Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

Welcome to Exarchia:

But lets take a look and see if we can discover the truth. What is Exarchia? Is it right to portray the area as an evil den of anarchists and criminals living in a neighborhood that is beyond the law, something like the town of Deadwood in the HBO series? Actually it is more like a college town within the city of Athens, similar to the East Village of New York BG (Before Guiliani). Exarchia sits between the University of Athens and the Politechnion and is home to students, immigrants, Greek families of different economic strata, restaurants, cafes, computer shops, used vinyl and CD shops, terrific guitar shops, used bookshops, boutiques, clubs, bars, anarchists, drug addicts, stray dogs and just about every kind of person, except cops.

The police don’t really go to Exarchia except in extreme situations because for them just to enter the neighborhood creates trouble. So on many weekends in downtown Athens you will see police and soldiers stationed strategically on corners around Exarchia, not to keep people out, but to keep large groups of anarchists or troublemakers in. Of course when you have an area of rock clubs, cafes and restaurants in a sort of cop-free zone it attracts young people, many of high school age, and other counter-culture types. This creates something of a scene, where you can go for your nighttime entertainment never sure of what is going to happen.

A week or so ago, an anonymous group smashed the windows of a butcher trading in Exarchia, and proclaimed that they were striking a blow for αντισπισισμός. Leaving a bunch of Greeks wondering, what the hell antispisismos was.

That was not the first time the butcher’s windows were smashed. It had happened before in 2012, and proudly announced on Athens’ Indymedia. What ensued was a fascinating debate between a minority of anarchists, sympathetic to the action, and a majority of anarchists, who condemned it as destroying their relations with the local community, and a mere ουγκανιά rather than coherent revolutionary action.

Several times:

Άμα δεν ήταν κάποιου φασίστα το μαγαζί ή έστω αλυσίδα κρεοπολίο είναι τελείως fail ενέργεια και ουγκανίστικη..

If the shop did not belong to a fascist, or was at a minimum a butcher chain shop, the action is a complete fail and ouganistic

συνηθως αντιμτωπιζω με ψυχραιμια κ λογικη ακομα κ την χειροτερη μορφη ουγκανιας που γινεται στο ονομα της αναρχιας, αλλα τετοια μαλακια παει πολυ.

I am usually calm and rational about even the worst forms of ougania carried out in the name of anarchy, but this bullshit has gone too far.

Δημόσιες σχέσεις? Η αντίληψη περί μαζικότητας της εξεγερτικής, επαναστατικής διαδικασίας, μάλλον δε σου λέει τίποτα. Και το ότι ο κόσμος έχασε τη δουλειά του είναι αποτέλεσμα του καπιταλισμού, το ότι ο συγκεκριμένος είχε θέμα είναι αποτέλεσμα της ουγκανιάς. Και αυτοί οι 18 άνθρωποι τώρα μπορεί σκέφτονται, σιγά μην πάω στο ΣΩ.ΒΑ. ανέργων με τα ούγκανα που σπάνε τον κυρ Τάδε. Αναχώματα για την ανάπτυξη της ταξικής συνείδησης λοιπόν τέτοιες δράσεις, καθώς δεν είναι η ταξικότητα που μας έφαγε αλλά η παντελής έλλειψη συγκρότησης και η επικράτηση της ουγκανίλας.

What about public relations? The notion of mass engagement in an insurgent revolutionary process doesn’t seem to mean anything to you. And people losing their jobs is a result of capitalism; the fact that this person in particular has a problem, though, is a result of ougania. And now those 18 [unemployed] might well think, “right, as if I’m going to go to the Organisation for Support of the Unemployed with those ougana (neuter plural) who smashed up Mr So-and-So’s joint.” Such actions, then, are levees against the development of a class conscience: it’s not class that’s defeating us, but a complete lack of coherence and the prevalence of ouganila.

(I was even more intrigued by the responses of the action’s defenders, dismissing class concern for the ελληναράς [Greek chauvinist] Working Man eating souvlaki and sausage. Revolutionaries dismissing the proletariat. Like the majority anarchists said: we’re not fighting the same cause you are…)

Now, I recognise the suffix of ouganiá alright, as my favourite Greek slang suffix, which I have already written about at length: originally Mediaeval Greek -έα, denoting a blow or strike with a weapon (e.g. λαντζουνέα “blow with a lance”, σπαθέα “blow with a sword”), it has ended up meaning a bad action or activity characteristic of someone or something. A suitable English equivalent is -ry, as in bastardry. So an ouganiá is an activity characteristic of an ouganos.

And the ouganos has been quite productive in the condemnation by mainstream anarchists (if I can use the term). ouganism and ouganistic actions; the neuter plural ougana as an even more dismissive reference to the ouganos; ouganila as an even more derogatory variant of ouganiá, using the suffix associated with a stench.

And what’s an ούγκανος to begin with? As ever, the answer lies in slang.gr; but see if you can work it out from context.

Έλεος πια με την ουγκανιά τύπου κρέας κακό,ουγκ.Μηδενιστικός αντισπισισμός, το είδαμε κι αυτό.Έτσι να ξέρετε δεν προοθείται ούτε ο κοινωνικός, ούτε ο ταξικός αγώνας για ελευθερία παρά μόνο ο φετιχισμός της βίας

Have mercy with the ouganiá of the “Meat Bad, Ugh” school. Nihilistic antispisismos, now we’ve seen everything. You should know that this is not promoting either social or class struggle for liberation, but merely the fetishisation of violence

Cavemen in English say Ugh. Cavemen in English translated into Greek don’t say Ugh /aɡ ~ ʌɡ/ (as a proxy of /əɡ/); the transliteration has misfired to make them say /uɡ/, oug.

