fuckers” or “animal-fuckers”. To bugger an ibne is an enjoyment open to all; any man could be seduced by one of those.

p. 223. The use of feminine suffixes (-u, -a, -i) to create novel words, including onomatopoeias, is not restricted to Kaliarda; there are examples from the slangs of drug addicts (paramiθu, paramiθa “heroin” < paramiθi “fairy tale; solace”) and rebetiko songs (afra “burglary” < ksafrizo “to skim the foam off the top = to steal”).

My note: But the Kaliarda usage appears to be much more systematic.

p. 267. Kaliarda is notable among Greek slang variants for its three-part compounds, used because of the secrecy nature of the cant; these are both exocentric and endocentric:

Exocentric:

• kifinoturlukoliko “religious icon” < Kaliarda kifinas “monk” < Standard Greek “drone bee” + Kaliarda turlukuliko < turlu “salad” < Turkish türlü “mixed food” + Kaliarda kuliko “colour” < French couleur (NOTE: The latter with an adjectival ending -iko, which makes it look like the Kaliarda for “shitty” < Romani khul)
• metaxalemadokamari “dining room” < Greek meta “after” + Kaliarda xalemade + Greek kamari “room”.

My note: The derivation given of xalemade from Albanian halë, Turkish halâ “toilet” should be rejected in favour of Romani xal “eat”. The derivation of xalemade as xal + Albanian made “food, stomach” is possible, but a pseudo-French -ment seems to me more in keeping with Kaliarda

Endocentric:

• ilektropopilobuso “trolleycar” < Greek ilektriko “electric” + popilobuso “bus”, calque of Puristic Greek leoforio “people-carrier”, < Italian popolo “people” + English bus
• matsoberdeðokuto “cash register” < matso “cash” Italian mazzo + berde “money” < Romani parne + Greek kuti “box”

Youth slang occasionally also uses three-part compounds: malako-putso-ɣliftra “jerk-dick-licker” = “immoral woman”, kariolo-tsibuko-ɣliftra “whore-blowjob-licker” = “immoral woman”, seksopornoðiastrofikos “sex-porn/whore-perverted” = “perverted”.

My note: It is fair to say that Greek has periodically enjoyed multi-part compounds, and I’ve cited in this blog instances from both Early Modern Greek literature, and from the Hellas-L mailing list in the 90s. However three-part (and even four-part) compounds are a much more systematic part of Kaliarda, owing to its artificiality: its deliberate use of a restricted, largely Romani lexicon to devise new words internally to Kaliarda.

p. 278. Metathesis is a common feature of contemporary slang , where it is known as poðana < ana-poða “backwards”. It occurs in youth slang, drug addict slang, soldier slang, and to small extent prisoner slang. Metathesis is to be expected in secrecy languages, but it does not appear in older Greek cants (e.g. koutsavakika). The only examples in Kaliarda appear to be ksalimari < maksilari “pillow”, and komoda < domata “tomato” (which may instead occur in the dialectal metathesis komodori < pomodori < Italian pomodoro)

p. 283. Truncation is a characteristic of both older and newer slang variants. The only instance given as Kaliarda is dzaz “mad” < dzazlos “ibid.” < dzazo “to leave” (i.e. be out of one’s mind) < Romani džav (the truncation is targeted at dzaz “jazz”). But several instances given as contemporary youth slang are also in Petropoulos’ dictionary: dana “whore” < putana, dania “dishonourable action” < putania lit. “whorish action”, tna “pimple” < Mt Etna, runa “policeman” < ɣuruna “pig”, duma “hashish smoke” < dumani. (Most of these are given in p. 535 as Kaliarda anyway.)

p. 294. Reduplication is characteristic of soldier slang, but is common (if not very frequent) in other variants; the Kaliarda instance cited is kul kul “shit” < Romani khul

p. 300. Phrasal compounds: the Kaliarda instances cited are: kipi kapaki “green beret”, Kaliarda “green hat” < “garden-coloured lid”, kapaki plereza “black beret”, Kaliarda “black hat” < “mournful lid”

p. 307. Idiomatic expressions: the Kaliarda instance cited is ðeno/ðanteliazo/avelo fionɡο “to bind/embroider/have a ribbon = to have sex with a homosexual who I thought was heterosexual”; the gloss Petropoulos actually gives is “to have sex with a bottom who I thought was a top”, reflecting the more salient dichotomy of the time. The idiom is in fact a pun on the word fionɡο “ribbon” < Italian fiocco, which means in Kaliarda “bottom who acts like a top” (cf. “straight-acting”), and is in fact a truncation of older mainstream slang dzidzifiongos “dandy” < Turkish cici “beautiful” + Italian fiocco.

p. 309. Verbal idioms in slang often feature a light verb—kano, perno, vɣazo “do, take, take out” in Koutsavakika, avelo, vuelo in Kaliarda:
avelo tula “be silent”, avelo dup “beat up”, avele apokate “come here”, avelo puf, vuelo fuma “smoke hashish”, vuelo dza “go away”, vuelo foria “pressure”.

