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What are major languages which declined/extinct during Turkification of Anatolia?
All the answers posted are very good, and a more substantial contribution than I will make. I agree that in all likelihood, by the time the Seljuks came to town, the indigenous Anatolian languages were long gone, and it was all about the retreat of Greek and Armenian. But I was A2A’d.
So I’ll talk about Greek.
What do I know? I’ll draw on the survey in Modern Greek in Asia Minor; a study of the dialects of Siĺli, Cappadocia and Phárasa, with grammar, texts, translations and glossary : Dawkins, R. M. (Richard McGillivray), 1871-1955.
- The collapse of Greek language and Christianity in Western Asia Minor in the 13th century appears to have been quite rapid: a matter of generations.
- Though I haven’t seen solid evidence for this, it seems that the substantial Greek populations in the Western Asia Minor coast date from Ottoman times, with Greeks settling the coast from the nearby islands. The dialects of the coast are certainly close to those of the Aegean islands. Dawkins concurs, speaking of both settlement from the islands, and a wave of migration out of Greece in the 18th century.
- We know that Bithynia was resettled by both Greeks and Bulgarians in the 1500s–1600s. In fact, there was even a Tsakonian colony on the mouth of the Gönen river, which probably dates from the 1700s.
- I think the Greek population in European Turkey was continuous.
- The Greek population in the Pontus was continuous, and if anything expanded, with mining colonies reaching far into the Black Sea hinterland: Ak Dağ, Buğa Maden, Bereketli Maden, Nevşehir, Ürgüp, Keban Maden, and around Şebinkarahisar.
- There were two distinct regions where Cappadocian Greeks lived: 6 villages around Pharasa, and 20 villages in Western Cappadocia. The language had substantially retreated by the time Dawkins surveyed them in situ; most Christians in the region already spoke Turkish, and particularly in South Western Cappadocia (e.g. Ulağaç), the Greek spoken was heavily influenced by Turkish.
- There was isolated Greek-speaking communities in Livisi (Kayaköy near Fethiye), the town of Sille near Konya, and a dialect that had died out by 1900 in Gölde of Lydia (near Kula, Manisa).
So, tl;dr:
Greek was vibrant in the Pontus; retreating in Cappadocia (and anecdotally the other remaining old settlements as well, with the possible exception of Livisi); and wiped out everywhere else in Anatolia though Turkification; the substantial Greek-speaking population in Western Asia Minor was the result of later resettlement.
I’m pretty sure this map from Wikipedia (File:Anatolian Greek dialects.png) is overstated for both Cappadocian and Mainstream Greek, but it’s a start:
Was the Greek population in western Asia Minor continuous from Byzantium, or did it migrate back to Asia Minor in Ottoman times?
Motivated by discussion with Dimitra Triantafyllidou at Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are major languages which declined/extinct during Turkification of Anatolia?
Citing from discussion there:
The received wisdom, from:
- Vryonis, Speros, Jr. The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
is that the bulk of Asia Minor was islamised and turkicised relatively quickly after the movement of the Turks into the region.
It seems that the substantial Greek populations in the Western Asia Minor coast date from Ottoman times, with Greeks settling the coast from the nearby islands. The dialects of the coast are certainly close to those of the Aegean islands. Dawkins concurs, speaking of both settlement from the islands, and a wave of migration out of Greece in the 18th century.
- Dawkins, Richard McGillivray. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor; a study of the dialects of Siĺli, Cappadocia and Phárasa, with grammar, texts, translations and glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
We know that Bithynia was resettled by both Greeks (from Epirus) and Bulgarians in the 1500s–1600s. In fact, there was even a Tsakonian colony on the mouth of the Gönen river, which probably dates from the 1700s.
Was Procopius referring to second half of 6th century, when he says that “some of these rascals were still Animists” or much earlier times in Arabia ?
Procopius, de Bellis I xx:
At about the time of this war Hellestheaeus, the king of the Aethiopians, who was a Christian and a most devoted adherent of this faith, discovered that a number of the Homeritae on the opposite mainland were oppressing the Christians there outrageously; many of these rascals were Jews, and many of them held in reverence the old faith which men of the present day call Hellenic. He therefore collected a fleet of ships and an army and came against them, and he conquered them in battle and slew both the king and many of the Homeritae. He then set up in his stead a Christian king, a Homerite by birth, by name Esimiphaeus, and, after ordaining that he should pay a tribute to the Aethiopians every year, he returned to his home.
Hellestheaeus was Kaleb of Axum, king of Axum (northern Ethiopia) in 520.
The Homeritae are the Himyarite kingdom, around Yemen, which fell to Axum in 525.
Esimiphaeus (Sumuafa’ Ashawa’) was the Christian Himyarite viceroy appointed by Kaléb.
The Himyarite kings adopted Judaism around 380, probably for reasons of political neutrality. Per Wikipedia,
From the 380s, temples were abandoned and dedications to the old gods ceased, replaced by references to Rahmanan, “the Lord of Heaven” or “Lord of Heaven and Earth”
…
During this period, references to pagan gods disappeared from royal inscriptions and texts on public buildings, and were replaced by references to a single deity. Inscriptions in the Sabean language, and sometimes Hebrew, called this deity Rahman (the Merciful), “Lord of the Heavens and Earth,” the “God of Israel” and “Lord of the Jews.” Prayers invoking Rahman’s blessings on the “people of Israel” often ended with the Hebrew words shalom and amen.
Now, Procopius is claiming that paganism continued in Himyar, despite Judaism being the state religion. Paganism certainly wasn’t extinguished immediately. In telling of the early Jewish king Abu-Kariba (390–420), Wikipedia recounts:
Initially, there was great resistance, but after an ordeal had justified the king’s demand and confirmed the truth of the Jewish faith, many Himyarites embraced Judaism.
