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Tag: Modern Greek
The declension of -ευς: Ionic forward to Modern Greek
In the last (but one) post, we worked out a reconstruction of the -ευς declension, to the point that we could explain the Homeric inflections. Where we wanted to get to was not Homer, but Aristophanes’ Attic. But once we have the proto-forms in place, we can use sound change rules and analogy to explain […]
αμέτι μουχαμέτι: Semantics
We have just looked at the development of the syntax of αμέτι μουχαμέτι, from an Ottoman Turkish noun phrase ümmet-i Muhammed “nation of Muhammad”, to the Modern Greek adverb “come hell or high water”—which arguably has ended up, in a limited sense, as a noun comparable in function to σκοπός “purpose” or όρκος “oath”. And […]
αμέτι μουχαμέτι: Syntax
We saw in the last post the evidence for the development of αμέτι μουχαμέτι in the 19th century, from the Ottoman Turkish ümmet-i Muhammed “nation of Muhammed”, to the Modern Greek “come hell or high water”. We can already get a fair idea of how the meaning shifted, from the examples Vasilis Orfanos produced—and which […]
αμέτι μουχαμέτι, “Come Hell or High Water”
As I alluded to in the previous post, this post is about how the Ottoman phrase ümmet-i Muhammed, “Nation of Muhammad”, turned into the Modern Greek expression αμέτι μουχαμέτι, “come hell or high water”. The material for this post is taken from the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog—as much of the material on this blog is. […]
άμε and άντε: Semantics Persistence in Modern Greek hortative particles
Vasilis Orfanos wrote a magisterial post on αμέτι μουχαμέτι, which I alluded to last post, and which am using to base the next post on. (Or maybe the post after that.) To acknowledge my debt, this is a post on a topic he requested from me a few weeks back. The topic in turn is […]
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 […]
Accent on compounds with inflection switched to -as
In the survey of compound accentuation on slang.gr that I’m about to start on, I’ve left out compounds switching inflection. These inflections, I had reasoned, bring along their own accentuation; and since the whole word was being reaccented from scratch, that new accentuation is recessive. Which is clearly the case when the switch in inflection […]
ξε- in compounds and phrases
This post has been anticipated in comments already anyway; it’s the reason why I got the accent of ξέμαγκας wrong. One reason was given last post: it is much harder to predict where recessive accent goes for the -a(s) inflection than for the other inflections of Modern Greek. For masculine and neuter -o(s), feminine -si, […]
Accent in Modern Compounds: Further Speculations
I’m doing a quantitative survey of accent location in Modern Greek compounds, because the foregoing speculations have been rather irresponsible, absent hard data. Having thought about the issues some more—and being irresponsible, I’m making some more speculations about factors which influence accent location. We can put them to the test later. If the second half […]
Accent in Modern Compounds: Speculations
Ancient Greek had mostly recessive accentuation in compounds, as we saw last post; there are exceptions, some nice, some messy, and a major group of exceptions with verbal nominals. If an Ancient Greek compound survived into Modern Greek, it had no reason to change accent location; we saw that for simple words as well, two […]