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Month: February 2010
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 […]
New TLG words in DGE VII
As I posted last month, the new volume of DGE (Diccionario Griego–Español) has appeared, spanning ἐκπελλεύω–ἔξαυος. As with any lexicographic work of an older language, some philology and textual emendation has been involved; this paper by Eugenio Luján Martínez gives four such instances, in Epicurus, Aretaeus, Nicander, and Galen. I have gone through this volume […]
Etymologies and attestation of μουνί
(See also μουνί vs. monín; μούτζα, μουνί and Tzetzes.) OK, let’s draw this talk of μουνίν to some sort of close. I’ll present the first attestations of the word, as given in Trapp’s and Kriaras’ dictionary; and then I’ll reproduce Moutsos’ presentation of the various proposed etymologies, with a few of my comments. The attestations […]
μουνί vs. monín
OK, I don’t particularly intend for this blog to be turned over to the etymology of sundry four-letter words, but the etymology of μουνί which I had posted on turns out to be complicated, and interesting. It’s certainly attracted a lot of interest in comments; I don’t remember my article on πεσσός “pier” getting this […]
Tzetzes’ Theogony, continued
I have picked up Hunger’s edition of the epilogue to Tzetzes’ Theogony, so I can now fill in some of the questions left open in my previous post, and correct some misunderstandings I had, In a separate post, I’ll speculate further on the etymology of μουνί. I’ve changed my mind on it, btw. But first, […]
Comparison, TLG BC and AD: log-likelihood
Helma Dik left a comment on my post on comparing TLG AD and BC through Wordle, suggesting I use Dunning’s Log-Likelihood measure of differential word frequencies in corpora, as Wordled by Martin Mueller. That lets you work out what the real shifts in frequency are, rather than trying to eyeball them through the aggregate word […]
μούτζα, μουνί and Tzetzes
I thank my esteemed commenters on the last post, and have a post-length response to them, concerning: The Complaint of the Anonymous Naupliot The Byzantinicity of the Greek insulting gesture of the moutza The controversy over the etymology of μουνί “cunt” The curious editorial fate of Tzetzes’ Theogony … Ah yes. There is a Language […]