This is a blog on the Greek language. That is why it is called Hēllēnisteúkontos, “From the guy who has been a scholar of Greek”. But I arrogate the right to post here about other linguistics stuff that I find of interest. I have a below-the-fold arrangement, so you can bypass it easily. This post […]
I didn’t get to hit the books on Old Man Hare, but I’ve had enough feedback from readers and blegs that I can tell somewhat more of a story than last time. Let’s start with what we know.Byzantine: We know of four mediaeval instances of the word. In Suda, 10th century, λαγώγηρως is used to […]
For far, far too long, scholars have treated Early Modern Greek literature as linguistic quarry, and have neglected these texts as literature in their own terms. Over the past couple of decade, this injustice has finally started to be redressed, as the Romances in particular have gained much deserved attention. This post, on the other […]
A post on Greek spelling. You’ve been warned. The spelling of the noun ending -εία vs. -ία had come up a few months ago on the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, as an orthographic bedevilment. Modern Greek writers feel ἀμηχανία (awkwardness) about how to spell the ending, and they’ll be reassured to know the Byzantines felt […]
[EDIT: followup post] As I already mentioned in the past, the occasional Early Modern Greek word ends up in LSJ, because it has been used in a scholion to explain an Ancient word, and LSJ figured they’ll take all the help they can get. Such a word is λαγόγηρως. Literally, it’s “Old Man Hare”. Actually, […]
Thanasis Costakis, doyen of Tsakonian Linguistics, has died, and the next Tsakonian Studies conference at Lenidi will be held in his memory. I have not heard of his passing anywhere else, and cannot find an obituary online, so I assume it has been this past year. I was lucky enough to talk to him in […]
The various counts of lemmata that I’ve been putting out for the last while have made little mention of the difficulty in deciding whether two forms belong to variants of the same lemma, or distinct lemmata. The judgement call is difficult enough within a homogeneous language, with slight variations in derivational morphology. It’s even worse […]
We can keep dredging lemmata up to move towards a target of 300,000. But of course for a living language, as Modern Greek now is and as Ancient Greek once was, there is no ceiling in lemmata: people can always make up new words, and do. And because dictionaries will never exhaust what words people […]
Here, I’ll try making some sense of how the vocabularies of Greek have shifted between the corpora. This is where we got to. Lemmata Excluding Proper Names TLG + PHI #7 (viii-XVI, +tech +christ +inscr/pap) 214,381 172,646 TLG (viii–XVI, +tech +christ -inscr/pap) 201,823 162,009 LSJ Corpus (viii-VI, +tech -christ +inscr/pap) 159,636 124,215 Mostly Pagan (viii–IV, […]