So an ouganos is a caveman. Anglo popular culture has ended up thinking of cavemen with some affection, long before the GEICO Caveman, and presumably as far back as The Flintstones; so no, the term has none of that affection in Greek. Here’s the slang.gr definition:

A person whose intellect and manner are reminiscent of an uncivilised barbarian, a primitive man, probably from the interjection “ugh”, because that is the only way he is considered capable of communicating. We often picture him as muscle-bound, [built like a] cupboard, and a body-builder. In Google examples, I see it is most typically used for members of Golden Dawn. Apart from them, it is often used for anarchist rioters, metal fans, and conspiracy theorists.

“You’re born human; you become an ouganos; you end up a Kasidiaris“.

And what is the antispisismos that the group smashing up the butcher’s were striking a blow for?

Give up?

Anti-speciesism.

Speciesism is a coinage so clueless about how Latin works, it could only have been coined in English, and in English after people stopped learning classical languages, at that. (It dates from 1970.) The -es in Latin is an inflection. You never ever put derivational suffixes like -ism after inflections. Except if you have no idea about the language you’re putting the suffixes onto, to begin with. The Latinically correct way of coining the word would have been specism, and you do indeed see that as a less frequent alternative to speciesism.

You also see forms more like specism in Romance languages, either because they know more about Latin, or more to the point, because species in those languages has dropped its -es inflection anyway. Wiktionary enumerates the following renderings:

Asturian: especismu m
Catalan: especisme m
Esperanto: speciismo
Finnish: spesismi (fi)
French: spécisme (fr) m, espécisme (fr) m
Greek: σπισισμός (el) m (spisismós)
Italian: specismo (it) m
Norwegian Bokmål: artssjåvinisme m, spesiesisme m, artsisme m
Polish: szowinizm gatunkowy (pl) m, dyskryminacja gatunkowa f, gatunkizm m, gatunkowizm (pl) m, especismo (pl) m
Spanish: especismo (es) m

Note that Norwegian and Polish have native formations, based on their indigenous equivalents of species. In languages more removed from Latin, well, they do what English did, whether because that’s what English did, or because they too treat Latin as opaque:

Danish: speciesisme c, artschauvinisme c
Dutch: speciesisme m
Estonian: spetsiesism
German: Speziesismus (de) m
Slovene: specizem m, speciesizem m

Now, Greek avoided spisisismos, and rendered the term as spisismos as the main rendering of speciesism (although Wikipedia does also list σπισισισμός.) I’d like to think that Greeks recognised the inflection in speci-es-ism, and had their linguistic sensibilities offended, as fellow speakers of a highly inflected language. It’s far likelier that they simply threw a haplology at the problem: /sp-is-is-mos/ already sounds ludicrous enough, /sp-is-is-is-mos/ could not be taken seriously by anyone.

It’s a repetition that the other languages don’t have. Reducing Latin -iēs so that it sounds identical to -ēs is a peculiarity of Anglo-Latin: the repetition of the vowel in /spiː-siːz/ doesn’t happen in Danish, Dutch, Estonian, German, or Slovene. And even if it had, it takes a language with no vowel length contrast to reduce /spiːsiːzizm̩/ to /spisizizm/—and then to suddenly realise that it’s Greek and not English after all, hastily convert /-izm̩/ back to /ismos/, get rid of the other <z> as a spelling pronunciation, and end up with the unspeakable /spisisismos/. No wonder they chopped off that syllable.

This is what happens when any yahoo in Greece with an internet connection and high school English can read Peter Singer in the original. When gatekeepers of loans into Greek were more effective for the learned register of the language (or, more to the point, when the differentiation between learned and colloquial loans used to mean anything), a formation like spisismos would never have happened. Greek would have been too proud not to translate species, which would have given ειδισμός.

And Greek would not have stopped there, either. The isms that involve a dominion or control of some sort have not traditionally been rendered with –ismos at all, but with –kratia. The old rendering of sexism, now restricted as its equivalent “male chauvinism” is in English, is φαλλοκρατία, phallocracy (“the dominion of dicks”). Determinism (which is not even a system of oppression) is rendered as ντετερμινισμός, but it is also rendered as αιτιοκρατία, aetiocracy (“cause-ocrasy”). The scholarly way of rendering speciesism, consistent with past practice in the language, would have been ειδοκρατία.

But of course, that’s not the world Greeks live in any more. It’s not a world where foreign ideas are garbed with any care in native clothing before being discussed in Greek. I wonder in fact whether they’re thought of in Greek at all, whether there is any distance allowed in the mind between σπισισμός and speciesism.

In two previous posts, I had gone through the Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions (GTAGE) approach to Alexis Tsipras’ odd translation of the Greek saying

We’ve eaten the donkey—and the tail has been left over for us. (Or: We’ve gone and eaten a donkey; are we to get stuck on the tail?)

as

There is an expression in Greece, “We have already eaten the camel, now we have the queue.”

