Nikos Sarantakos raised a few points about my previous post in comments. Rather than give a post-length response in comments, here’s a post-length response as a post: “b) hypercorrection re aspiration has produced some words that managed to get accepted like μέθαύριο or εφέτος.” Why those hypercorrections—”day after tomorrow; this year”, and not others? They’re […]
The prepositions of Ancient Greek, which were also used as verbal prefixes, had a rich and subtle semantics. As is the doom of all linguistic subtleties, the system has not survived, and the couple of dozen prefixes of antiquity have collapsed to a handful in the modern vernacular. (How does Nikos Sarantakos put it? Οι […]
I too noticed the breathless article in the Independent, right after New Year’s Day, on the discovery of a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece. The actual Independent article is not as over-the-top as the daft lead-in article, which has done the rounds through the world’s press. I […]
The reason why I picked Markos Vamvakaris’ song Ο Ισοβίτης for my ruminations on hiatus is its last verse, with its startling macaronic juxtaposition: όπως τον Έκτορα ο Αχιλλεύς τον έσουρνε στο κάροLike Achilles dragging Hector in his cart The clash isn’t just thematic of course, it’s also linguistic: Hector and Achilles are solemnly invoked […]
We saw a couple of posts ago the rebetiko musician Markos Vamvakaris in the 1930s, being more subject to the phonology of Puristic than Greeks might now expect of a singer extolling the underworld. Such an expectation says more about the romantic notions fomented by centuries of diglossia, than it does about the linguistic realities […]
I posted in November about Leo Allatius, who coined a new word in the Greek literary corpus through a misreading of Pindar—or rather, perpetuating a mediaeval misreading of Pindar. But with the transmission of Classical literature as haphazard as it was, Allatius was not the only writer to have come up with such creative misreadings. […]
Eighty year old recordings of popular music should tell you, for a normal language, how that language has changed in the interim. And so it is for Greek, as I’m finding by listening to the collected recordings of Markos Vamvakaris, 1933–1937. The catch is, diglossia has meant Greek is not a normal language; and the […]
The canon (patchwork though it is) of Greek lexica that I described a while back has a fair representation of German scholarship: Lust Eynikel & Hauspie, Bauer Danker Ardnt Gingrich, Trapp. The oddity is that German scholarship wasn’t represented there for the Classical period. Yes, LSJ is a major work, and DGE is more comprehensive […]
It’s been a little while since I’ve put up a language sample of an obscure variant of Greek; this is a sample of the Greek spoken in Calabria. Of the Greek spoken in Italy, the Greek of Salento is healthiest, with something like 20,000 speakers; the Greek of Calabria has less than a tenth of […]
Today’s installment of the Golden Treasury of Anglo–Greek Expressions (GTAGE) takes religion in vain. That does not mean the expressions I’m going through are blasphemous per se—although if taking religion lightly is not your thing, you shouldn’t be reading further. If anything, the expressions show how central a role Orthodox Christianity has played in how […]