The Wikipedia articles on Anatolian Bulgarians, English and Bulgarian, imply that Kızderbent was far away from the other settlements where Bulgarian was spoken. That’s why Bulgarians in Bulgaria became aware of the bulk of settlements in the 1860s, but Kızderbent was documented since the 1800s—and Shishmanov discusses Kızderbent in a separate chapter from the other […]
This is a complicated story no matter how one tells it and from what vantage point, but I’ve put this off a few months too many. So, following on from the preceding post on the Trakatroukides, let’s take the story from the top. Again, thanks to Butcher of Yore for doing all the research. After […]
This post has been put off for a long time, and its sequel even longer; but one of its protagonists has just asked for it here, so I will not put it off further. This is a translation of a derailed comment thread last October, over at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog, through which I […]
The TLG has just released the latest updates to its text collection. This is what has been added, from the oldest to the most recent texts, with Early Modern Greek texts separate: Philodemus (i BC): On Anger (ed. Indelli, 1988) Philodemus is a Hellenistic philosopher, who we know about mainly thanks to Mt Vesuvius, carbonising […]
This has not been one of the major reasons for my latest blog detox, but I’ve become involved in a translation project, which has cost me a few evenings and will cost me a few yet. Tom Schmidt has worked on a translation of Hippolytus’ Chronicle—a text I’d already noticed in my TLG work because […]
Or: Why Nicholas will continue occasionally two take a tuthree weeks off bloggingAs my readers—more loyal to me than I to them—have noted, I haven’t written here for a little while: since I was in the States, in fact. The reasons why are properly a matter for The Other Place, but I’ve had a conspiracy […]
The Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions (GTAGE) at slang.gr (see my pretext for this thread) begins with the enigmatic syntax of the following idiom: we have not seen him yet, and we have removed him John: ακόμα δεν τον είδαμε, Γιάννη τον εβγάλαμε. The actually meaning of the phrase is rather more transparent: “we have […]
Challenging people on what phonemes they’re hearing, when they’re analysing a language: that’s thankless stuff. There are subtle continua of phonetics, and if you’re actually doing this kind of thing for a living, you rely on spectrograms and electropalatograms, with chocolate paste to tell where your tongue is actually moving. One’s ears? They hear what […]
I’ve already posted about the seesaw in the Soviet Union of the ’30s between Demotic and the indigenous variants of Greek, Pontic and Mariupolitan. As I’ve also mentioned, Greek is not the only language spoken by the ethnic group around Mariupol. A minority instead speak the Turkic language Urum. A group identifying itself as Greek […]
The following are translations of Taras Shevchenko’s Testament into Mariupolitan Greek and Urum. They appeared in 1993 side by side, in a volume of (mostly Greek) translations of Shevchenko, the Ukraine’s national poet. The texts appeared in Cyrillic—including Kostoprav’s abridged translation, which would originally have appeared in the Soviet phonetic Greek alphabet. The transliterations into […]