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Tag: Pontic
Pontic infinitive, real and imagined
I too noticed the breathless article in the Independent, right after New Year’s Day, on the discovery of a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece. The actual Independent article is not as over-the-top as the daft lead-in article, which has done the rounds through the world’s press. I […]
Pontic locatives
In the last post, I said—somewhat flippantly—that the locative adverbs of Pontic are neurotic; and John Cowan asked me to spell out how. To do so, I’ve gone through the 60 pp discussion of George Drettas’ 1993 grammar of Pontic, Aspects pontiques. I have to say, I don’t like Drettas’ grammar; as a friend said […]
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 […]
Demotic in the Soviet Union
In the short-lived Springtime of the Nationalities, in the late ’20s and early ’30s, the Soviet Union encouraged its multitudinous constituent ethniticies to develop their languages into modern instruments of proletarian thought. Many languages were first written down in that period, and it was a freewheeling time, just as it was in art, poetry and […]
Soviet Orthography of Greek
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 […]
Pontic in Cyrillic orthography
I’m perusing that Russian Pontian forum some more. The Pontic is done in Roman script by some (default foreign script these days, I suppose), and Cyrillic by others. The Mariupolitan I’d seen in print had a systematic mapping, including Дъ and Тъ for ð and θ. Things are more chaotic here: θ is usually ф—the […]
Greek in Turkish orthography
In the history of Greek, Greek adjusts to the orthography of the culture it falls under; and cultures have their own scripts. So the Catholic Greeks, and the Greeks of the Venetian cultural sphere, wrote in Roman script with Italian spelling. The Greek-speakers of Southern Italy now write Greek in Roman script with Southern Italian […]