Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 327 other subscribersJuly 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Why was literacy so low in the Ottoman Empire?
Yes, Arabic script was a spectacularly bad fit for Turkish. But a more proximate reason, surely, was that mass literacy presupposes printing—and the Ottomans did not allow printing in a Muslim language. (They didn’t allow it in Christian Greek either, but at least Venetian printers were able to capitalise on that.)
Global spread of the printing press
Due to religious qualms, Sultan Bayezid II and successors prohibited printing in Arabic script in the Ottoman empire from 1483 on penalty of death, but printing in other scripts was done by Jews as well as the Greek and Armenian communities (1515 Saloniki, 1554 Bursa (Adrianople), 1552 Belgrade, 1658 Smyrna). In 1727, Sultan Achmed III gave his permission for the establishment of the first legal print house for printing secular works in Arabic script (religious publications still remained forbidden), but printing activities did not really take off until the 19th century.
1727: First press for printing in Arabic established in the Ottoman Empire, against opposition from the calligraphers and parts of the Ulama. It operated until 1742, producing altogether seventeen works, all of which were concerned with non-religious, utilitarian matters. Ibrahim Muteferrika.
1779: Abortive attempt to revive printing in the Ottoman lands, by James Mario Matra (Briton).
[Btw, Wikipedia? What printing in Greek communities? Judaeo-Greek doesn’t really count as the “Greek community” in this context. Citation needed.]
On the late adoption of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire
It is clear from the historical evidence that the professional manuscript scribes were violently against the printing press because they did not want to lose their jobs.
…
It is not so clear that the clergy of that era were against the printing press even though historians show evidence that it was the case. In the current intellectual climate of religious fervor in Turkey the prevailing opinion is that the clergy of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries were not against the printing press. They say that the printing press was rejected because of the strong opposition of the calligrapher/scribe class. This begs the question: if the clergy were not against the printing press why Muteferrika or others were not allowed to print religious books?
Myths and reality about the printing press in the Ottoman Empire (which looks like a weak apologist account to me—they didn’t allow it because it wasn’t as pretty as manuscript? And only the scholars needed to read anyway? Really?)
Printing banned by Islam? (Christian polemicist, but consistently with scrupulous scholarship)
What does a French speaker from the Val D’Aosta region of Italy sound like?
Ah, French in the Val d’Aosta.
I don’t have a phonetic answer for OP. I do however have a sociolinguistic answer that I’m delighted to share, because I co-supervised an MA thesis on this subject. The facts are all from Genevieve Foddy (née Czarnecki). The snark is all mine.
The indigenous language of the Val d’Aosta is not French. Any more than French is the indigenous language of Brittany, or Alsace, or Gascony.
The indigenous language of the Val d’Aosta was Franco-Provençal. Which was also the indigenous language of Suisse Romande, and Grenoble, and the rest of the erstwhile Duchy of Savoy. “Franco-Provençal” doesn’t sound like much of a name for a language, so locals now prefer to call it Arpitan. The Val d’Aosta is now where Franco-Provençal survives the strongest. And “the strongest” is not all that strong.
Franco-Provençal never got taken seriously as a language. (I mean, have you ever heard of it?) The Duchy of Savoy, in fact, adopted Paris French as its official language, even before France did. In 1536.
That means that Paris French was a Roofing Language (Dachsprache) for Franco-Provençal. Meaning, it was the Official Language that you file the local dialect under. A roofing language can give you some shelter: you can claim the superior status of the roofing language as your own. But it also stunts your growth: literary Franco-Provençal was never going to amount to anything but cute stories about dales and goats, because French was the “real” language of anything outside the shepherd’s hut.
The Val d’Aosta became part of Italy, Grenoble became part of France, and Suisse Romande had already got rid of its Arpitan at the time of Napoleon. The Valdôtains protested they were French, but they were swamped by migrants from the Piedmont, and their dialect was on the retreat.
Before Mussolini. But of course, it was Mussolini that made martyrs of the Francophone Valdostans, such as Émile Chanoux.