This is the third iteration, using the material in Tripranslate: The useful app that translates 13 most wise proverbs into Tsipras English. The material is not as rich there; in fact, in patches it’s lame (and there are better suggestions in the comments). But there’s a couple of interesting bits still; and I had said I was going to do this a couple of weeks ago.

I’ll pause to comment on the site it comes from: luben.tv. Luben?

Luben is a transliteration of λούμπεν. Λούμπεν in turn is a word that originates in a Latin-alphabet language, and that’s not what it sounds like there. It’s lumpen:

lumpen

Of or relating to social outcasts.
Of or relating to the lumpenproletariat.
Plebeian.

Lumpenproletariat is a term that was originally coined by Karl Marx to describe the layer of the working class that is unlikely ever to achieve class consciousness and is therefore lost to socially useful production, of no use to the revolutionary struggle, and perhaps even an impediment to the realization of a classless society. The word is derived from the German word Lumpenproletarier, “Lumpen” literally meaning “miscreant” as well as “rag”. The Marxist Internet Archive writes that “[lumpenproletariat] identifies the class of outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population of industrial centers” which include “beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements.”

The word is used in English, but it shouldn’t be that surprising that, especially in its truncated form, it is far more commonly used in Greek.

Ancient Greek /mb/ and /mp/ ended up pronounced in Modern Greek as [mb], and many dialects of Modern Greek, such as Cretan, ended up pronouncing it as [b]—as do Standard Greek speakers under 60. The distinction between [mb] and [b] is not phonemic, which means that native speakers of Modern Greek are unaware of it: they’d have no reason to think that /lu[m]ben/ is actually <lumpen> originally.

(They would of course differentiate them if they’re bilingual with one of those languages; manuscripts from the Cretan Renaissance in Latin script, for instance, do differentiate <mp>, <mb> and <b>—to the extent that editions of those texts in Greek script (Fortounatos) resort to diacritics to differentiate them. But to pick up on the spelling of <lumpen>, you’d have to be either bilingual in German, or bilingual in English plus exposed to Marxism in English.)

I’m going to quickly dispatch the Tsipranslate offerings consisting purely of replacing random animals with “camel”:

Σκυλί που γαβγίζει δε δαγκώνει: A camel that barks does not bite

“All bark and no bite”, the original being “a dog”.

Το λέω στο σκύλο μου κι ο σκύλος στην ουρά του: I tell it to my camel and my camel tells it to its queue

Original: I tell it to my dog and the dog tells it to its tail.

Του δίναν γάιδαρο και τον κοίταζε στα δόντια: He was offered a camel, and he was looking it at its teeth.

Original: “donkey”. Corresponds to “looking a gift horse in the mouth”

Τρία πουλάκια κάθονταν: Three little camels sitting.

Original: “little birds”. The phrase is a misconstrual of a ballad, with the typical use of magical animals in ballad:

Τρία πουλάκια κάθονταν στου Διάκου το ταμπούρι
το ’να τηράει τη Λειβαδιά και τ’ άλλο το Ζητούνι,
το τρίτο το καλύτερο μοιρολογάει και λέει
Three little birds sat at Diakos’ fort.
One watches Livadia, the other watches Zitouni [Lamia],
the third and best one laments and says…

Because the birds are looking in different directions, the phrase now proverbially means to someone being absent-minded, not paying attention.

Κάλλιο γαϊδουρόδενε παρά γαϊδουρογύρευε: Better camel-tie, than camel-toe

Original: Better to tie up a donkey than to go looking for a donkey, with the oddity of making “tie a donkey” and “seek a donkey” single verbs. I guess “camel-tie” made “camel-toe” inevitable.

A few more are deliberate misrenderings of ambiguous words:

Μαζί με τον βασιλικό ποτίζεται και η γλάστρα: Together with the monarchists the pot is also watered

Properly: “Together with the basil plant, the flower pot also is watered”, referring to unintended benefits for third parties. (Do we have a saying for that in English.) Basil means “the royal plant”, βασιλικός, and the adjective “royal” is also applies to royalists.

Η περιέργεια σκότωσε τη γάτα: The weirdness killed the camel

Curiosity killed the cat, of course; Greek uses the same word for the active sense (curiosity, finding things curious), and the passive sense (weirdness, being found curious by others).

Σιγά τον πολυέλαιο: Slow the very oil

An old, old instance in GTAGE: πολυέλαιος “many-oil” is the word for a candelabra, which consisted of multiple oil lamps. There is a large class of “slow the X” expressions, meaning “big deal!”, all of which are also popular in GTAGE; “slow!” there means “take it easy,” so “take it easy on the eggs/the vegetables/the candelabra” is (somehow) a proverbial encouragement not to become overwrought.

Αλλού βαρούν τα όργανα αλλού χορεύει η νύφη: Elsewhere hurt the organs, elsewhere dances the bride

“The instruments strike up in one place, the bride dances in another.” Organon (which is cognate with ergon “work”) is the Greek word used for an instrument in general, and for a musical instrument in particular; that’s why pipe organs (reintroduced to the West as a Byzantine present to Charlemagne’s father) are called that. Organs of the body are so called because they are also considered to be instruments. Musical instruments are struck in vernacular Greek, and thence they strike (up) intransitively. Which the GTAGE rendering mangles in turn to the organs hurting.

