Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

God bless Khateeb, he’s actually asking me what I found in my PhD. Without me bribing him. And I’ve forgotten to reupload my thesis; Khateeb, remind me to do it if I haven’t done it in the next week.

There will be some jargon here, but I’ll try to keep it high level.

που (< ὅπου “where”) is a relative conjunction (I saw the guy that came here). It can also be used in Standard Greek to introduce some clausal complements, but not all (I am happy that you came, but not I hope that you came. I hear you walking, but not I heard that you walked. You walked in—I already knew that, but not I know that you walked in.) And especially in older vernacular Greek, it was a catch-all conjunction in general: it could be used to mean “when”, “because”, “although”, etc.

If any classicists are reading this: its range of functions is pretty similar to those of the Ancient participle.

The unifying principle seems to be that whatever clause it introduces is taken as given, in some sense. (Some very slippery, hard to express sense.) It is true and real in the world, or it is presupposed, or it is phrased as if it is presupposed.

• Τhere’s a wonderful exception in “the hell I did!”-type statements, where the speaker is making fun of the claim being presupposed by someone else: βρε άει στο διάολο που πήγα. Nicholas, N. 2005. pu-based Greek Rude Negators. Journal of Greek Linguistics 6. 103-150; http://www.opoudjis.net/Work/xez…

What’s the diversity in dialect? High level:

• Lots and lots of dialects have generalised the complement use to all real complements: they can use it to say “I heard that you walked” or “I know that you walked”. Constantinople dialect is the best known one; see http://www.opoudjis.net/Work/com…. There’s no obvious connection between the dialects, and I think it’s just independent drift: it’s the kind of construction that would generalise anyway.
• For the conjunction use, the dialects generally align, but the mainland dialects align much more closely than the island dialects do. Some island dialects do strange things with που as a conjunction, especially moving it away from given clauses, to more hypothetical clauses (e.g. “whenever”).

My irresponsible hypothesis on the latter: mainland dialects are more homogeneous grammatically, because of unimpeded communication between regions and bilingualism: analogy was more pervasive in levelling out eccentric developments, and promoting internal consistency (που always referring to given situations, etc). The islands are more eccentric linguistically in general (including more archaic): they are more isolated, and have not had any bilingualism. So they had less pressure to level out eccentricities.

Let’s take the Greek State as 1832, when it had fixed boundaries.

I’m also going to use the pre-2010 Prefectures of Greece to break down the area of the new State.

We know that Arvanitika was spoken widely in the new Greek state. We know that many who fought in the War of Independence were monolingual Albanian speakers, who could not understand the instructions of Greek commanders.

15 of the 2010 prefectures were part of the new State. Of these:

• Arvanitika was the most widely spoken in Attica, Boeotia, Corinthia, and the Argolid, and the southern half of Euboea.
• As far as I know, it was all of Boeotia, most of Attica (Greek was limited to Athens, Aegina and Megara), most of Corinthia, and the eastern half of the Argolid.
• Arvanitika was a minority language in Messenia, Achaea, Arcadia, Laconia, and the Cyclades. Per Arvanitika – Wikipedia, not Elis.
• That leaves, by my guess, just 5 prefectures out of 15 where Arvanitika was not spoken: Phthiotis, Phocis, Eurytania, Aetolia & Acarnania, Elis.

Arvanitika and Greek were the major languages of the new State. I’m not aware of any Ladino: Jews in southern Greece spoke Greek. Not aware of any Slavonic spoken there since the Middle Ages. There would have been some Romany and Turkish spoken. There is a pocket of Aromanian spoken in Acarnania, per Aromanian language – Wikipedia.

I don’t have population numbers handy, and I don’t know if anyone does. Going by geography, Arvanitika was not the majority language, but it could easily have been spoken by a quarter of the population.

There’s a substantial number of Italian loanwords in Modern Greek. Many of those loanwords are specifically from Venetian, rather than Tuscan Italian, because a large part of Greece was under Venetian rule for centuries. (And a large number of Greek islands were ruled by other Northern Italian republics.) Italian was also the language through which Greece was exposed to the West for centuries. Lexicography does not differentiate Venetian and Italian consistently.

The post Ιταλικές και βενετσιάνικες λέξεις στα ελληνικά at the lexilogia forum links to 891 headwords listed as Venetian in the Triantafyllidis dictionary, and 2468 as Italian (out of 47,000 entries.) The post is wrong, because the search they link to also retrieves entries from Kriaras’ Early Modern Greek dictionary, hosted at the same site; but the number is substantial, and I agree that most Modern Greek loanwords are from Italian and Venetian.

As a sampler, this PDF: http://www.greek-language.gr/gre…, a guide for teachers of Greek as a Foreign Language, gives the following examples of “Italian” loans:

αντένα, βάρκα, βελούδο, βεντέτα, βίζιτα, βίλα, βιολί, βόλτα, γάντι, γάτα, γούστο, κάλτσα, κανάλι, καπετάνιος, καπρίτσιο, κάρβουνο, καρέκλα, κάσα, κασετίνα, κόλπο, κομπόστα, κόστος, κότερο, κουβέρτα, κούνια, λάμπα, μπάνιο, μπαρκάρω, μπαστούνι, μπότα, μπουκάλι, μπουρίνι, μπράτσο, όπερα, παντελόνι, πατάτα, πόζα, ράτσα, ρεντίκολο, ρόδα, σαλάμι, σβέλτος, σερβίρω, σκούρος, σούπα, σπίρτο, στάμπα, τενόρος, τραμουντάνα, φουρτούνα.

antena, varka, veluðo, vendeta, vizita, vila, violi, volta, ɣanti, ɣata, ɣusto, kaltsa, kanali, kapetanios, kapritsio, karvuno, karekla, kasa, kasetina, kolpo, komposta, kostos, kotero, kuverta, kunia, lampa, banio, barkaro, bastuni, bota, bukali, burini, bratso, opera, panteloni, patata, poza, ratsa, redikolo, roða, salami, sveltos, serviro, skuros, supa, spirto, stampa, tenoros, tramuntana, furtuna.

antenna, boat, velvet, feud, visit (esp. to a doctor or prostitute), villa, violin, stroll, glove, cat, good taste, sock, channel, captain, caprice, coal, chair, trunk, pencil case, trick, fruit preserve, cost, yacht, blanket, cradle, lamp, bath, embark, cane, boot, bottle, squall, arm, opera, pants, potato, pose, race, figure of ridicule, wheel, salami, swift, serve food, dark, soup, matchstick or spirits, stamp, tenor, north wind, storm.