Now that I’m paying more attention to Facebook, I’m seeing clickbait that I on occasion will take issue with here. (And probably more so in the Other Place.) Here’s an example: Στη… Γραμμική Β οι ταμπέλες του νέου ΒΟΑΚ As the Cretan edition of Εφημερίδα των Συντακτών (The Editors’ Newspaper) reports, the vice president of […]
It’s a curious thing, having been the co-translator of the Klingon Hamlet. Those involved in the enterprise decided to efface our egos, and publish the translation as a group effort back in 1996. My name’s on the inside cover; my name’s certainly underneath the introduction, which I strongly suspected was the only bit that most […]
Klingon is back. Not that it ever really went away. And this time, Paramount is no longer massacring the language, like it did on the TV series. No more wij jup shit. Wij jup? That’s the notorious TNG Klingonese rendering of “my friend”. Literally, as “my” + “friend”. Where wIj in Klingon is a possessive suffix. […]
This post is about a mediaeval Greek bird name. This post is, of course, not about a mediaeval Greek bird name at all. I coauthored with George Baloglou an analysis of a vernacular mediaeval Greek poem, the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds (Διήγησις Παιδιόφραστος των Ζώων των Τετραπόδων). The Tale recounts a parliament of animals, who […]
My post on Nathanael Bertos was occasioned by a Google search that led me to find out that there had been a recent PhD thesis, which had just been published, by Despoina Athanasiadou-Stefanoudaki. I bought the book. Bertos was advertised as one of the earliest writers in Greek vernacular prose, and I knew nothing about him; […]
As ably explained in Wikipedia: Names of the Greeks, there is a tension in mediaeval and modern times between names for Greeks based on their ancient heritage (Hellenic; Hellenes), and names for Greeks based on their Roman and Byzantine heritage (Romaic; Romioi = Romans). The tension was clearer within Greek, because Western languages used a term […]
I rejoin Hellenisteukontos with a translation of a sermon possibly by Nilus-Nathanael Bertos. No, most people have not heard of him, and justifiably so. He isn’t all that good. But the sermon struck me as so… WTF, so divorced from the world I know (a world substantially informed by the Reformation and the Enlightenment), that […]
I’m back. This is going to all sorts of audiences, so I now need to spell out where I’m back to, and where I’m back from. I maintained two blogs up until 2011. hellenisteukontos.blogspot.com was a blog about Greek linguistics, and opuculuk.blogspot.com was a blog about everything else. Hellenisteukontos in particular developed quite a following, […]
I’ll give Stelios Kazantzidis – Wikipedia’s take, but I’m very interested in hearing from Israelis why Greek Levantine-flavoured music, and his in particular, appear to have had such resonance in Israel. In Israel, he was a musical icon. Many of his songs were translated into Hebrew and performed by the country’s leading singers. Yaron Enosh, […]
In antiquity, every city had its own variant of the Greek alphabet; they varied not only on shape of letter, but also on which letters they used. Athens undertook a spelling reform in 403 BC, under the archonship of Eucleides, which adopted the Milesian variant of the Ionian alphabet, including the letters eta and omega. […]