As commenter Apostolos Zafeirakoglou pointed out, “Guys, you’ve made a little mistake. νύφη in English is “camel”.

Ο σκοπός αγιάζει τα μέσα: The guard justifies the media

As far back as Homer, the word skopos was ambiguous between someone doing the watching (a watchman, a guard), and something you watch out for (a literal target, a mark for an archer, in Homer; the metaphorical meaning “aim, intention” dates from Plato.)

Media in Greek are μέσα μαζικής ενημέρωσης “means (of mass communications). In rendering media as “means”, Greek is merely recapitulating the metaphor of Latin media: as a channel of communication, they are what is in between the sender and the recipient, and the mechanism through which the communication happens.

So. “Guard” is ambiguous with “aim, intention”, and “media” with “means”. This is of course merely “the ends justify the means”; and the Tripranslate translator has betrayed his familiarity with the English version: the Greek says not “justify”, but “sanctify, hallow”.

As indeed pointed out by commenter Anna Paparizou Fatsi: it should read “the guard saints the media”.

This is also a misrendering of a kind-of ambiguous word, if you allow misaccentuation:

Σπίτι δίχως Γιάννη προκοπή δεν κάνει: A home without John Paki does not make

“A house without a John in it will have (“make”) no prosperity (/prokoˈpi/).” If you mis-stress /prokoˈpi/ you get the accusative of the proper name Prokopis /proˈkopi/. The current president of Greece is Prokopis Pavlopoulos, and his nickname is Pakis.
I didn’t think that was funny, but several people on Facebook seem to have.

And that leaves this:

Τον αράπη κι αν τον πλένεις το σαπούνι σου χαλάς: The afroamerican as much as you wash, your soap you break

“If you wash a moor, you’re wasting [ruining] your soap.” The original is as old as Aesop (Washing the Ethiopian white). The less problematic current rendering of the sense is from Aesop’s contemporary Jeremiah in the Hebrew Scriptures, about leopards changing their spots; but Jeremiah also used the same expression as Aesop: “Can the Nubian change his skin or the leopard his spots?”

I momentarily contemplated leaving this one out, but of course that would be whitewashing itself. Yes, the saying in current Western society is reasonably construed as racist. No, the saying in ancient society—and I’d suggest even in early modern European society—was exoticising rather than racist per se. (“How strange, black people have a different skin colour, which is emblematic of people’s nature not changing” vs “Black people have a different skin colour, which is emblematic of them being filthy or morally corrupt.”) The Wikipedia article has a good run down of how the interpretation of the saying evolved to the worse in Western Europe.

Of course, if you don’t see black people in daily life, it’s easy to exoticise them; the appearance of the arapis “moor” in Greek folk tale in fact is all about exoticism. (That’s also why I’m rendering arapis as the old word Moor in this context.) Sometimes the Moor is benevolent, sometimes he is malevolent; but consistently, the Moor is otherworldly, and supernatural: he occupies the same role as ogres or fairies occupy in other fairy tales. He’s not an ordinary human like the Greeks and Turks that show up in fairy tales.

If you don’t see black people in daily life, sure; it is worth pointing out, though, that Greeks in the Ottoman Empire did have the opportunity to see black people—Sudanese Muslims that moved to Greece, either as slaves or as porters. In fact, the vernacular word for black people, arapis, is derived from Arab. There was a recent article on the black Greeks of the village Avato in Thrace; the khalikoutides of Crete, who ended up expelled to Turkey as Muslims, are better known. The black Greeks of Thrace have plenty of prejudice to recount (“What are you doing here?”); and the fact that χαλικούτης in Cretan now means “filthy, outcast” is likely not just a reference to the poor living conditions of the Sudanese porters in Khania.

I’ve just discussed Kostas Karapotosoglou’s proposed Greek etymology for μουνί “cunt”, which he advanced in 2008 as an alternative to both the problematic Greek proposals to date, and the Italian proposals to date, which Italians themselves are not enthusiastic enough (although Tasos Kaplanis has argued for one here.)

In the Italian proposal article, I noted that the word also turns up in Occitan:

mouni in Occitan, reported as meaning variously “cunt”, “monkey”, and “cat”.

The same homophony between “cunt” and “monkey” also applies in Venetian. I further noted there a third possible etymology: Arabic maimūn “monkey”.

If the word for “cunt” came from Italian or Greek, then it is a coincidence that it sounds identical in Venetian and Occitan to the word they have borrowed from Arabic for “monkey”. And coincidences do happen. If the word for “cunt” does in fact originate from Arabic maimūn “monkey”, then that’s no coincidence. The homophony was avoided in Greek, because Greek took μαϊμού “monkey” directly from Arabic maimūn, and did not need to take it from Venetian monna.

Over at Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, Karapotosoglou has just posted the relevant entry from the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. The FEW takes it as a given that the Occitan (and, as it turns out, Arpitan) word originates in “monkey”. Here’s what it says, under maimūn (p. 117). (Pardon me for not expanding the abbreviations: the online guide was not comprehensive or friendly enough for me to work it out, and I wasn’t strongly motivated to anyway.)

2e. Female genitals: Stéph. monna “vulva”. – Rouchi moniche, slang id. DelvEr, monique, mouniche Sainéau Par 309, Paris moniche (Villatte; B); saint. mouniche, ard. “vulva of a little girl” Vauch, Lyon mounichi “female genitals”, Gren. monichi. — Npr. mouniflo. — Dauph. monon Ch.