Christodoulou discusses altering grammatical gender of references to humans as one of the means of increasing or decreasing offensiveness in slang, with feminines referring to men as typically offensive (even when effeminacy is not being overtly alluded to). The use of feminines in Kaliarda of course is not about insult at all, and purposefully celebrates effeminacy, if not femininity.

p. 535. Further examples of morphological processes:

• Blend: sikafra “chancre, ulcer associated with syphilis” < siko “fig; derogatory mainstream word for gays” or sik “chic” + afroðisiο “venereal (disease)”, which has been truncated in turn
• Truncation: tua “money” < tula “ibid.” (Etymology unknown)
• Truncation: pfes “coffee” < kafes
• Phrasal compound: dzas nionio “mad” < Kaliarda dzas “leave” + Colloquial Greek nionio “mind”
• Phrasal compound: kart kaliard “photograph” < French carte + Kaliarda kaliarda “ugly, bizarre” [The ending of kaliarda has been truncated to make it look French, by analogy with kart postal < carte postale “postcard”]
• Phrasal compound: pompino frape “blowjob” < French bonbon + French frapper “strike” [or of course frappé]
• Phrasal compound: prufa mors “telegram”, lit. “Morse letter”
• Phrasal compound: flokia romanof “Russian salad, Olivier salad; a mix-up”; lit. “jizz Romanoff”
• Idiom: artista tu vuvu “elderly and experienced gay” lit. “silent cinema artist”
• Idiom: avelo kusumia “to gossip jealously” lit. “to do insults”
• Idiom: benavo anθiɣiina “to gossip jealously” lit. “to speak unsanitarily”
• Idiom: dzazo ta mol “to have diarrhoea” lit. “to expel water”
• Idiom: latsa xalemata “expensive food” lit. “beautiful food”

A Kaliarda adjective that poses an interesting etymological conundrum is musando “fake”. It is interesting both because it is in a chicken-and-the-egg relationship with Mainstream Greek Slang musi “fake”, and because the etymology of both could be Romani, Turkish, French, Greek, or likelier a conflation of all four.

The data for this comes from a post on Nikos Sarantakos’ blog about musi, which was reposted twice—Από τη μουσαντένια ιστορία στο μούσι του αυτοκράτορα and Μουσαντένιο μούσι—and the commenters on both posts.

Here is the data:

• The French mouche “fly; goatee, soul patch” was borrowed into Greek as musi by 1902.
• Vrasidas Kapetanakis’ dictionary of slang (1950) records the adverb musanda “as a lie”.
• Konstantinos Danguitsis’ dictionary of slang (1967) records the adverb musanda “as a lie” as well.
• Kaliarda, as recorded by Petropoulos in 1971, has the entry musi, meaning a lie; Petropoulos writes that it was already used in mainstream colloquial Greek to mean a lie. Sarantakos and I both recall that meaning from our infancy (which in Sarantakos’ case means the 1960s), and the associated gesture of stroking one’s beard to mean that someone is lying.
• Petropoulos records in the same meaning muselman de tif (a jocular French exapansion on musi as “Mus-lim of tuft”, with tuf likely a calque of Greek kotsana “stalk; nonsense”)
• Petropoulos also records, again meaning “fake, lie”, the prefix mus- (e.g. mus-flori “fake flower = nylon”, mus-Dzusis “Jesus the Fake = Jesus”), and musando. musando- as a prefix is particularly productive in Kaliarda.
• Zahos’ dictionary of slang (1981) records the adjectives musandenios and musande (the latter with the fake-French ending -é so beloved of Greek slang). Vasiliki Metatroulou reports musandenios used in a 1965 movie, along with sta musanda, referring to someone pretending to play the bouzouki.

