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What do you know about Nikos Skalkottas?
OP, making Michael Masiello PM question to me a public message. Because Sharing and Growing the World’s Knowledge.
Well of course, Nikos Skalkottas – Wikipedia. But let me not look up questions.
Greek composer. Disciple and in fact pupil of Schönberg. Had a measly gig as a second violin in an Athens orchestra, and did not live long. Not widely known in or outside Greece.
I’ve tried, very half-heartedly, to listen to one or two of his large scale orchestral compositions, and I can’t. I don’t grok the language of dodecaphony in big doses, and I don’t find enough rewards to make it worth my time.
(I deeply love Berg’s Violin Concerto, but Berg’s Violin Concerto utterly undermines dodecaphony, by using the most tonal tone row possible. Joachim Pense, I think that’s why you didn’t think much of it: if you wanted tonal music, you know where to find it. It helped that I studied the Violin Concerto in music literature, in high school.)
There are two batches of pieces by Skalkottas that I love.
The 36 Greek Dances, I’m sure, are pieces he hated. They are old school romantic nationalist set pieces. They’re what the mob wanted. But I’m sorry, they are brilliantly, and at times subversively orchestrated.
It helps if you recognise the originals, as I do: he often goes deliberately against the tenor of the original. His Tsamikos, a setting of Ένας αϊτός καθότανε An Eagle Sat, is claustrophobic, not heroic. His final dance is a demonic tarantella; it’s originally a lullaby. His Syrtos is a revelation: what do you get if you combine Greek Middle-Easternish melismata with a Germanic Oompah bass? Klezmer!
For a very long time, the original full-orchestra versions were not widely available: you could only get 5 of the 36 in string arrangements. Not finding the 36 on YouTube; the recording companies have been assiduous.
The second batch are in a tape I got 20 years ago, of piano pieces. Miniatures, dodecaphonic, but witty, expressive, and digestible. Michael said they’re said to be sprightly; yeah, I think that’s a good call. And if I’m saying that, that means they’re really good. I haven’t heard (yet) the 32 Pieces that Michael is practicing. The tape had Suite #3, Suite #4, and the 15 Variations.
They’re that good, Michael. I need some working music today, and haven’t played these for a while. (Tape, after all.) Thank you.
Is it possible to have a Greek-Turkish Confederation in the future?
You know how people put A2A at the top of their answers, because they like the asker, but are ambivalent about the question?
Sofia, if we ever meet up for coffee in Oakleigh (you’re a Greek in Melbourne, you probably live inside an Eaton Mall patisserie), I will be asking you: WHY YOU ASK ME IF CONFEDERATION!
Greece is already in a confederation, and has been in one since 1981. That hasn’t worked out wonderfully lately; and that was an identity that Greeks actually invested in. To a heart-breaking extent.
What Serdar said. The rapprochement Greeks and Turks have had since ’99 has been a wonderful thing. I’m deeply grateful for it. But you know, we have a saying in Greek.
And knowing how things work in our part of the world, there is probably an identical saying in Turkish.
Μακριά μακριά κι αγαπημένοι. Distant, distant, and [therefore] loving each other.
Greeks ruled by Erntoghan?! Turks ruled by Çipras?!
That would end the rapprochement pretty quickly.
(… although, then again: Turks ruled by Erdoğan?! Greeks ruled by Τσίπρας?!)
How did the word “gaster” come to mean “stomach” in Greek?
You mean, there’s a story there?
(Checks Frisk.)
Hm. Looks like there’s a story there.
gastēr “belly” is likely derived from *grastēr, “something that does graō”. Graō in turn is a really, really obscure word for “gnaw, eat”, that shows up once in Callimachus, and that also turns up in Ancient Cypriot, which was an archaic dialect. So, gastēr is “eater”. This verb graō is apparently cognate with Old Indic grásate “eat, devour”.
There is an equivalent word to gastēr in Old Indic: grastar-. It’s an astronomical term, referring to eclipses; the moon, I guess, is described as devouring the sun.
So, if you ever see this Halloween costume:
—the Vedas had the same idea.
I saw a marginal note in Frisk that threw me btw.
Gastēr has not survived in Modern Greek. The related verb engastroō ‘to make something be in a belly’ is alive and well as gastrono, the colloquial word for ‘impregnate’.
But a millenium after Greeks decided to take the r out of *grastēr, they decided to put an r back into the same spot. Language change is random like that. Gastra, a word meaning “a belly-shaped container, a container with a swelling in the middle”, went to *grastra > ɣlastra. Which is the modern word for a flowerpot.