…

The meaning “female genitals” (e above) also turns up in Northern and Central Italy (see RF 14, 522), Comelico mǫna ARom 10, 143, Modern Greek το μουνί (< Italian) Kr Jber 5, 368

Does that solve the issue?

Well, not quite. The Arabic origin of the word could explain it turning up in Sicilian and in Southern Italian Greek, without the need to appeal to Venetian influence there. Then again, Kaplanis has argued that monna “my lady” was in use throughout Italy. So in fact, the presence of the word in Southern Italy could be explained by any of Greek, Italian, or Arabic.

For the Arabic derivation to work, we would have to accept that people chose to call female genitals “monkeys”. I mean…

… really?

Are there any other secondary meanings to “monkey” that might be a little more plausible, in explaining that transition?

Actually, there are, but you have to keep reading to find them. This is the list of secondary meanings of words derived from maimūn “monkey” from the FEW. (That’s Occitan not Italian, but the relevant sense does show up in Italy as well.)

• 2a. Ugly, grumpy person
• 2b. Grimace
• 2c. Bugbear
• 2d. Child
• 2e. Female genitals
• 2f. Old cow
  • No, it’s not that one
• 2g. (Drunken) Noise
• 2h. Deaf
• 2i. Stupid
• 2j. Doll

A lot of these you’ll find in English too. Maybe not the cow. Or “deaf”.

Oh, I’m not done:

• 2l. Other animals.

Oh? What other animals?

Mdauph. pr. mouno “cat”, Toulouse id. D., vel. mouna. Pr. Barc. mounet m. “little cat”; mdauph. mꭒnę́to “little female cat”, Nice mouneta. Bearn. mounoû, -oûne “male cat, female cat”, Ariège, HGar. mꭒnꭒ́ “cat call” ALG 463. Lim. mounasso “female cat”; mounassaria “patisserie”, Blim. mounossorio “all kinds of porridge or crepes”.

Bast. mamǫnęt “badger”.

Npr. mouno “gadus merlangus” [whiting], Nice mouna, Palavas id. RLR 23,142.

BRhône mounino “raja aquila” [now Myliobatis aquila, eagle ray], Cette mourina. Barbier RLR 52, 105; 56, 218; RlFn 11, 160, 171.

See any animals in that list that are more usually used to name female genitals after?

No, not whiting.

Now. Remember that FEW cited a paper in Kr Jber when it mentioned Greek μουνί as coming from Italian. Kr Jber, Googling tells me, is Kritischer Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der Romanischen Philologie, a Romance linguistics journal. And the paper cited there is by none other than the greatest Greek historical linguist who ever drew breath, Hubert Pernot. In fact, this issue of the journal was intended as an encyclopaedia of Romance philology, and his article is the Modern Greek bit. ⁴ Here’s Pernot’s paragraph; as always my translation, and I’ve supplied Boerio’s definition of Venetian monìn:

Modern Greek calls feminine genitals μουνί. The initial proposed etymology was Greek βουνί “mountain”. Psichari (EPh Ngr LXXX) thought, more reasonably, that it was múnno, Venetian monna (Boerio, s.v. mona); but I don’t think, as he does, that we should take the sense “monkey” as our starting point. Wouldn’t the meaning “cat” be preferable? Somavera II 306,3 does render mona (animal) as ἡ μαϊμοῦ μὲ τὴν οὐρὰν (cf. I 249,3 gatto sariano “tabby cat”) and “nature [genitals] of a woman”, but he also gives gatta “cat”. So I would link Greek μουνί directly to Venetian monìn (with a closed o, a nasal i and a barely audible n) = mu[s]cino (Boerio, s.v. monìn: [“a name for a cat, or used to call a cat”]). Cf. French chat “pussy”, despite the ingenuity of the spelling chas. D. Hesseling informs me that the Dutch word poes “pussy cat” has the meaning of μουνί in Afrikaans. In Modern Greek the word γάτα “cat” itself is a Venetian loan.

(Yes, Pernot is citing his mate Hesseling again. And I’m not finding it particularly difficult to imaging them chatting about this.)

And yes, I am writing this in yet another language in which a word for “cat” has been conflated with a word for female genitals, although which meaning came first is not actually as obvious as you’d think.

Pernot, incidentally, is citing Somavera’s 1700 Italian–Modern Greek dictionary, which I had previously cited, misreading sariano as fariano. It claims that the Italian loanword μούνα in Greek meant “monkey” or “tabby cat”—which is consistent with the word being ambiguous between the two in Italian.

I’d defer to any Arabists reading as to whether “monkey” > “cat” had already happened within Arabic. If it had not, then an Arabic origin of μουνί in maimūn would not have given μουνί its semantics; that would have happened once the word had also come to mean “cat”, in Northern Italy and Southern France.

… whereupon once again Sicily and Southern Italian Greece are a problem, because that meaning shift would have had to have happened there independently.

So. We have three languages that Greek μουνί, Venetian (and Northern Italian) mona ~ monìn, Calabrian Greek munno, Erice Sicilian munnu, and Occitan monna ~ moniche could have come from: Arabic (“monkey” > “cat”); Italian (“my lady”? “Simona”?); Greek (“mountain”? “lip”? “bed”? “down”? “red fig”?).