Fast forward to the end of WWII. De Gaulle is doing some sabre-rattling on the French–Italian border. To smooth things over, Italy grants the Val d’Aosta autonomy.
Autonomy from Rome pays off bigtime economically. The Valdôtains achieve the highest standard of living in Italy. Which attracts a lot of migrants from elsewhere in Italy again—this time, from the poor South.
Like I said, Franco-Provençal is not doing that well: it’s steadily retreating. There may be revival efforts, but if you’re not in Palestine 1910, revival efforts seldom reverse language loss.
Franco-Provençal, once again, is not French. But Franco-Provençal is also not an Ausbausprache—an Official Language of the kind you can put in forms and legal documents and books. French is.
And the Valdôtains, dammit, are Savoyards. People who belong to the glorious lineage of the French-Speaking Nations.
So they learn French at school. Because they sure as hell don’t speak it at home.
And they get all their government forms in French as well as Italian.
And most of them, in reality, don’t speak anything but Italian. Some of them will speak Franco-Provençal in the villages, some of the time.
But remember: French is what makes them distinct, French is what makes them autonomous, French is what makes them part of la Francophonie. If it was just some mountain gibberish dialect that they spoke, halfway between French and Tuscan, well, Italy is full of those.
(Remember: the snark is all mine, not Genevieve’s.)
So, this is how the scenario plays out for Eustace-Marie de Valdôtain-Courmayeur, born and bred in the Vallé d’Aoste, pronounced [vale dɔst], sacré, not [daɔst].
(In Franco-Provençal it’s actually Vâl d’Outa, but remember: French. Because: French.)
- We Valdôtains are Savoyards.
- That makes us members of the glorious lineage of the French-Speaking Nations, who adopted French before Paris did.
- We speak French, and that makes us autonomous from Rome.
- The fact that noone in my family has spoken Franco-Provençal in three generations is irrelevant.
- The fact that I only learned French in school is irrelevant.
- The fact that I always fill out the Italian forms down at the town hall, and not the French forms, is irrelevant.
- We speak French. And those southern migrants don’t. Because we are true Valdôtains.
Meanwhile, this is how the scenario plays out for Salvatore Mangia-Foccaccia, who has moved here from Reggio di Calabria.
- The streets of Aosta are paved with gold.
- The streets are paved with gold, because the Valle d’Aosta (pronounced [daosta], porca miseria, not [dɔst]) speaks French.
- Any actual French they speak here, they learned at school.
- … Hey hang on! I learned French at school!
- Sure, Vive l’Aoste libre! Works for me just fine!
OP, this doesn’t really answer your question, but it is a warning to look at the claims carefully. It’s Arpitan, not French (hence the “distinctive features”), and the locals are motivated to exaggerate how much non-Italian Romance they speak. Arpitan is a second language in the revival now; but so is French.
I wish Arpitan well, as I wish all minority languages well. But Arpitan in the Val d’Aosta is not going to grow if it keeps calling itself French…
How did terms such as stoicism and cynicism come to adopt totally different meanings from their original Greek definitions?
Sorry to answer by reference to Wikipedia, but, well, I think the answers are all there.
We have ancient philosophical schools.
We have popularisations of what those ancient philosophical schools were about, in education and in all-round educated discourse.
We have people repurposing those popularisations, to express commonplace attitudes.
To the extent that the meaning differs from antiquity, that’s the result of popularisation.
Stoicism first
The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, of the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature.
…
Later Stoics—such as Seneca and Epictetus—emphasized that, because “virtue is sufficient for happiness”, a sage was immune to misfortune.
The word “stoic” commonly refers to someone indifferent to pain, pleasure, grief, or joy. The modern usage as “person who represses feelings or endures patiently” was first cited in 1579 as a noun, and 1596 as an adjective. In contrast to the term “Epicurean”, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Stoicism notes, “the sense of the English adjective ‘stoical’ is not utterly misleading with regard to its philosophical origins.”
