This blogpost in the ongoing thread on the Lernaean Text and counting words in Greek (see Lerna II, Lerna I) may be misdirected to the readership of this blog. It goes through basic notions in linguistics that some of you will be familiar enough with to be annoyed at. And given how the Lernaean text […]
I’ve started a series of posts on counting words in Greek (see: Lerna I). This is the kind of thing that revokes your linguistics cabal membership card, so I have to add that the posts are really about the journey to counting words, and the questions that come up along the way, rather than the […]
I’m revising my paper on Tsakonian lexicostatistics, that I took a month off my PhD to write in 1997. (No idea what I’ll do with it yet.) As part of that, I needed to provide an updated map of where Tsakonian was spoken, including the villages in the Propontis, Havoutsi (Χαβουτσί) and Vatika (Βάτικα) (aka […]
I’d like the record to show that the Allemannic Wikipedia (as in the dialects of Switzerland, Southwest Germany, Western Austria) have an article on Tsakonian with stuff not seen elsewhere online, including some photos of Tsakonian greetings, and a list of villages with their Tsakonian names. In fact, they’re using a source I don’t happen […]
I mentioned in the other place the Lernaean text, which fulminates that Greek has 90 million words, and English a mere 490,000. The text, of course, comes from people who have seen the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae’s word counts, and can’t tell between a word count and a word list. Still, it’s a wonder DARPANET could […]
If you’re blogging about language, and want a readership broader than two linguists to follow you, lexicon is easy to blog about: people get words. Grammar is harder to blog about: people get grammar only when they’ve been told they’re doing something wrong. And the operation of analogy on the declension of Ancient Greek—well, that’s […]
Sorry about that title. I promise not to do that too often. Over the last several months, I’ve been contributing translations to the Suda On Line project. (See writeup of project.) The Suda is a 10th century encyclopaedia cum dictionary, and often preserves information about Ancient Greece not available elsewhere. It also provides a lot […]
Julia Krivoruchko, from the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism project at Cambridge, has just responded extensively on my post on the Judaeo-Greek Torah and the controversy between Hesseling and Belleli on publishing it. (Matters which, as I already knew, she knows a lot more about than I do.) Because it’s not clear to me that […]
These are my reactions to Kaplanis’ paper on using the monotonic for Early Modern texts. Vernacular Polytonic is Absurd: Nolo Contendere To start with, I agree with the position that applying the polytonic to Modern Greek is capricious and arbitrary and a blockage for learners. Triantafyllidis was the linguist Kaplanis cited (with tildes for circumflexes) […]
So. I’m going to summarise the Mona Lisa with a doodle, and Tasos Kaplanis’ paper on Polytonic in Early Modern Greek editions with a dot point summary. It’s my summary, not his, and I invite comment on whether it’s a fair summary (including from him). In all, I sort of agree intellectually with his conclusion; […]