Once the intermediate meaning “cat” is introduced, Arabic “monkey” looks somewhat more attractive. Italian makes more sense as the vector for transmitting the word, since Venetians were the ones doing the travelling. But I’m not coming away with any more conviction about which of the three etymologies is best.

I’d mentioned in the previous post that Italianists, at least, believe that Venetian monín “cunt” derives from Greek μουνί “cunt”, rather than vice versa. We know that the word was current in both Venetian and Greek at the same time, and in fact it had made it into the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, as monín de gassa, a kind of knot known in English as “cut splice”. (Or, unbowdlerised, “cunt splice”.)

Deriving monín from μουνί is annoying for Greek etymologists, because that means they still have to come up with a Greek origin for the word; and none of the Greek etymologies proposed for μουνί have been convincing. (Karapotosoglou’s recent derivation from an old word for figs is more convincing, but it too has some issues.

At the conclusion of my final 2010 post, Tasos Kaplanis had reasserted his opinion that the Greek word has an Italian etymology after all, deriving it from Monna “my lady”. Since this blog is going to be googled a lot, I think it only fair to promote our exchange from that comment section into an article.

TAK: Nick, you have done a great job collecting all the evidence and I am afraid I cannot do the same. But since we need to end this mounology, please allow me to present my hypothesis.

Monna in Italian is a form with syncope for Madonna (= My Lady) already attested in the XIII century, according to Palazzi-Folena (I copy the entry):
monna [da m(ad)onna, mia signora; sec. XIII] sf. titolo che si dava nel Medioevo alle donne maritate, madonna: monna Filippa ; dim. monnìna.

Monna could have easily become Mona – I don’t know when, but it is certainly attested as such by Somavera in his Italian-Greek Dictionary; I copy from p.306:
Mona. Κυράτζα, η, κυαράτζα, η.
Mona. v. Gatta
Mona. (animale) Η μαϊμού με την ουράν (ζώον)
Mona. v. Natura della donna.

I copied all the relevant entries, but I will only discuss the first one (= lady) in relation with the fourth (= cunt).

The main reason you rejected the Venetian etymology was that it lacked a Latin origin. But the word “Monna” (= lady) was already there in Italian in the 13th century and if you go to trecanni you will see that the word also had ironical uses that questioned the dignity and the character of the ladies that it referred to…

What I see here is a rather classical and easy to grasp “totum pro parte” synecdochical use of the word [the lady became her most significant body part, i.e. her pudendum…]

If we went from Monna>Mona>Ven. mona>Ven. monin>MGr μουνίν or more directly from the diminutive monnina>monnin (with or without intervention of Ven. monin)>MGr μουνίν is something that may be difficult to investigate (I am not an Italianist and I do not quite know when and where the dim. monnina was used).

However, I believe that instead of going through all the acrobatic postulations of all Greek etymologies (from βινείν, μνους, ευνή, etc.), we should accept this direct route, which makes perfect sense, at least to me.

Now, one may ask why Italianists didn’t think of Monna; perhaps they got confused due to the semantic relevance between Venetian mona and modern Greek μουνίν and started looking for a common ancestor which they could not find; who knows.

opoudjis: […] Moreover, it’s not that there was no Romance etymology at all, though I may have implied it: Cortelazzo himself says there’s been no shortage of attempts to explain monna. The real challenge is still the distribution of monnu in Southern Italy, which points to Greek and not Venetian or Vulgar Latin as a source…

[In that, I am referring to the following argument:]

But the compelling argument Moutsos mentions is where else the word shows up in Italy. Gerhard Rohlfs noted that “cunt” is munno in the Greek of Bova, Calabria; and munnu in the Siciliano of Erice. It would be odd for a Venetian form to show up in the Calabrian and Sicilian hinterland. (OK, Bova and Erice are pretty close to the sea, but still.) Southern Italian Greek is archaic, with much influence on the Romance dialects that replaced it—that’s why Rohlfs became interested in it. The word didn’t get into Southern Italy from Latin: it’s much likelier to have gotten there from Greek than from Venetian.

That doesn’t necessarily mean *Ancient* Greek: Southern Italy only became cut off from Byzantium in the 11th century, and Greek was used as a legal language for several centuries longer.

Given Southern Italy, and the lack of a Latin etymon, I’m inclined to go with a Greek origin, then. The one remaining oddity is the ending: if it was difficult to accept mon-a becoming μουν-ίν, it is also difficult to accept μουν-ίν becoming mon-a. But it’s entirely possible that mona was backformed from monín, and that monín was the original form that entered Venetian.

TAK: Nick, the distribution of monnu/munnu/munno in Southern Italy as well as in other places (in Italy I mean) is well attested but with a totally different meaning and etymology: < mondo, i.e world.
Check out this:
dialettando.com

What does Rohlfs exactly say?

I see no necessity for a Greek etymology (all the more because there is NO convincing Greek etymology…). On the contrary, Monna/Mona (as in Mona Lisa) is Panitalian, the texts referred to in trecanni (Dante, Boccacio) are also very well known and the step you have to make from Mona (Lady) to mona (cunt, with a totum pro parte synecdoche) is very small when compared with all the unattested jumps of all Greek etymologies…

So, I guess we disagree.

