The Greek of Rumi and Walad, like the Greek of the Proto-Bulgarian inscrptions, the Judaeo-Greek scripture translations, and the Latin-Greek phrasebooks, should be a more accurate reflection of the spoken language of the time than what we have in Greek script, inevitably influenced by diglossia. In fact, given where it was written, Rumi and Walad […]
I’ll get into linguistic observations separately, but some literary notes here, including comments on the restoration of the text, and on its cultural particularities. The use of the Greek theological term σκήνωμα “hut, tabernacle” for the mortal body is noticeable, and establishes that Walad had been talking about Christianity with the local Greeks, and didn’t […]
I’ve just put online the various transcriptions available of the Greek verses written by Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273) (yeah, *that* Rumi), and Rumi’s son, Sultan Walad (1226-1312). I’m going to comment on the editions and the linguistics in the next couple of postings. Rumi and Walad wrote bits of Turkish and Greek among their […]
There’s three and a half millenia of Greek lexicon out there. Of course, that’s three and a half millennia if you accept that Mycenaean is the same language as is spoken on Greece’s Got Talent—which demands a bit of looseness in when you deem a language to have become a different language. (And the distinction […]
Philip points out that ípeto in the Dittamondo excerpt is also Greek: of course! And here, the commentary: “ípeto” Είπε το(ν) “He told him”. Obvious error for Είπα το(ν) “I told him”. I’m going to take the clitic on face value as accusative, confirming that whoever told degli Uberti about how a Macedonian peasant might […]
User kepleon has uploaded this past month four vids of someone telling primary school kids in Lenidi about Tsakonian, with examples, and singing in Tsakonian. Must follow up. I don’t agree with everything the guy says, but the nitpicking is not relevant. (But no, they don’t still speak Tsakonian in Turkey, and Costakis’ dictionary was […]
When I was researching the background to the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds in 1999, I came across Charles Gidel’s 1864 Imitations faites en grec depuis le douzième siècle, de nos anciens poèmes de chevalerie, which was the first mention of the Quadrupeds in scholarly literature. Early Modern Greek studies officially kicked off in 1870, with […]
When Thanasis Costakis, fresh out of high school, sat down in 1930 with Hubert Pernot to give him language data, Tsakonian was still quite different from Standard Greek, not just in morphology, but syntax as well. The phrase I keep coming back to is αρχίνηε κχαούντα “he started barking”: participles could still be the complements […]
If you’re Hubert Pernot, the great hellenist whose grammar of Tsakonian is a Neogrammarian masterwork, Tsakonian gets written in some bizarre adaptation of a bizzare French dialectological alphabet (Gillieron-Rousselot, which seems to have evolved into the French Romance transcription.) If you’re Agathocles Haralambopoulos, former prof at Aristotle Uni who did his doctorate on Tsakonian phonology, […]
It was 1991, and I was an engineering student who was not interested in engineering, and for whom the joy of mathematics had recently been killed by the “Shut Up And Learn The Formula” approach to the proof of Fourier Transforms. I met a girl at a party, and followed her into a linguistics course. […]