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Month: October 2017

ουγκανιά and αντισπισισμός

By: | Post date: 2017-10-30 | Comments: 18 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Welcome to Exarchia: But lets take a look and see if we can discover the truth. What is Exarchia? Is it right to portray the area as an evil den of anarchists and criminals living in a neighborhood that is beyond the law, something like the town of Deadwood in the HBO series? Actually it […]

GTAGE: The Tsipras Edition Part #3

By: | Post date: 2017-10-28 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

In two previous posts, I had gone through the Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions (GTAGE) approach to Alexis Tsipras’ odd translation of the Greek saying We’ve eaten the donkey—and the tail has been left over for us. (Or: We’ve gone and eaten a donkey; are we to get stuck on the tail?) as There is […]

Did Tzetzes write the first attested instance of μουνί?

By: | Post date: 2017-10-27 | Comments: 9 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Literature, Mediaeval Greek

The first recorded instance of μουνί “cunt”, as I reported in 2010, is in the epilogue of John Tzetzes’ Theogony, written in the 1140s (based on when the patron who commissioned it was active). The next attestations are from the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds (1364), and the excommunication of a priest (1383). At the time, […]

PAWAG is back as Words In Progress

By: | Post date: 2017-10-24 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics

The PAWAG—Poorly Attested Words of Ancient Greek site has been relaunched as Words In Progress: Supplementary Lexicon of Ancient Greek. The site is an initiative by Franco Montanari who is responsible for the Vocabolario della lingua greca (recently translated into English as the new Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek): The WiP – Words in Progress […]

Early Modern Greek site

By: | Post date: 2017-10-24 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Literature, Mediaeval Greek

The Early Modern Greek site is back after being inactive for a while, and its curator Notis Toufexis is making up for lost time posting new entries on editions and digitised manuscripts. There is also an associated Facebook group.

μουνί < maimūn

By: | Post date: 2017-10-24 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

I’ve just discussed Kostas Karapotosoglou’s proposed Greek etymology for μουνί “cunt”, which he advanced in 2008 as an alternative to both the problematic Greek proposals to date, and the Italian proposals to date, which Italians themselves are not enthusiastic enough (although Tasos Kaplanis has argued for one here.) In the Italian proposal article, I noted […]

μουνί < monna "my lady"

By: | Post date: 2017-10-23 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

I’d mentioned in the previous post that Italianists, at least, believe that Venetian monín “cunt” derives from Greek μουνί “cunt”, rather than vice versa. We know that the word was current in both Venetian and Greek at the same time, and in fact it had made it into the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, as monín de […]

μουνί < αἱμώνιον

By: | Post date: 2017-10-23 | Comments: 4 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

In Etymologies and attestation of μουνί, I had reviewed the proposed etymologies of Modern Greek μουνί “cunt”. By far the easiest course would have been to derive μουνί from Venetian monín “cunt”; but it turns out that the Venetian word likely originates from the Greek, rather than vice versa. The etymologies I reviewed were listed […]

GTAGE: The Tsipras Edition Part #2

By: | Post date: 2017-10-22 | Comments: 5 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags:

Among the reactions I saw on Facebook to the Tsipras meme in GTAGE: The Tsipras Edition Part #1 was this by Aineias Kapouranis: So Donald, to say the figs figs and the tub tub, and because I ate the whole world to find you I believe that it is better to say them at a […]

GTAGE: The Tsipras Edition Part #1

By: | Post date: 2017-10-22 | Comments: 4 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags:

Before I stopped posing on this blog six years ago, I’d inaugurated GTAGE, a series on comically literal translations of Greek into English, motivated by slang.gr’s Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions. I think these are useful in teaching Greek, because they help illustrate some at times unexpected discrepancies between Greek and English. In his recent […]

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