I’ve been putting off this post because I lost an earlier draft to a crash. The Cloud will come back to bite us yet; but until it does, why can’t I have access to the Cloud on the train? Without having to remember to top up my wireless modem? So, it started a few weeks […]
I forwarded my posts on Rumi and Sultan Walad to Petros Karatsareas, who is in fact doing his doctoral work on Cappadocian morphology in Cambridge, and who had written me to ask what I thought of those texts a couple of months back. (I’d been intended to put them online for a while, but kept […]
A culture confident in itself (or arrogant, same thing) will assimilate foreign place names and personal names, bending them to its language. Thus did Kshayarsha become Xerxes, and Shoshenq, Sesonchosis. Thus did Svyatoslav become Sphentísthlavos, and Dagobert Takoúpertos, and Saint-Gilles Isangéles. Thus did Hujr become Ógaros, and Ma’di Karib Badichárimos, and Kormisosh Kormésios. Thus, in […]
We have very, very, very little vernacular material from the Dark Ages, between Leontius of Neapolis in vii AD, and Michael Glycas’ Prison Verses from 1158. A couple of acclamations, the odd proverb, a song half-written down by Anna Comnena, a song reconstructed from a 16th century curse against mice, a few legal deeds from […]
For our next text in our tour of Greek linguistic oddities: this collection of Tsakonian songs has been online for something like ten years, and it’s about time I tried to translate the one song in Tsakonian. Before I do, a trap for the unwary. The first song, Σου ‘πα, μάνα, πάντρεψέ με “I told […]
I said last post that I would scan whatever was on Belléli’s review of Hesseling and put it online. I won’t, the printout is very hard to read, and the Hebrew and the French italics are recoverable only from context. (My Hebrew, of course, is context-free.) The bad quality of the printout is not so […]
What text to publish as a sample of the 1547 Judaeo-Greek Torah? The obvious Genesis 1 has already been scanned in by the Jewish Languages site. And a good thing too, because my photocopy of that page is really crap. Valetas included Genesis 9, the story of Lot. Well, if you’ve been trained as a […]
I’d earlier mentioned in passing Dirk Hesseling’s publication of the Judaeo-Greek Torah (published 1547, not 1543); so I thought I’d regale you with a passage. First, though, a lot of digression. We don’t know a lot about Judaeo-Greek at all; Julia Krivoruchko (who contributed the online description of Judaeo-Greek) has been working in the area, […]
In what little you get about Tsakonian online, you will on occasion see reverent references of Michael Deffner (1848-1934), renowned Tsakonologist, who so loved Tsakonia that he made his home in Leonidion, who wrote the renowned 1881 Grammar of Tsakonian and the renowned 1923 Dictionary of Tsakonian. The problem with what little you get about […]