Yet
After Abu-Kariba’s demise (420), a pagan named Dhū-Shanatir seized the throne.
I know nothing of the history of the Himyarites, or of Yemeni archaeology. Yet, even if paganism was no longer the official religion, I see no problem with some Himyarites continuing to be pagan.
Did Hebrew affect all languages in the world? If so, is it the only language that affected all languages?
… The only wide-ranging influence of Hebrew I can think of is
- In the variants of languages that are spoken by Jews: Yiddish, Ladino, Judaeo-Greek, Judaeo-Persian, Judaeo-Arabic… for all I know, Judaeo-Chinese.
- In the church register of languages impacted by Christianity. And not a lot of words there. Amen, Satan and Sabbath are probably the most wide-ranging ones.
Be careful not to conflate Hebrew with other Semitic languages. In Greek, arrabōn for “pledge; (later) engagement” dates from Classical times; that means it’s not Hebrew, it’s Phoenecian. The same is likely true for camel, which was used by Herodotus.
Both Jews and Christianity spread widely, but the lexical impact of Hebrew, I’d say, is surprisingly superficial. English, Greek and Latin have gotten around a lot more.
What is the root of word “Havales”, denoting in Greek, “spending time, having fun”?
A magnificent resource I have just stumbled on, in seeing if someone has already answered this question (do I look like a Turcologist to you?) is tourkika.com. An online Turkish grammar resource for Greek learners of the language, with lots of etymology for loan words into Greek.
The etymology… is enlightening.
Χαβαλές – havale. From Arabic حوالة (ḥawāla), meaning “transfer”. The phrase havale etmek in Turkish means to refer someone, to delegate someone to do something, to transfer responsibility to someone else.
What do Greeks do when they’ve been entrusted a task, and they’ve successfully delegated it to someone else?
They sit around a café, talk shit, play backgammon, crack jokes, have an ouzo.
You know.
Κάνουν χαβαλέ. “Doing havale”. Having fun.
EDIT: The related adverb χαβαλέ (Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής) means “doing something without serious effort”: Δε διάβασα· έδωσα εξετάσεις χαβαλέ “I didn’t study; I sat the exams havale”. Meaning “as if I delegated it to someone else, without taking responsibility for it”.
What is the Latin translation of “healing is not linear”?
I’ll take a different template, with Alberto Yagos’ as an inspiration.
When Ptolemy I asked if there were any shortcuts for plodding through the Elements, Euclid supposedly said, “there is no royal road to geometry”: Euclid – Wikiquote
The first Latin translation of the quote is Non est regia ad Geometriam via.
Non est regia ad curationem via? “There’s no royal road to healing”?
Or tweaking Alberto Yagos’ proposal, “the road to healing is not straight”: Via ad curationem non recta est.
Is it correct that the word “Dune” comes from a very old Greek root?
A dune is a heap of sand. We can track it to Gaulish *dunom. Maybe.
A θίς can be a heap of several things, including sand.
A relation between the two has been suggested, but it’s not certain. To quote Frisk:
No satisfactory explanation. Wackernagel compares Old Indic dhíṣṇya– ‘situated on a knoll’, ‘knoll strewn with sand’, which could go back to an IE *dhisen-, *dhisn-. Often compared to German Düne ‘dune’ and related words, either as *θινϝ- related to Old Indic dhánvan– ‘dry land, mainland, beach’ (Fick; but that does not account for the /i/), or as *θϝιν- related to Lithuanian dujà ‘particle of dust’, cf. θύω ‘to storm in’. According to Osthoff, from Old Indic –dh-i in ni-dh-í ‘putting down, keeping’ (see τίθημι).
So… definite maybe.
Would a language borrow from another language a word with which it already has homophonous words in itself?
Yes, it would.
I’m not going to bother with examples other than grave (Germanic: tomb; French: serious).
It is a common perception that language change is driven by trying to avoid ambiguity. In fact, language has an astounding tolerance for ambiguity, because context usually takes care of it. Instances where words change in order to avoid ambiguity (eg French hui > aujourd’hui ) are actually pretty rare.
What is the definition of allophone, what is the relationship between allophones and free variation?
Phonemes are groupings of phones (different sounds), which language speakers treat as equivalent.
The phones that are variants of the same phoneme are allophones of the phoneme.
Normally, the distribution of allophones depends on their context: there is a rule, based on surrounding phonemes, which determines whether one allophone or the other is used.
If you can’t work out such a rule, then you give up and say that the choice of allophone is random. (Or at least, it’s random phonologically: there may be other factors at play, such as sociolinguistics.)
If the distribution of allophones is not phonologically predictable, then the allophones are in free variation.
What decides if a word is easy to learn due to similarity with a known one?
It’s an interesting question, OP. I wonder whether too much similarity will make a word less easy to learn, not more, due to the potential for confusion.
There can’t be a categorical difference for when a word switches from similar to dissimilar. It’s not like a distance of 3 means similar and a distance of 4 means dissimilar. But here’s some starting points:
- The Damerau–Levenshtein distance is a linguistically appropriate metric for how different two strings are: it allows for not only deletion and addition of letters, but also transposition and substitution.
- You will presumably want to include syllable count in your metric: two words will be more different if their syllable count is different (meaning additional vowels). So in the distance metric, vowels count for more than consonants.
- OTOH if the two words are related through morphology, e.g. derivational morphology, they belong to the same family, and all difference metrics are off: the two words are related through a morphological rule.