Tag: orthography

Karamanlidika orthography

By: | Post date: 2019-01-26 | Comments: 7 Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek
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I blogged about Phanariot in the last post, but what I actually wanted to talk about was something far more tangential. Phanariot, as we discussed, was filled to the brim with Turkish loanwords. Phanariot was still Greek, and it was still written in Greek script. That included the Turkish loanwords in the Greek. But the […]

Sorting of breathings and accents in Unicode

By: | Post date: 2011-03-15 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Writing Systems
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Microsoft’s implementation of Unicode, as a recent post by Michael Kaplan points out, sorts ἒ and ἕ as the same character. In fact, it sorts identically any vowel with acute and rough breathing, and the same vowel with grave and smooth breathing. Why is it so? Allow me to get my geek on. You may […]

Mariupolitan transcribed through Russian ears

By: | Post date: 2010-04-11 | Comments: 9 Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Writing Systems
Tags: , ,

Challenging people on what phonemes they’re hearing, when they’re analysing a language: that’s thankless stuff. There are subtle continua of phonetics, and if you’re actually doing this kind of thing for a living, you rely on spectrograms and electropalatograms, with chocolate paste to tell where your tongue is actually moving. One’s ears? They hear what […]

Shevchenko in Mariupolitan and Urum

By: | Post date: 2010-04-07 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Writing Systems
Tags: , , ,

The following are translations of Taras Shevchenko’s Testament into Mariupolitan Greek and Urum. They appeared in 1993 side by side, in a volume of (mostly Greek) translations of Shevchenko, the Ukraine’s national poet. The texts appeared in Cyrillic—including Kostoprav’s abridged translation, which would originally have appeared in the Soviet phonetic Greek alphabet. The transliterations into […]

Soviet Orthography of Greek

By: | Post date: 2010-03-31 | Comments: 8 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: , , ,

I’m working on a post on the Greek language politics of the USSR, which glancingly mentioned the spelling reform that took place there in 1925. Because it’s a topic that deserves to be presented separately, I’ll put it in a separate blog post. The material isn’t mine, it’s from the blogger Πόντος και Αριστερά (Pontus […]

Linguashmucks: Motorcycle Boy 1, Purity of Greek 0

By: | Post date: 2009-09-22 | Comments: 14 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: , ,

Enough teasing: at last, here is the translation of Motorcycle Boy’s post “Linguashmucks” (Οι Γλωσσοκόπανοι). To lead in: my friend Diana, of the blog Surprised By Time (bringing the Mediaeval Peloponnese to life) forwarded me a link, and suggested I blog about it. The link was to an article in the Athens press (here in […]

Islántē: Island Of The Fish-Eaters

By: | Post date: 2009-09-07 | Comments: 5 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , , ,

[EDIT: This post has been updated] The quiz I set last post gave me an excuse to Google Σαμῶται, and in the process to find that Lascaris Cananus is online—after a fashion. So this post is about him. Lascaris Cananus wrote a page about his visit to Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland in the 15th […]

What’s Londínon in the language of the Inglínes?

By: | Post date: 2009-09-03 | Comments: 16 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek, Modern Greek
Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve been working on lemmatising the TLG for, oh, over six years. And lemmatising the TLG includes lemmatising its proper names. The TLG is, in quantity, a mostly Byzantine corpus, even though the point of the TLG was ancient literature: the Byzantine corpus is what survived most. And in the absence of a Byzantine gazetteer […]

On nominalisations ending in -εία

By: | Post date: 2009-08-17 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: , , , ,

A post on Greek spelling. You’ve been warned. The spelling of the noun ending -εία vs. -ία had come up a few months ago on the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, as an orthographic bedevilment. Modern Greek writers feel ἀμηχανία (awkwardness) about how to spell the ending, and they’ll be reassured to know the Byzantines felt […]

Response to Kaplanis on Early Modern monotonic

By: | Post date: 2009-05-23 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek, Writing Systems
Tags: , ,

These are my reactions to Kaplanis’ paper on using the monotonic for Early Modern texts. Vernacular Polytonic is Absurd: Nolo Contendere To start with, I agree with the position that applying the polytonic to Modern Greek is capricious and arbitrary and a blockage for learners. Triantafyllidis was the linguist Kaplanis cited (with tildes for circumflexes) […]

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