And indeed, if you read Epictetus, the stuff of pop stoicism is there: you should only care about the stuff you can control, there’s no point being bothered by the stuff that’s outside of your control. So you don’t let pain, pleasure, grief or joy from those things run your life. It’s just that there’s a calm—at times, a defiance, even a joy, in Epictetus not bothering with the stuff you can’t control. And there is a sense of purpose in the stuff you can control, which does give you joy.
The pop version of stoicism, as exemplified by the British stiff upper lip, doesn’t have that; it’s more absolute. But you can see how you would jump from one to the other in the 16th century.
Cynicism is a school of Ancient Greek philosophy as practiced by the Cynics. For the Cynics, the purpose of life was to live in virtue, in agreement with nature. As reasoning creatures, people could gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which was natural for themselves, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, sex and fame. Instead, they were to lead a simple life free from all possessions.
That’s not small-c cynical.
By the 19th century, emphasis on the negative aspects of Cynic philosophy led to the modern understanding of cynicism to mean a disposition of disbelief in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions.
Oh, OK. So what gave people that idea?
The ancient Cynics rejected conventional social values, and would criticise the types of behaviours, such as greed, which they viewed as causing suffering. Emphasis on this aspect of their teachings led, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, to the modern understanding of cynicism as “an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others.” This modern definition of cynicism is in marked contrast to the ancient philosophy, which emphasized “virtue and moral freedom in liberation from desire.”
Ah. So too many anecdotes in the 1800s of Diogenes of Sinope flouting conventional morality to point out hypocrisy. And not enough justification of what Diogenes’ point was, behind his antics—that there was true virtue to be found out there, it just wasn’t to be found in conventional pieties.
Do I hyphenate “upper middle class family”, if yes, then how?
Yes, hyphenation is less fashionable than it used to be, and yes, people think that it is finicky to introduce a distinction between two levels of punctuation.
But may the fire of a thousand Harts and Fowlers rain down on all respondents, for not one of them suggesting as an alternative something involving an en-dash:
upper-middle–class family.
Regrettably, that would these days be regarded as an affectation. Particularly as most people don’t know how to type en-dashes (even if they do know what they are).
It is true, though, that upper middle class family without hyphens will usually be understood just fine, and hyphens are more avoided these days than not.
I disagree with Paulette Smythe and agree with Jeff Christensen, btw: the nesting is surely (upper middle) class, not upper (middle class).
How hard is for Greeks that speak Standard Modern Greek to understand Tsakonian?
Not mutually intelligible. At all.
The bizarre thing with Tsakonian is: the non-core vocabulary, you can understand, because it’s pretty much the non-core vocabulary of Greek. Except you’ve got some quite massive regular sound changes to deal with, which were regularly applied even to modern loans. [ɣramatici] for example, “grammar”, ends up as [ɣramacitɕi].
But the grammar is massively simplified (it’s actually a lot like English); and the core vocabulary, in between Doric survivals, archaic vernacular words, and massive sound changes, is unrecognisable.
I’ve found a Tsakonian Berlitz online. I’m bolding the words that a Modern Greek speaker would understand without effort (and italicising the words they would recognise as archaic). I anticipate people saying “but I recognise X! or Y!” Not conversationally and without prior exposure, you wouldn’t. Although I suspect by the end of the passage, readers will have worked out the main sound changes.
The writer btw ignored the aspirated stops. I’ve put them back in.
Τσ’ έσ’ ποίου;
How are you?
Εζού κά έννι, αφεγκία ντι.
I’m fine, how about yourself?
Καούρ εκάνατε καμπζία.
Welcome children. [No, that’s not “you do”. You recognised εκάνατε wrong.]
Καούρ ερέκαμε νιούμου.
Well have we found you.
Καούρ εμαζούμαΐ.
Well have we gathered. [OK, that word has something to do with μαζί, “together”, I’ll give you that.]
Που ντ’ έν’ αούντε;
What’s your name?
Μ’εν’αούντε Αλέξαντρε.
