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Month: April 2009

Judaeo-Greek Genesis 11:1-9

By: | Post date: 2009-04-30 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Literature, Mediaeval Greek
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What text to publish as a sample of the 1547 Judaeo-Greek Torah? The obvious Genesis 1 has already been scanned in by the Jewish Languages site. And a good thing too, because my photocopy of that page is really crap. Valetas included Genesis 9, the story of Lot. Well, if you’ve been trained as a […]

Judaeo-Greek Torah, Constantinople, 1547

By: | Post date: 2009-04-30 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Literature, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: ,

I’d earlier mentioned in passing Dirk Hesseling’s publication of the Judaeo-Greek Torah (published 1547, not 1543); so I thought I’d regale you with a passage. First, though, a lot of digression. We don’t know a lot about Judaeo-Greek at all; Julia Krivoruchko (who contributed the online description of Judaeo-Greek) has been working in the area, […]

Michael Deffner, scoundrel

By: | Post date: 2009-04-26 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
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In what little you get about Tsakonian online, you will on occasion see reverent references of Michael Deffner (1848-1934), renowned Tsakonologist, who so loved Tsakonia that he made his home in Leonidion, who wrote the renowned 1881 Grammar of Tsakonian and the renowned 1923 Dictionary of Tsakonian. The problem with what little you get about […]

Rumi and Sultan Walad, linguistic notes

By: | Post date: 2009-04-24 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , , , ,

The Greek of Rumi and Walad, like the Greek of the Proto-Bulgarian inscrptions, the Judaeo-Greek scripture translations, and the Latin-Greek phrasebooks, should be a more accurate reflection of the spoken language of the time than what we have in Greek script, inevitably influenced by diglossia. In fact, given where it was written, Rumi and Walad […]

Rumi and Sultan Walad, literary notes

By: | Post date: 2009-04-22 | Comments: 6 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , , ,

I’ll get into linguistic observations separately, but some literary notes here, including comments on the restoration of the text, and on its cultural particularities. The use of the Greek theological term σκήνωμα “hut, tabernacle” for the mortal body is noticeable, and establishes that Walad had been talking about Christianity with the local Greeks, and didn’t […]

Rumi and Sultan Walad, Konya, mid-1200s

By: | Post date: 2009-04-22 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , , ,

I’ve just put online the various transcriptions available of the Greek verses written by Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273) (yeah, *that* Rumi), and Rumi’s son, Sultan Walad (1226-1312). I’m going to comment on the editions and the linguistics in the next couple of postings. Rumi and Walad wrote bits of Turkish and Greek among their […]

Dictionary coverage of Greek

By: | Post date: 2009-04-20 | Comments: 6 Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , , , ,

There’s three and a half millenia of Greek lexicon out there. Of course, that’s three and a half millennia if you accept that Mycenaean is the same language as is spoken on Greece’s Got Talent—which demands a bit of looseness in when you deem a language to have become a different language. (And the distinction […]

Μετά χαράς: supplemental

By: | Post date: 2009-04-18 | Comments: 4 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , ,

Philip points out that ípeto in the Dittamondo excerpt is also Greek: of course! And here, the commentary: “ípeto” Είπε το(ν) “He told him”. Obvious error for Είπα το(ν) “I told him”. I’m going to take the clitic on face value as accusative, confirming that whoever told degli Uberti about how a Macedonian peasant might […]

Tsakonian on YouTube

By: | Post date: 2009-04-16 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: ,

User kepleon has uploaded this past month four vids of someone telling primary school kids in Lenidi about Tsakonian, with examples, and singing in Tsakonian. Must follow up. I don’t agree with everything the guy says, but the nitpicking is not relevant. (But no, they don’t still speak Tsakonian in Turkey, and Costakis’ dictionary was […]

Μετά χαράς: archaisms in spoken Greek, 1350

By: | Post date: 2009-04-16 | Comments: 5 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: , , ,

When I was researching the background to the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds in 1999, I came across Charles Gidel’s 1864 Imitations faites en grec depuis le douzième siècle, de nos anciens poèmes de chevalerie, which was the first mention of the Quadrupeds in scholarly literature. Early Modern Greek studies officially kicked off in 1870, with […]

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