And here are the accounts:

• Petropoulos suggests that the meaning comes from “beard” via the colloquial use of trixes “hairs” to mean “nonsense”.
• Petropoulos accounts for musando as a pseudo-French ending; cf. piasman, piasmante (in the song Kaliardosynes piasmanto) “groping” < piaso “hold” + French -ment.
• Sarantakos adds that fake beards, which feature in Mardi Gras costume parties, would have added to the association of beards with fakery.
• Kostas Karapotosoglou proposes it comes from Turkish مساعده musa‘ade “help; permission” (< Arabic سعد sa‘ida “fortunate”), with the notion of concession (“I’ll allow you to say that”) being extended in Greek to allowing someone to pretend.
• Sarantakos hesitates before a Turkish meaning, because of how late the word appears in Greek. He is also not convinced by Petropoulos’ account.
• Commenter Ein Steppenwolf proposes Romani musardo “spoiled, damaged”, which would work well with Kaliarda.
• Karapotosoglou then proposes Ottoman Turkish مصنع musanna‘ “fake, artificial” < Arabic مصنع musanna‘ “affected, artificial”.
• Karapotosoglou rejects Romani musardo, because in Kaliarda Romani -rd- is preserved as -rd- —as indeed occurs in the name Kaliarda < Romani kaljardo.
• Commenter Diver Of Sinks (who is an Ottomanist) thinks musa‘ade is irrelevant, though he likes musanna‘.
• Commenter Katerina suggests the Turkish suffix -muş, -müş, -mış, meaning “allegedly”. Commenter Antrikos agrees that derivation satisfies Occam’s Razor.

I’ll add my own observations:

• Kaliarda systematically distorts words to match polyglot affectation, or folk etymology. We have seen in Montoliu’s paper Italian presenza “presence” pseudo-Francified as prezanda, and Romani parne “money” folk-etymologised into Turkish berde “curtain”. A distortion of Romani musardo into musando, whether because that sounded more French (-(m)ent), or because it matched musanna‘, is hardly implausible.
• On the other hand, Kaliarda and Koutsavakika did not communicate much, and we know that the words already existed in virtually the same form (musanda) in mainstream slang. Mainstream slang could also have taken the form independently from Romani, or from Kaliarda, but that is less likely. Since mainstream musanda looks closer to musanna‘, that derivation is indeed somewhat likelier, and both the phonology and the semantics is much closer.
• The -d- in musanda could have been introduced by conflation with Romani musardo; but geminates are absent from most Greek dialects anyway, and if musanna‘ was indeed pronounced with a double consonant (as does occur with Arabic loans), musanda might have been how Greeks heard it.
  • I don’t know to what extent that kind of development happens in Turkish loans into Greek though. It certainly doesn’t happen in Turkish anneden babadan > Greek anadan babadan “from mother and father”.
• The Turkish suffix -muş, -müş, -mış has in fact been borrowed in degrammaticalised form into Greek Cypriot: miʃːi “allegedly”. That could well have inspired musi in Standard Greek slang; and once contact with Turkish was lost, the French meaning “beard” took over in popular understanding of the word—to the extent of inspiring the associated hand gesture, and the folk etymological connection with “hairs” = “bullshit”, which becomes a happy coincidence.
• The similarity with musanna‘ is another happy coincidence. So Greeks introspecting on their language would assume that musi and musanda are related. The two could be related in Kaliarda, which would add an -and- as pseudo-French, as it did in piasmante. But if musanda was created outside of Kaliarda, that is less likely: -and- doesn’t mean anything in Greek.
• That’s a lot of happy coincidences, and coincidences should normally make us suspicious. But coincidences can still happen.

I’ve already posted the etymological information from Montoliu’s 2005 paper on Kaliarda.⁷ This is what else the paper covers:

p. 300. There is a Romani-based gay cant used in Istanbul⁸. The Istanbul cant and Kaliarda share words and linguistic features, and may be related from Ottoman times.

p. 301. Kaliarda is derived from Romani kaljardo “blackened” < kalo “black”—which is also the name of the Spanish–Romani language Caló. So, “the language of the dark-skinned”, meaning the Roma themselves.

p. 303. Kaliarda is not morphologically exotic—its grammar is just Modern Greek; but it has a huge amount of foreign vocabulary that make it unintelligible to Standard Greek speakers, not restricted to Romani. The polyglot nature of Kaliarda is not characteristic of Para-Romani languages (mixed Gypsy languages used in language shift), but of secret Romani-based languages spoken by non-Roma. But it must have been initially coined by Romani bilingual speakers, before being transmitted to Greek speakers who developed it further.