My name is Alexander. [Finally!]
Τσούνερ έσι;
Whose [child] are you?
Εζού έννι τα μάτη μι, τ’αφεγκη μι τσαί του παπού μι εγγόνι.
I’m my mothers, my father’s, and my grandfather’s grandchild.
Καλημέρα μαμού, τσ’ εσ’ ποία; Εσ’ θέα να ντι ποίου κανένα θέλημα;
Good morning grandmother, how are you? Do you want me to do you any bidding? [Hopefully by now you’ve worked out they’re using the ancient word for “do”]
Καώς το, το καλέ καμπζί, όνι θέα τσίπτα καμάρζι μι.
Welcome, such a fine child! I want nothing, my pride. [You might have even worked out that they’re deleting all their lambdas before back vowels.]
Έα όρκο μι, να ντι δίου κάτσι.
Come my oath [darling], I’ll give you something.
Χάγγε τθο καλέ, να έσι κά.
Go to the good, be well. [That’s not a vocative! o > e after coronals]
Ευχαριστού πάσου, καλέ να ’χερε.
Thank you very much, may you have goodness.
Ούρα κά, άι α πορεία ντι.
A happy hour, may your road be smooth as oil.
Να ζάρε τθο καλέ, τθαν ευτζή του Χρζιστού τσαί τα Δεσποίνη.
May you go to the good, to the blessing of Christ and Our Lady.
Αγακητέ μουσαφίρη καούρ εκάνερε τθα χώρα νάμου.
Dear guest, welcome to our village.
Οι τσακώνοι είνοι περήφανοι αθροίποι.
Tsakonians are proud people.
Είνοι αγαπούντε του γραφτοί τσαί τουρ άγραφτοι νόμοι.
They love written and unwritten laws. [As soon as we go into speech making, the words are recognisable.]
Έσι καοδεχούμενε σου χωρζίς να ντι κολαντσέγγωι.
You are welcome by them without them flattering you.
Είνοι αγαπούντε πρεσσού τα πάστρα.
They love cleanliness a lot.
Άμα τθα πορεία ντι θα ρέσερε βρωμίλε ούνοι έχουντε σι ποιτέ Τσακώνοι.
If on your road you find filth, Tsakonians have not done it.
Κά να περάρε εκιού τσαί οι κολέγοι ντι, για να μόλετε ταν άβα χρονία κίσου.
Have a good time, you and your friends, and come back next year again.
… So. Greek-speaking Quorans. How did you go?
Update, cc Dimitra Triantafyllidou Lara Novakov Dimitris Sotiropoulos
You know what the very definition of badass is?
Let me tell you what the very definition of badass is.
Maxim L. Kisilier. Born in Russia. Bred in Russia. Learned Ancient Greek in Uni. Lecturer in Greek at St Petersburg State University. Has done some fieldwork oin Tsakonia.
Seen here, delivering the welcoming address to the Annual Tsakonian conference in 2013. With lots of grammatical examples.
IN TSAKONIAN.
For twelve minutes straight. (He then has to summarise in standard Greek.)
And, incidentally, with a Russian accent.
This man is badass.
Pity there is no way on earth the locals will accept his proposed orthography…
(I feel badass, myself, for almost understanding three quarters of what he’s saying.)
Do people in the Near and Middle East still refer to Westerners as Franks?
In Greece: it was very much a mainstream term from Mediaeval times right through to the early 20th century. It was also used to refer to Greek Catholics; hence the classic song Frangosyriani “Catholic girl from Syros” (1932), from Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Catholic boy from Syros. The conflation of Western Catholics and Levantine Catholics makes sense in the context of the Ottoman Millet system.
Nowadays, I’m probably the only person who uses it with any contemporary reference, because I’m an antiquarian like that. Greeks now consider themselves Westerners, and have for a while; so they have no use for a term Othering the Westerners.
But as a historical reference, whether to crusaders, or to the Latin Empire of Constantinople, or to the confused relation between Greeks and Philhellenes during the Greek War of Independence, Greeks will still get it.
