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Day: September 16, 2016
How hard is for Greeks that speak Standard Modern Greek to understand Tsakonian?
Not mutually intelligible. At all. The bizarre thing with Tsakonian is: the non-core vocabulary, you can understand, because it’s pretty much the non-core vocabulary of Greek. Except you’ve got some quite massive regular sound changes to deal with, which were regularly applied even to modern loans. [ɣramatici] for example, “grammar”, ends up as [ɣramacitɕi]. But […]
Do people in the Near and Middle East still refer to Westerners as Franks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks#Legacy In Greece: it was very much a mainstream term from Mediaeval times right through to the early 20th century. It was also used to refer to Greek Catholics; hence the classic song Frangosyriani “Catholic girl from Syros” (1932), from Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Catholic boy from Syros. The conflation of Western Catholics and Levantine […]