Kaliarda treats Romani voiced and voiceless stops as allophones in free variation: pagro “hair” < bakro “sheep”. This is common to Turkish and Southern Italian “dialects”.

p. 305. The following counts obtain for different classes of Kaliarda words:

• Base words are 51% non-Greek: 7% Romani, 22% Italian, 8% English, 8% French.
• Compound words are 63% non-Greek. 39% of them are Romani, 31% Italian, 16% Turkish.
• Derived words are 60% non-Greek. 43% of them are Romani, 30% Italian, 10% Turkish.

p.307. So foreign words are overrepresented in compounds and derivation—which is consistent with this being a secrecy language, being obfuscated by foreign words used to form new words.

A very large proportion of words are compounds—40%. This is likely the most radically extensive instance of compounding among Modern Greek variants.

p. 308. Romani is overrepresented because of the persistent use of a small number of constituents, which are arguably grammaticalised, and are certainly highly combinative. That includes avelo, as well as the compound constituents balo “fat”, baro “fat”, kulo “shit”, molo liquid, mudzo “vagina”, pagro “hair”, piselo “sleep”, pulo “arse”, puro “old”, dzus ~ dzas “flight, sacking, throwing away”, dzinavo “to be gay”, xal “food”.

The high score of Italian reflects the high prestige of Italian in the Ottoman Empire; the French and English contributions to the vocabulary are smaller, and must date from rather later. Examples used in compounding are vivo “living”, groso “big”, gran “big”, lakrimo “tear”, lutso “light”.

p. 309. There is common relexification and calquing of Greek expressions and concepts via Romani in Kaliarda, as is common in Romani-based slangs. So the Standard Greek use of θeo- “God” as an intensifying prefix is rendered in Kaliarda with English godo-; the derogatory use of Standard Greek palio- with Romani puro- or Italian veko-. The use of pagro “hair” from Romani bakro “sheep” is only possible because Greek conflates fleece and human hair as mali.

The use of mol “wine” to mean “water” is also a demonstration of creativity, extending to mololetra “water company letter”; on the other hand moliazo “to get drunk” preserves the original Romani meaning.

p. 309. but gratsiozo “thank you” , lit. “very thankful”, from Romani but + Italian grazie, affixes Italian -oso to make the word look even more Italian—or as a misconstrual of grazioso “graceful” as “grateful”.

p. 310. In koza tembo avelis “what time have you got?”, Italian (che) cosa has been generalised from “what thing” to a generic interrogative, reminiscent of what happens in creoles.

p. 311. kularo tin isandes prezanda “Fuck you, Your Excellency!”, lit. “I shit your presence”, is a calque of Turkish and Arabic hazret “presence” to mean “Your Excellency”. Kaliarda has not used the equivalent Greek “your lordship” i afentia su; whoever coined this expression used the Turkish idiom, calqued it into Italian presenza, and wrapped it with a French ending. Which only makes sense if Kaliarda was born in the multilingual Ottoman Empire. And had Petropoulos recorded more Kaliarda, we would have found more such instances.

Compounds have the following patterns:

• Adj + N (most common): balo-muskulos fat-muscled = muscular, ilektro-popilo-buso electrical people bus = trolleybus, latsokangela good iron-bar = good metal = gold, latsotemba beautiful weather = summer, calque of Greek kalokeri
• O + V almo-biseliazo soul–put-to-sleep = hypnotise, animatsurnos soul-thief = death, panxalo eat everything = autumn
• V + O dzas-moliazo expel-liquid = sweat
• N + N, apposition lutso-lakrimo light-tears = candle, sodomolu soda wine = champagne, dzastiraxosekeri away shoes sugar = kick the bucket sugar = death sugar = poison

p. 313. Kaliarda often borrows Romani verbs in the perfect (avil, dikhel, hal); this also occurs with Turkish verbs. The meaning of the verbs is not consistently perfective or imperfective. avelo is a light (“delexicalised”) verb, like Greek kano “do”, or more so Turkish etmek “do”, but it has been even more generalised; that is not only because avav has a wide functional range in Romani, but also because the cant was adopted by non-Roma speakers, and again it resembles developments in creoles.

p. 316. Even in Ottoman society, exclusively homosexual activity was marginalised; public displays of exclusively homosexual activity were limited to easily identified, marginalised manifestations, i.e. prostitution and transvestism, and marginalised groups such as the Roma would have been overrepresented among them—just as they were in other looked-down upon professions (blacksmiths, musicians). Both gay men and Roms are well known for their wit and “for their tendency to distort received language as a way to face the conventionalisms of society.”

