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Tag: Early Modern Greek
Dictionary Updates: Kriaras, Vol. XVII; Trapp, Fasc. VII
New volumes of Kriaras’ and Trapp’s dictionaries of Greek are out. Kriaras covers Vernacular Early Modern Greek, and Trapp covers (mostly learnèd) Late Mediaeval Greek, with some overlap. For background on these dictionaries—and on the coverages of the dictionaries of Greek in general—see my earlier post on Dictionary coverage of Greek. Trapp’s Dictionary, Fascicle 7 […]
κατσούλι “kitten”: where did the cutesy /ts/ come from?
Tom Recht had a simple question in comments the other day, which admits of an almost simple answer. There is a catch, in that there is no clear phonological reason for what has happened, and I offer an unconvincing guess at it. Tom Recht’s question: I’m curious about the word κατσούλι, which is intriguingly similar […]
TLG Updates, May 2010
The TLG has just released the latest updates to its text collection. This is what has been added, from the oldest to the most recent texts, with Early Modern Greek texts separate: Philodemus (i BC): On Anger (ed. Indelli, 1988) Philodemus is a Hellenistic philosopher, who we know about mainly thanks to Mt Vesuvius, carbonising […]
Maximus of Gallipoli: linguistic commentary
I posted an excerpt of the 1638 New Testament translation by Maximus of Gallipoli last week. I’ve been rather busy and will continue to for at least a fortnight, and the promised linguistic commentary on the text has held me up from writing other stuff. Well then, here it is. It’s a lot of information, […]
RIP: Tassos Karanastassis
Tassos A. Karanastassis (Τάσος Καραναστάσης), lecturer at the University of Thessalonica seconded to the Centre for Byzantine Studies, passed away last week, entirely too young. He finished up at the Centre for Byzantine Studies; but for much of his career, from 1980 to 2003, Tassos worked at the Dictionary of Mediaeval Greek Vernacular Literature. The […]
Maximus of Gallipoli, Geneva, 1638: Mark 13:1-22
I’ve been off for a week, and things on this blog have been a little salty-languaged of late (and will get so again: there’s a nice list of slang.gr idioms I’m planning on walking through). To offer some respite from all that, I’m posting an excerpt from the translation of the New Testament into Modern […]
Chantakites: Linguistic analysis
As I promised, I’m going to walk through the linguistic particularities of Manuel Chantakites’ letter. This is pretty usual in the philological editions of Early Modern texts: there’ll be a couple of pages in the preface enumerating linguistic oddities, working their way up from phonology through to syntax (and not getting far beyond syntax, or […]
Generalised use of να in Early Modern Greek
I’ve been reluctant to write this post for a couple of reasons: It requires dropping a moderate amount of linguistic science; I’m not prepared to do either the research or the bibliographic survey to back it up; It’s probably already been worked out by the Grammar of Mediaeval Greek people. If the latter is the […]
Manuel Chantakites, Away from Crete, 1420
Rather than continue from the previous post by presenting the theoretical framework of documentary texts, I will instead give a sample of that kind of text. This is one of the absurdly few private letters we have in the vernacular from the Early Modern period. It’s such a rare thing, Kriaras’ online dictionary abbreviates it […]
Philological Reliability: Literary Texts
It’s safe to come out now, folks, I’m no longer debating the etymology of Greek four-letter words. But two points that came up in that debate—the reliability of a vernacular phrase in Tzetzes, and the unrelated search for the earliest attestation of the -opoulos suffix, bring up a philological point, about dating linguistic changes through […]