This debate does need an Italianist; we’re both agreed on that…

In Etymologies and attestation of μουνί, I had reviewed the proposed etymologies of Modern Greek μουνί “cunt”. By far the easiest course would have been to derive μουνί from Venetian monín “cunt”; but it turns out that the Venetian word likely originates from the Greek, rather than vice versa.

The etymologies I reviewed were listed in a paper from 1975, and none of them were great. They were bad enough that Tasos Kaplanis and I debated in comments whether we should be trying for a Romance etymology, after all.

Anon delivered, pointing out that a recent paper did provide a Greek etymology for μουνί. Sarantakos reminded me of it when I reposted a link to my posts on μουνί, and I realised that I never went through that article properly. ⁵ It turns out that the paper’s author, Kostas Karapotosoglou, summarised his paper on Sarantakos’ blog; and I’ll work off that—though the journal is one of the few journals on Greek that still turns up at Melbourne University.

So, we start with Athenaeus. Athenaeus wrote the Deipnosophists, a pedantic account of a banquet in which the dinner guests provide all sorts of information that we would not otherwise have about Antiquity:

It is an immense store-house of information, chiefly on matters connected with dining, but also containing remarks on music, songs, dances, games, courtesans, and luxury.

One of the many pieces of information it supplies is the names of different variants of figs. And one of the variants of fig he names is haimōnios, which derives from the word for blood, haima:

τῶν δ’ ἐν Πάρῳ τῇ νήσῳ—διάφορα γὰρ κἀνταῦθα γίνεται σῦκα τὰ καλούμενα παρὰ τοῖς Παρίοις αἱμώνια, ταὐτὰ ὄντα τοῖς Λυδίοις καλουμένοις, ἅπερ διὰ τὸ ἐρυθρῶδες καὶ τῆς προσηγορίας ταύτης ἔτυχεν—Ἀρχίλοχος μνημονεύει λέγων οὕτως· «ἔα Πάρον καὶ σῦκα κεῖνα καὶ θαλάσσιον βίον.»

And as for figs from the isle of Paros (for there are various figs there too, which the Parians call haimōnios; they are the same as those called Lydian, and they happened to get that name because of their red colour), Archilochus mentions them saying: “away with Paros, and those figs, and the seaman’s life.” (Deipnosophists 3.19)

Archilochus was himself from Paros. The word isn’t mentioned elsewhere in Ancient literature (and Athenaeus is all we know of Archilochus’ verse). Eustathius of Thessalonica cites Athenaeus in his commentary on the Odyssey, and one scholiast of the Odyssey uses the word as a missing link in his fanciful etymology of amnion “bowl in which the blood of sacrificial victims was caught”. (The term was already extended in antiquity to “inner membrane round the foetus”: it’s the amniotic sac.) And that’s it.

So this is presumably a one-off local word for a kind of fig, that never went anywhere else. Athenaeus himself says that the usual name for them was Lydian figs.

Fast forward to 2007. Volume V of Trapp’s dictionary of mediaeval Greek has come out. Trapp has lots of good etymologies, but etymologies can always be improved; and Karapotosoglou writes a paper going through what he’s finding in the volume. In the last page of his paper, he reports on a discovery he’s made in Trapp:

μώνια, τά? “figs”. τὰ σῦκα LudwAnek 70,2.

LudwAnek is a work that shows up very often in Trapp: it is a series of mediaeval spelling dictionaries which Arthur Ludwich published in 14 different fascicles, attributed to Pseudo-Herodian ⁶ You can see the entry online, but it doesn’t tell you anything more than Trapp does: among a bunch of words starting with /mo/, including Moab and Moses, μόλις “just now” and μωραίνω “drive crazy”, μώνια is listed with the gloss “figs”.

We don’t know when the dictionary was written. (We know it wasn’t by the actual Herodian, so it’d have been some time after the 2nd century AD.) We don’t know what kind of vocabulary is in it. Ancient Greek dictionaries are infuriatingly curt like that. If someone has written a thesis analysing the vocabulary in it (and Trapp’s work on it will have made that much easier), we can work out whether it’s plausible that it has vernacular words in it.

But to Karapotosoglou, this does look like the missing link. We know that figs in Ancient Greek were used to refer to female genitalia. We know that a haimōnion (plural haimōnia) was a kind of fig. We know that in a dictionary written sometime after Athenaeus, mōnia is a word for figs. And we know that vernacular Greek dropped unstressed initial /e/: so the development haimōnia > /eˈmonia/ > /ˈmonia/ would have been completely regular.

And as he argues, you can get from /ˈmoni(o)n/ (the singular of /ˈmonia/) to /muˈni/ straightforwardly in Modern Greek:

ενώ μορφολογικά η λ. εξελίχθηκε σε *μωνίον –*μωνίν – μουνίν, με κατέβασμα του τόνου, πβλ.θρόνος (116) – θρόνιον – θρονί, σπάθιον – σπαθί, καθως και το δημώδη τύπο αιμωνιό = είδος σύκου (Πάρος) και τροπή του ο – ου από την επίδραση του χειλικού μ

Morphologically the word developed as *μωνίον –*μωνίν – μουνίν, with the accent descending; cf. θρόνος (116) – θρόνιον – θρονί, σπάθιον – σπαθί, as well as the vernacular form αιμωνιό “kind of fig” (Paros) and /o/ > /u/ under the influence of labial /m/.