In this post, I give two somewhat extensive texts in Kaliarda, that give a better flavour of the language than I’ve found elsewhere—even if they don’t date from the 1960s, let alone the 1920s.

The first is a 2013 pop song, Καλιαρντοσύνες “Kaliardadoms”, with lyrics by Giorgos Pavrianos, and sung by Betty Vakalidou; recall that Petropoulos had discussed Vakalidou’s use of Kaliarda in her 1979 autobiography. The video clip is online, and features naked luchadores. It is a Kaliarda text generated from within the community. And it has several words beyond Petropoulos’ dictionary.

The second is a skit from comedian Harry Klynn from the 1997 album The X Klynn Files, Ανάποδα, featuring a gay man complaining in Kaliarda about politicians. It’s clearly a text from outside the community; in fact its punchline features the one word Kaliarda speakers never used to describe themselves, pustis.

—What’s that guy saying?
—Weren’t you saying “Won’t some son of a bitch stand up and say what’s wrong with this country?” [In idiomatic Greek: “some faggot”]
—… Yeah?
—Well, that was the faggot.

Initially, I was impressed by Klynn’s skit, and unimpressed by Pavrianos’ song. After transliterating and glossing them, I’ve flipped on both. Pavrianos’ song is somewhat disjointed, and its chorus parrots the top five Kaliarda words; but it is clearly reflecting a real language, that was not exhausted by Petropoulos. Klynn’s skit, once I looked at it closely, cleaves a little too closely to the dictionary (the Greek people’s hunger is not religious fasting, for example), and there’s only a little morphological productivity on display.

I’m italicising the Kaliarda words in the following, and boldfacing the words not in Petropoulos. I’m putting in red the known Romani words, in blue the known French words, in green the Italian words; in purple the Turkish words; in brown the English words; in grey the words whose etymology is unknown. I’ve asterisked the words which are foreign but have come into Kaliarda phonologically unchanged via either Standard Greek, or Koutsavakika.

I owe the transcription of Kaliardosynes to a comment on Gay News In Greek:

[EDITED with corrections. In brackets, verses from the transcription not in the video; in curly brackets, verses from the video not in the transcription]

[Ανάλω] Αβέλω νταμίρα*
η ντάνα η μοίρα
τα μπουτ μου [αβέλει] μπενάβει κουλά
Αβέλω μια φούμα
βινάρω την ντούμα
κι αρχίζω σερσέ για τουλά

[Αβέλω κατόλια
που ντίκω τα τσόλια*
να έχουνε βγει πρεσαντέ
Αβέλω και ντέζι
μια λούγκρα με παίζει
μα νάκα αβέλει μπερντέ]

Αβέλω χαλχάλω
βουέλω να χάλω
κακνά της κακνής δικελτά
Αβέλω μπαλόμπα
και νάκα η μπόμπα
μονάχα τα μπουτ πιασμαντά

[Αβέλω τζους λέσι*
μια λάτσα μ’ αρέσει
κι αρχίζω με σικ το παρόλ
Αβέλω μια μόλα
και γίνομαι γκόλα
και δίνω παντού κοντροσόλ]

{Αβέλω και ντέζι
μια λάτσα με παίζει
μα νάκα αβέλει μπερντέ
Αβέλω μια μόλα
και γίνομαι γκόλα
κι αρχίζω με σικ το κονέ}

Αβέλεις-αβέλω
Βουέλεις-βουέλω
Βουέλουμε μπουτ μουσαντά*
Τζινάβεις-τζινάβω
μπενάβεις-μπενάβω
μπενάβουμε στα καλιαρντά

I smoke hashish
Fate that whore
tells me a lot of crap
I take a drag
I drink in the smoke
and I start [looking] for money

I cry
seeing scoundrels
go out on the beat
I get horny
A bitch/pretty girl plays with me
But she doesn’t have any money

I [am hungry?]
I want to eat
fried eggs
I eat too much
and no blowjob (?)
just a lot of groping

I clean up
I like a pretty girl
and I start gently [chatting her up/getting to know her]
I have a [drink]
and I get [drunk]
and I give kisses everywhere

You do, I do
You do, I do
We do a lot of lies
You understand, I understand
You speak, I speak
We speak in Kaliarda

Notes

analo:

from κατ-αναλ-ώνω “consume”?  But avelo is more plausible.

damira “hashish”:

Dura Liarda, from Koutsavakika, and the word features in old Rebetika songs. According to Donmhtsos at slang.gr, from Ottoman Turkish damır “thin”, and it was also used to refer to the hallucinogen datura stramonium “jimsonweed”

dana “whore”:

truncation of Standard Greek putana < Italian

ta but “the (neut.pl) very” as emphasis of “very”.