Or by extension, a model paid to look decorative on a TV show.
I don’t know whether that extends further, to maternity wear models.
How does IPA keep up with the constant change of sounds in the languages?
Several ways to tackle this question. And it’s a very good question.
Both consonants and vowels in the IPA are defined, not against a word of a language (they can indeed change), but against an articulatory gesture. Because people’s oral cavities are pretty much the same, that works. [ç] is defined as a Voiceless palatal fricative, not as the <ch> in German ich (Which dialect of German?), or as the χ in Greek όχι (Which dialect of Greek? Which period, for that matter?)
For vowels, it’s only slightly more complicated. There is indeed a continuum of articulation, of where you place your tongue in your oral cavity, to produce vowels. But:
- There are eight reference vowels, the Cardinal vowels, which are defined through articulatory gestures as signposts for the rest of the IPA vowels;
- There is an articulatory space defined for vowels —
- —but the two dimensions of the space can actually be plotted precisely based on the formants of the vowel—the first and second peak of the vowel sound in a spectrogram. See Vowel diagram. So you can run a spectrogram on vowels, and get a precise plot of vowels like this:
—the classic vowel trapezium plots F1 against F2–F1.
In any case, the IPA is not intended for a precise plot on the trapezium. It’s intended for a close enough area of the mouth, that sounds the same to listeners as other speakers’ vowels, and that sounds different to other vowels of the same language. Two speakers’ vowels are not going to plot to exactly the same place. The IPA is used for linguistic transcription, which is based on contrast; it is not intended to substitute a spectrogram.
So if people start pronouncing cat slightly differently, but it’s still in the general area of [æ], few linguists are going to care. Particularly if the [æ] is still nowhere near the [ɑ] or [ɐ] or [a] of that dialect of English. If it does, why, we’ll relabel it to the other area of the vowel chart that it’s moved to. /kʰæt/ used to be /kʰat/ (and still is in some dialects of English).
If you’re one of the few linguists that do care, you’re not looking at the IPA anyway. You’re looking directly at the spectrograms.
You’ll see that the IPA vowel chart allows 7 degrees of height, and 3 degrees of backness; diacritics allow both to be tripled. The 7 degrees of height is new-fangled, and I’m not sure whether symbols like Close-mid central unrounded vowel [ɘ] have really been used seriously. Even with the diacritics ̟ ̱ ̝ ̞ , I doubt most transcriptions have ever bothered with more than four degrees of height.
So the IPA doesn’t need to make more symbols to keep up: it’s got an oversupply if anything. (The Labiodental flap symbol /ⱱ/ is the first new IPA consonant in decades.) You just make sure the definitions of the symbols are independent of words in any one language.
What’s the most recent song you’ve cried to?
My close followers will have noted a bunch of posts lately on Greek songs that move me. This is another one.
What have I done to you, to make you smoke. 1968. Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos. Music: Mimis Plessas.
stixoi.info: Τι σου `κανα και πίνεις
The lyrics are nowhere near as indirect and allusive as some I’ve posted. It’s a torch song that first appeared in a movie, after all, not part of a concept album. And its language is visceral. Too visceral in fact for me to do justice to it in English. Not “smoke”, but “drink cigarettes” (idiomatic in Greek). Not “stare at the floor”, but “your eyes are nails on the floor”. Not “my heart breaks”, but “my insides spasm”.
And the music is a dignified, steady, impassioned lament.
I’m crying again.
What have I done to you, to make you smoke cigarette after cigarette,
and your bitter eyes be nailed to the floor?
Tell me, why won’t you let me, with two kisses,
take away the dark cloud from your murky eyes?
The pains that stab you are double pains for me,
the tears you cry are dripping into my heart.
If you only knew how my insides spasm for you,
standing so far from me and speaking not a word.
My wordless mouth, my extinguished moon,
I curse the hour and the fateful moment.
I’ll give up everything for you, everything: I’ll die,
just so no sigh will ever touch you again.
What is meant by projection problem in semantics?
Presupposition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
http://eecoppock.info/Presupposi…
Simple clauses have presuppositions. For example, The current king of France is bald presupposes that there is a current king of France.
If you do various things to a clause, like negate it, question it, or say it’s unlikely, the claim of the clause is no longer affirmed. But the presupposition still remains intact. So I can negate The current king of France is bald, and say that The current king of France is not bald at all.
But the presupposition that there is a current king of France still survives. That’s called projection of the presupposition. If X +> Y (X presupposes Y), then Not X +> Y. You need to say something different to the clause, to say “that doesn’t make sense, there is no current king of France”.