Why is an article inserted before a proper noun that has been qualified by an adjective?
Proper nouns in English are not normally qualified by adjectives; the adjective would be taken to be part of the proper noun (This is Lucky Phil).
Some authors do qualify proper nouns with adjectives, although as this discussion notes (Adjective with proper noun), it is stylistically quite marked (“Stylistically, attributively modifying a proper noun isn’t something people do in normal conversation. It strikes me as newspaper-ese”.)
When that does happen, the proper noun is considered to be acting more like a common noun: it’s as if the adjective is being used to narrow down which of the avatars of the person is being considered. (A bewildered Elliot, as opposed to a contented Elliot; The Amazing Mr Fox, as opposed to The Humdrum Mr Fox.) Hence the use of the article.
What language first introduced punctuation such as the period, comma, exclamation point, and question mark?
See Punctuation on Wikipedia. David Crystal has a lovely book out on the history of punctuation: Making a Point.
As Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer indicated, there were anticipations of punctuation for a while; the notion of systematically indicating pauses (period, comma) was a Hellenistic Greek invention, which became systematic in the late Empire.
Punctuation as we know it is a mediaeval Latin thing, and it kept evolving up until after the invention of printing; parentheses for example are a 16th century thing. The question mark is 8th century; quote marks as we know them (as opposed to quote marks the way email does them) is 12th century.
But the main written language of Western Europe was Latin up until at least the 16th century, and that’s the language for which most punctuation we are familiar with was introduced
What happened to the Greeks of the Seleucid Empire?
Where are the Seleucid Greeks?
(InB4 Kalash people. We’re pretty sure they’re not Greeks.)
One can only presume, they assimilated. The ruling class would have been Greek for a fair while; royalty certainly was. But there’s no reason to think the majority of Greeks didn’t intermarry. Not that we’d know much about it, because the contemporaries didn’t pay that much attention to ethnic difference. Lucian of Samosata is quite happy to tell us he’s “Assyrian”, and wrote a book on the religious history of Syria; but everything he wrote was firmly enmeshed in Greek literary culture.
What did they leave behind? The architecture of places like Palmyra. The tradition of human-looking statues in India, including statues of the Buddha. A Greco-Bactrian letter in Unicode: Sho (letter). Awe of Greek learning, inherited by the Arabs. Lucian himself. The koine of the New Testament (although the vehicle of Eastern Orthodoxy was Syriac, not Greek). And lots of stories about Alexander, including those involving Dhul-Qarnayn.
What can be lost in translation from ancient Greek?
- The allusions. Which are much more obvious in Ancient Greek, because it had several quite distinct literary dialects. If you want to allude to Homer, or to the tragedians, you can easily choose a word that occurs only in Homer, or a grammatical inflection that is antiquated. And literate Ancient Greeks were meant to be across all the canonical texts; so one adjective can invoke an entire myth. (It’s no different in our contemporary cultures; we just have different canons.)
- The convoluted syntactic structures: how, at its best, a prose sentence is a poised, beautiful construct, with lots of nesting and embedding and qualifications and rhetorical contrasts. And at its worst, it’s a rambling, ugly jumble, with lots of nesting and embedding and qualifications and rhetorical contrasts. We don’t write like that any more, and more and more, we don’t read like that any more. Not necessarily a bad thing, just different.
- The subtlety of free word order; something I miss in translation from Modern Greek as well. Free word order isn’t just an excuse to put syntax in the blender (at least, it isn’t in prose); it’s a way of making nice, understated distinctions in emphasis, or contrast, or in topic vs comment structures in the sentence. English does that as well, of course, but with different means: there’s a reason plaintext English still feels it needs to use all caps or asterisks for emphasis, and Greek doesn’t.
- The kind of primitive way Classical Greek deals with abstractions: it’s not Goodness, it’s The Good; not Equality, but The Equal. In fact, old technical Greek seems to make do with some surprisingly sparse resources.