The use of the neuter plural article is a Kaliardaism that is not grammatical in Modern Greek—but it does correspond to Ancient (and Puristic) Greek τὰ μάλα.

avelo:

the omni-purpose verb appears both as avelo and as its Dura Liarda variant vuelo, and is used here both as a content verb (“I take a drag”, “she has money”, “I want to eat”, “I take a drink”) and as a light verb (“I do tears = cry”, “I do horniness = I am horny”, “I feel hungry”, “I feel full”, “I do away filth = I clean up”)

fuma

“drag (of cigarette, of hashish)”: truncation of Standard Greek fumaro “I smoke” < Italian

vinaro “to drink”

< Italian vino “wine”

duma “smoke”:

truncation of Standard Greek dumani “smoke” < Turkish

serse “looking” (?)

< French chercher “to seek”

tula “money”:

“Etymology unknown” [EDIT: Romani thulo “thick”, as a calque of Greek slang xontra referring to wads of cash]

katolia “tears”:

“Etymology unknown”

diko “see”

< Romani dikhel

tsoli “scoundrel”

< Standard Greek “mop” < Turkish çul

presante “on the beat”

< French presenter “to present”

dezi “desire, horniness”

< French desirer “to desire” or Italian desiderio “desire”

lugra “bitch”:

“Etymology unknown”

naka “not”:

“Etymology unknown” (Arvanitika nukë?) [EDIT: Romani na khan “not at all”]

berde “money”

< Standard Greek “stage curtains” < Turkish; Petropoulos suggests it is because money covers up everything? Montoliu gives the more plausible Romani parne “money”; there may have been a folk-etymology at work. [EDIT: actually, Lubunca belde < Turkish bedel “price, cost, fine”]

xalxalo:

presumably “hungry”, as reduplication of Romani xal “eat”

xalo: “eat”

< Romani xal “eat”

kakna tis kaknis ðikelta:

according to Petropoulos both kakna (neut.pl) and kakni (fem) mean “chicken”; but from context the neuter here means “egg”:

“eggs of a hen, eyes”, which is a calque of Standard Greek αυγά μάτια “egg eyes” = “fried eggs”. In Petropoulos, the expressions is tekna tis kaknis ðikelta, “children of a hen, eyes”, which makes more sense.

ðikelta: “eye”

< Kaliarda ðikelo “see” < Romani dikhel

baloba: “fatso”

< Kaliarda balos “fat” < Romani balo “pig”

bomba: “blow job”

< Kaliarda bombona “sweet” < French bon-bon

piasmanta: “groping(s)”

< Standard Greek pias- “to hold, to grab” + French -ment (nominaliser)

dzus: “away; without” <

Romani džav

lesi: “filth”

< Standard Greek “corpse” < Turkish leş; dzus-les- is productive in Kaliarda with the meaning “cleaning, beautifying”; hence dzus-les-latsaðiko “filth-away beauty shop = beauty parlour”

latsa: “beautiful”

< Romani lačho

me sik: “gently, politely” (lit. “with chic”)

< Standard Greek sik “chic, style” < French chic

parol:

from context, “chatting up” < French parole “speech”. The video has, I think, kone < French connaître “to get to know”

mola:

presumably variant of mol “drink” < Romani mol “wine”

gola:

listed in Petropoulos as Dura Liarda for “deaf”; but from context this is an inflected version of older mainstream slang indeclinable gol “drunk”. This literally means “(soccer) goal” < English goal, but has been derived from older gon < English gone

kontrosol “kiss”

< kontro “against” < Italian contra + sol “sweetness, pleasure”: “Etymology unknown”

musanda “fake”

< Standard Greek musi “goatee; bullshit” < French mouche

dzinavo “to understand”

< Romani džanav “to understand” + džinav “to count, to read”

benavo “to speak”

< Romani phenav

I owe the transcription of Klynn’s skit to the Zone-Memo blog; it’s more accurate than the transcription on YouTube, which is genuinely confused, but I’ve still intervened in places to normalise the text to match Petropoulos.