Some combinations of clauses do not project: not all the presuppositions survive. Working out how and why is the projection problem. For example:
If there is a knave, then the knave stole the tarts.
There is a knave +> … There is a knave.
If there is a knave, then the knave stole the tarts +> There is a knave? Obviously not: the presupposition of a hypothesis can’t be projected, precisely because it is a hypothesis.
The conditions under which projection happens are messy, and it’s 11:15 pm, so you can go to the links to work out what the debate is about.
What are some great threats one can make?
NSFW, and rather instructive in attitudes towards anal sex as punishment.
There was a threat made by Georgios Karaiskakis, the foul mouthed general of the Greek War of Independence, that I’ve just discovered. It has a kind of magnificent menace to it.
For it to even be intelligible in English, I have to cite from Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some weird expressions?
Θα μου κλάσεις τ’ αρχίδια. “You will fart on my balls.” The meaning of this is: your threats to me are meaningless, as I am in a position of complete dominance over you.
A particular positioning of bodies is presupposed by this adage, as an expression of traditional male dominance (stereotypically associated with Greeks by non-Greeks, and with Ottomans by Greeks themselves). In such a positioning of bodies, the phrase content would be a plausible if impotent expression of repudiation of such dominance.
That oblique enough for you?
Good. Because in this answer, I won’t be so oblique.
Karaiskakis sent once a message of defiance to the foe. His message of defiance can be paraphrased nobly and decorously, as something like, I don’t know,
“If I should live, then shall they fear my wrath.
If I should die, why should I care a whit?”
But Karaiskakis was not a decorous kind of guy.
What he actually demanded his scribe write down is:
Αν ζήσω, θα τους γαμήσω.
Αν πεθάνω, θα μου κλάσουν τον πούτσον.
Ready?
Remember: this is the notion of anal sex among heterosexuals as punishment. As seen in prison stereotypes.
“If I live, I will fuck them [in the ass].
If I die, they can fart on my dick.”
The primary meaning of “they can fart on my dick” is “I don’t give a shit about them, they can’t do anything to hurt me anymore.”
But it is the “I don’t give a shit” of magnificent indifference, of someone who is already fucking you in the ass as punishment.
WHILE DEAD.
So the worst you can do to them is fart on their dick.
It’s repulsive. It’s homophobic. It’s brutal.
But you gotta admit. It has a certain crude effectiveness.
How do linguists view programming languages?
Read Logan R. Kearsley’s answer to How do linguists view programming languages? Vote #1 Logan R. Kearsley.
What he said.
Supplemental:
At very very most, a linguist programmer will see YACC rules specifying a programming language’s syntax, and think “Oh, how cute. Kinda like phrase structure rules, but ludicrously simpler.”
Or, look at the three flavours of semantics of computer languages, procedural, denotational and axiomatic, and find hilarity in their mismatch to human language semantics. It’s almost like the semantics of computer languages is modelling nothing more than the narrow concerns of a Turing machine’s universe.
Oh wait…
If a linguist gets to either YACC or axiomatic semantics, btw, he’s delving a lot deeper into actual Computer Science than any programmer under 40 that I’ve met.
Vote #1 Logan R. Kearsley.
Why is the communist symbol (☭) an emoji?
There are two problematic premises in this question.
The first is that the primary semiotic of the hammer and sickle is “mass random murder of dissidents”, rather than “common ownership of the means of production”. The legacy of Communism may have been tainted by what Lenin and Stalin did; but that does not make the hammer and sickle a hate symbol banned the world over. In some Eastern European countries, at most (Hammer and sickle – Wikipedia). And there are still plenty of Communist parties left in the world.
The second is that this is an emoji. As in, cutesy symbol intended for SMS use, promulgated by mobile phone manufacturers in Japan because they got lazy about rich text encoding, and sanctioned by the Unicode Consortium in a move that I will never ever forgive them for.
But the Hammer and Sickle symbol is not an emoji. It was not brought in by phone manufacturers, and it was not intended for Communist member parties to send cutesy messages to each other.
The Hammer and Sickle, U+262D, belongs to the Unicode Miscellaneous Symbols block. You can discern why it is there, by looking at its immediate neighbours:
☠☡☢☤☥☦☧☨☩☪☫☬☭☮☯ (U+2630 through U+263F)
Five medical/hazard symbols, followed by eight religious symbols, followed by the Hammer and Sickle, the Peace Sign, and the Yin Yang symbol. These are various symbols of creeds and ideologies that have been prominent in recent years. The Hammer and Sickle belongs there for the same reason the Peace Sign belongs there. And the Peace Sign is not there as an endorsement of nuclear disarmament.