If we accept that haimōnion survived into Modern Greek, then all the phonological developments proposed are plausible, although one is questionable:

• eˈmonion: Koine pronunciation of haimōnion
• ˈmonion: Regular deletion of initial unstressed e- in most dialects of Greek
• monˈion: The diminutive neuter suffix -ion was both accented and unaccented, and the accent on the suffix did indeed routinely shift on the path from Ancient to Modern Greek, e.g. spátʰion “sword” > ˈspaθion > spaˈθion > spaˈθi
• moˈnin: The -o- routinely dropped off in the diminutive suffix -ion, and this was already happening by 500 AD.
  • This change did not apply to -ion when it was not a diminutive suffix: skʰoleîon “school” > sxoˈlion > skoˈljo [skoˈʎo]
• muˈnin: Though it is not regular, o > u does occur in Greek near labials: e.g. kōnōpion “mosquito” > kunupi.
• muˈni: Final /n/ drops off in most contexts and most dialects of Greek.

So it can all happen, with one caveat: for monˈion > monˈin to happen, the word had to be considered a diminutive; otherwise, it would have ended up as monˈjo [moˈɲo]. But it wasn’t a diminutive; -ion here is an adjectival ending. The analogy is not impossible; it’s not obvious, either.

The development Karapotosoglou posits still sounds more plausible than the rest of the proposed etymologies, although I’m still uneasy at the notion that an obscure word from one island survived as long as it did.

But in defending the stress shift, Karapotosoglou drops a bombshell that needs a lot more scrutiny:

the vernacular form αιμωνιό “kind of fig” (Paros)

The claim is that the ancient Parian fig name has survived from the time of Athenaeus (if not Archilochus), and is still used on the isle of Paros to this day. And sure enough, if you look up the online Historical Dictionary of the Academy of Athens (the Modern Greek dialect dictionary), there it is:

αἱμωνι̮ὸ τό, Πάρ. Ἐκ τοῦ ἀρχ. οὐσ. αἱμώνιον. Σῦκον ὀνομαστὸν ἔχον τὴν σάρκα αἱματόχρουν καὶ τὸν φλοιὸν ὑπέρυθρον. Συνών. κοκκινόσυκο.

emoˈnjo [emoˈɲo] (neut), Paros. From the ancient noun haimōnion. A fig so called for having blood-coloured flesh and a pink skin. Synonym: kokinosiko “red-fig”.

That is too good to be true.

I mean, seriously. It is too. good. to be true.

There’s two things to note about the form, both of which do not work in Karapotosoglou’s favour:

• The form does not end in -ˈi, but in -ˈjo. That’s what you’d predict a non-diminutive -ˈion form to end up as—as we noted: monˈjo. But the whole point of the haimōnion etymology of muˈni was that it was treated like a diminutive.
• It does not drop its initial unstressed e-. The whole point of the haimōnion etymology of muˈni is that the word did drop its initial unstressed e-.

The fact that the initial unstressed e- did not drop off makes the form even more too good to be true.

The sources that the Historical Dictionary has used are of variable quality. Some are by dialectologists employed by the Academy of Athens. Some are by random schoolteachers and antiquarians who submitted their manuscripts to the Academy, and to its predecessors. So it’s worth digging a little further.

The lemma turns up in the first volume of the dictionary, published in 1933.

The Institute for Language and Speech Processing has put up a Flash-based browser of the provenance of the manuscripts of the Historical Dictionary. (Rush to use it while Flash is still supported. sigh.) We’re looking for sources from Paros, from before 1933. The browser has:

• Ms 87. I. Protodikos. 1870. Glossary. 800 pp, A5.
• Ms. 367. I. Kakridis. before 1922. Pariaka [journal] Vol. 1 pp. 1-44. 95 pp, 16o small.
• Ms. 408. I. Kakridis. 1924. Vocabulary of Lefkes, Paros. 170 pp, very small.
• Ms. 458. A. Papadopoulos. before 1929. Vocabulary of Lefkes, Paros. 30 pp, small.
• Ms. 545. N. Kypraios. 1928/33. Folklore of Paros Island. 42 pp, A4.

Now of these scholars, Anthimos Papadopoulos was a director of the Historical Dictionary, and a good scholar; he wrote the Historical Dictionary of Pontic, and a series of papers on the origin of phrasal expressions. Ioannis Kakridis was one of the great Greek classicists, and the time frame is right—he’d have been 21 years old in 1922, and he completed his PhD in 1925. German Wikipedia confirms he worked at the Historical Dictionary from 1924–1931. They are both serious enough scholars to have earned the benefit of the doubt.

N. Kypraios wrote two more manuscripts on Paros folklore for the Historical Dictionary. Folklore could at a pinch include agricultural practices, but I think it less likely that the fig name comes from him.

That leaves us with 800 pp of Parian words from I. Protodikos, from a time when Greeks were rabidly trying to prove their continuity from antiquity, and before the advent of good practices in dialectology as we now recognise it.

Yes, it’s a big deal to accuse a scholar of falsifying evidence, even if they are from the bad old days of Greek lexicography. Especially when I don’t know whether the form is record by Protodikos, as opposed to Papadopoulos or Kakridis. All I’m saying is, I’d want to see corroboration from elsewhere of the survival of haimōnion in Paros.