Κυρίες και κύριοι, σας αβέλω λατσαβαλέ. Αβρακιάζομαι η κουρκουζελού, γιατί δικέλω όλες τις ζουγκλολουμπίνες, τις λούγκρες, τους γκραν τζαζμπερτεροπουρούς και θεόμπαρα που γοργοτζολιάζουν θρονιασμένοι παραντίκ στο Γκραικοκάθικο, να έχουν αρπάξει την ζουμοσακούλα και ν’ αβέλουν μπαλόμπα και καλιαρντά χαλέματα. Ενώ ο λαός, λιγδομπερντές δικελοσβουριασμένος, ατζινάβωτος και αναιμιάρης συνεχώς στο ανεμοτζάσιμο και στη γκοντάχαλη, αβέλει διακόνα στο μπερντέ και έχει πέσει στην αχαλού και στο γυροδιακονάρισμα.
Σας αβέλω μπακαλούμω, να πρεσάρουμε* και να αβέλουμε κόντρα τέμπο σε όλους τους κατέδες που τζεβέλουν κουσελιά στα όνειρα μας, και νάκα αβέλουμε τούφες.* Και αφήνομε τις βιδομπλαντορούφες να μας πίνουνε το μπλάντυ. Μόνο έτσι θα γλιτώσει η μπαξ-και-λατσή μουτζόπουρη Ελλάδα. Αλλιώς μας δικέλω να τζάμε τα τιραχά και να αδικοκουτιαζόμαστε. Αβέλτε μου κανά γαργαρογλασόνι, άφρισα η μπλούκρω! Ούψα και στο λατσοδίκελμα!

Ladies and gentlemen, I bid you welcome. This slut is outraged, because I see all the disgraceful gays, the bitches, the grand philanthropists and the fat men stink as they’ve enthroned themselves next to Athens, grabbing the spoon and gorging themselves and eating bizarre food. While the people, penniless and dizzy, innocent and confused, are left in sacrifice and fasting, are out begging for money, and have ended up in hunger and begging. I ask of you that we should pressure all those who wish to betray our dreams, so that we can’t sleep, but let those leeches drink our blood. That’s the only way that Mother Greece can be saved once and for all. Otherwise, I see us dying and in coffins. (Get me a soft drink, I’m so thirsty I’m foaming at the mouth!) Goodbye, and see you soon!

Notes

latsavale: “beautiful-doing” = “welcome”.

In Petropoulos λατσάβελες (pl.); this variant uses the pseudo-French suffix -é.

avrakiazomai: “I am outraged”

< a- “un” + vraki “underwear” < Latin bracca: a calque of the Standard Greek expression for being outraged, βγαίνω από τα ρούχα μου “I come out of my clothes”

kurkuledzu: “slut” (πουτανιάρα).

“Etymology unknown”. On the recording, kurkuzelu

ðikelo: “to see”.

< Romani dikhel

zuɡlolubines: “disgraceful gays”.

< Greek zuɡla “jungle” + Romani lubhni “whore”

luɡres: “bitches”

“Etymology unknown”

ɡran dzazberteropurus: “grand philanthropists”.

Italian gran “big” + Kaliarda dzazo “to drive away, to throw away” < Romani džav + Kaliarda berde “money” < Romani parne + Kaliarda puros “old man” < Romani phuro

θeobara: “extremely fat”

< Greek θeo- “God” as intensifying prefix + Romani pharo “heavy”

ɣorɣodzoliazun: “stink”.

< Gorgonzola cheese

paradik: “next door to”.

< Greek para “next to” + Romani dikhel “to see” (i.e. facing)

ɡrekokaθiko: “Athens”, lit. “The Chamberpot of Greece”

< Italian greco “Greek” + Greek kaθiki “chamber pot”, so called because all of Greece has ended up in Athens, and because geographically Athens is situated in a basin

zumosakula: “spoon”

< Greek zumi “broth” + Greek sakula “bag”

avelo balomba: “to gorge oneself”

< Kaliarda balomba “fatso” < Kaliarda balo “fat” < Romani balo “pig”

kaliarda: “bizarre”

Literal use of kaliardos “ugly, evil, strange” < Romani kaljardo “blackened”

xalemata: “food”

< Kaliarda xalo “to eat” < Romani xal “to eat”

liɣðoberdes: “penniless”

< Standard Greek liɣða “stain” + Romani parne “money”

ðikelosvuriasmenos: “dizzy”

< Kaliarda ðikelo “see” < Romani dikhel + Greek svura “spinning top”

adzinavotos: “innocent”