Although I note with merriment (Peace symbols – Wikipedia) that the South African government tried to ban the Peace Sign in 1973, because it was used by opponents of apartheid.
What are your favourite lyrics?
It’s a self indulgent answer, but then again, it’s a self indulgent question.
The Greek laiko tradition (bouzouki pop) came from the Greek rebetiko tradition (bouzouki blues). The rebetiko tradition was singer-songwriters, often in jail, singing about getting high or my woman done me wrong. At its best (and that certainly includes Vamvakaris), the lyrics are incandescent. But they’re still singer-songwriter lyrics.
Laiko typically has seperate lyricists. The lyricists are often bona fide poets. And you can tell.
Two songs. The first is a bona fide pop song, that most Greeks will get up and dance a stern zeibekiko to. Bear that in mind. Lyrics: Alkis Alkeos Άλκης Αλκαίος. Music: Thanos Mikroutsikos. Singer: Dimitris Mitropanos.
Rosa. 1996. stixoi.info: Ρόζα For length, I’ll just give my translation here.
My lips, parched and thirsty,
seek water on the asphalt.
Trucks go past me,
and you tell me there’s a downpour coming
and drag me into a damp cabaret.
We’re pacing together on the same road,
but our cells are separate.
We wander through a magical city.
I don’t want to know what we’re looking for anymore,
as long as you’ll grant me two kisses.
You gamble me on the roulette wheel, and lose me
in a nightmarish fairy tale.
My voice is now an insect’s voice.
My life is a climbing vine:
you cut me down and throw me into the abyss.
How need turns into history!
How history turns into silence!
Why do you look at me, Rosa, so numb?
Forgive me for not understanding
what the computers and the numbers are saying.
My love made of coal and sulfur,
look how time has changed you!
Trucks pass over us,
and I, in the fog and downpour,
sleep starving by your side.
RIP, Alkis Alkeos. RIP, Teacher Dimitris.
The second is from an even more poetry-ridden source, the songs that came out towards the end of the Greek Dictatorship (1967–74). It was a time when censorship encouraged you to be obscure; and even if you weren’t alluding to politics, the population was inclined to read it in anyway.
The lyricist and poet is Manos Eleftheriou, Μάνος Ελευθερίου. I’ve already cited his Birds of the Netherworld in Which poem or song best represents Greece in your opinion?
Music: Yannis Markopoulos. First performance (and there have been many): the Cretan folk singer Charalampos Garganourakis (Μπάμπης (Χαράλαμπος) Γαργανουράκης βιογραφικό)
The Lost Words and Years. 1974. stixoi.info: Τα λόγια και τα χρόνια
The lost words and years,
and the sorrows covered by smoke—
Exile has found them reconciled as brothers.
The sudden joys that have come to me
were lightning in a black forest,
as were the thoughts I dared have about you.
And I speak to you in courtyards and balconies,
and God’s lost gardens.
And I keep thinking that the nightingales are coming,
together with the lost words and years,
everywhere where you used to be,
and now in the cold and snow.
Fate and the Season had set it down
that I should cast a line out in this world,
and that the night should turn a thousand years.
That he should sing at the end of the feast,
he who has known no kin,
and knock on the door of sorrow.
They were no stopped clock
in a ruined deserted household,
those roads that have led me out to wait.
The words I do not know, I bind them for you
with the people who have witnessed the evil,
and have it embroidered against their name.
He who sows tears and pain
reaps the ocean at dawn.
Black birds show him the way.
And he has a drawing near his shoulder,
a secret, fateful sign
that he has escaped Hades and the World.
There’s more than a few Greeks scratching their heads now. That’s not the lyrics they know.
Indeed they aren’t. The song came out after the Athens Polytechnic uprising, in 1973, when the tanks rolled in and crushed the protesters. People assumed that’s what Eleftheriou was alluding to, and the lyrics were tweaked to make the allusion slightly more explicit.
The sensibility of the verse was not cheapened.
He who sows tears and pain
reaps death at dawn.
Black birds show him the way.
And he has a wound near his shoulder,
a secret, fateful sign
that he has escaped Men and the Law.
Fate and the Season had set it down,
Friday night at nine,
that the night should turn a thousand years.
That he should sing at the end of the feast,
Friday the Killer’s night,
and knock on the door of the people.
Here’s Garganourakis, singing the new lyrics, 40 years on.