< Greek a- “un-” + Kaliarda dzinavo “understand” < Romani džanav “to understand” + džinav “to count, to read”

anemiaris: “dizzy”

lit. “bloodless”

anemodzasimo: “sacrifice, work in vain”

Standard Greek anemos “wind” + Kaliarda dzazo “drive out, throw away” < Romani džav (so: throwing something to the winds)

godaxali: “(religious) fasting”

English God + Greek a- “un-” + Kaliarda xalo “eat” < Romani xal

ðiakona: “begging”

Truncation of Formal Standard Greek ðiakonia; avelo ðiakona sto berde “go begging for money” is a fixed Kaliarda expression

axalu “famine”

< Greek a- “un-” + Kaliarda xalo “eat” < Romani xal

ɣiroðiakonarisma “begging”

< Greek ɣiro “(going) around” + Formal Standard Greek ðiakonia “begging”

bakalumo “request”

< Turkish bakalum “we’ll see”

presaro “to press, to pressure”

< Standard Greek “to press on a laundry press; metaphorical: to pressure” < Italian pressare

kontra tempo “pressure”

< Italian contra “against” + Italian tempo “time”

kates “that one”

< Romani kathe “here”

dzevelun “to want”

< Kaliarda avelo < Romani avil

kuselia “betrayal”

“Etymology unknown”

naka “not”:

“Etymology unknown” (Arvanitika nukë?)

tufes “deep sleep”:

Possibly Italian tuffo “diving”, word shared with Kutsavakika

viðobladorufes “leeches”:

Standard Greek viða “screw” + Kaliarda English bladi < English bloody + Standard Greek rufo “to suck”

bladi “blood”:

< English bloody

baks ke latsi “once and for all”:

Calque of Standard Greek mia ke kali lit. “once and good”; baks < Puristic Greek apaks “once” < Ancient Greek hápax; latsi “beautiful” < Romani lačho

mudzopuri “mother”:

lit. “cunt old-woman” (i.e. old woman who gave birth) < Kaliarda mudzo < Romani mindž “vagina” + Kaliarda puros < Romani phuro “old”

dzazo ta tiraxa “die”:

lit. “fling off shoes = kick the bucket”, calque of Standard Greek idiom τινάζω τα πέταλα “fling off one’s horseshoes” < Romani džav + Romani tiraxo

aðikokutiazomaste “be buried”:

< Kaliarda aðikokuti “coffin” < Standard Greek “box of injustice” (from the notion of death being unjust: cf. Standard Greek idiom αδικοχαμένος “unjustly lost = dearly departed”)

ɣarɣaroɡlasoni “cold soft drink”:

Standard Greek ɣarɣara “gargle” + Kaliarda ɡlasoni “ice” < French glaçon

blukro “thirsty woman”:

Not in Petropoulos’ dictionary; < Kaliarda blukru “thirst”, which Petropoulos believes is onomatopoeic

upsa “salutation; hi!”:

“Etymology unknown”; cf. English woopsie!

latsodikelma “seeing again”:

(used in farewells, as calque of Greek επανιδείν, which is a calque in turn of French revoir and German Wiedersehen); lit. “good seeing” < Kaliarda latso < Romani lačho + Kaliarda ðikelo “to see” < Romani dikhel

I have found a copy of Montoliu’s paper on Kaliarda.⁹ I will post on it separately, but I’m going to use the opportunity to supplement the Romani etymologies provided by Poniroskilo on slang.gr, with the extensive etymologies provided by Montoliu. Where a term appears in both Poniroskilo and Montoliu, I have gone with Poniroskilo’s transliteration (taken from ROMLEX), and I have attempted to normalise the transliteration to ROMLEX.

The Dortika are from (UPDATED) Triantafyllidis, M. 1924. 7. Eine zigeunerisch-griechische Geheimsprache. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschungen 52: 1–40. Reprinted in Άπαντα [Collected Works]: 2: 46–85.

NOTE: I will be updating this listing as I discover more Romani words. Montoliu counts 52 roots. I have 44 (though one, mataˈlo, would have been unknown to Montoliu, and one, parniˈes, replaces berˈde which he erroneously derived from Romani—it is Turkish via cant metathesis.)

NOTE: The words develo ~ dzevelo “to desire”, dapavelo “to surrender” are clearly also Romani, but I have been unable to date to work out their etymology. (dapavelo looks like the causative tapavel “he makes someone beat someone up”)