I’ve finally taken the time to read Günther Henrich’s 1976 thesis on the spread of the -o vocative and -o genitive in Greek. My blog series has been something like 15 pp written off the cuff, with minimal research. Henrich’s is 270 pp of meticulous historical and dialectal research. He has orders of magnitude more […]
In the last few posts, I’ve worked through the analogies that have extended the o-vocative into proper names: M1–M5, O2–O6. There was to-ing and fro-ing, there was nebulous definition and redefinition of rules, there was a whole ballet of criteria. But the ballet orchestration can be formulated: the rules for the analogy are sweeping, even […]
So far we have accounted for: M1: Bisyllabic common nouns that used to be third declension: ˈɣeros “old man”, ˈðjakos “deacon”. (Ancient ɡérɔːn, diákɔːn). M2: Bisyllabic truncated, informal given names: ˈɣjorɣos, ˈnikos, ˈðimos (corresponding to the formal forms ɣeorɣios, nikolaos, ðimitrios) “George, Nick, Dimitri” M3: The trisyllabic (truncated) name aˈlekos “Alec” O2: Bisyllabic formal given […]
So we have the messy data on the distribution of the o-vocative in Greek. And we have the tools to try and make sense of that distribution, in terms of features that classes of nouns with the o-vocative have in common. We also, as it turns out, have an entire PhD thesis on the o-vocative: […]
We have seen the data on the spread of o-vocatives in Modern Greek. I will post how I make sense of the data. But first, some preliminaries about analogy. How analogy works Analogy in language change takes a linguistic rule that applies to one word or paradigm or category, and starts applying it to another […]
This is a story of analogy, based on an article at Nikos Sarantakos’ blog (because the traffic between our two blogs has ever been two-way). Sarantakos’ article in turn cites an older blog post by Giannis Haris, which cites two grammars of Modern Greek. The story is the retreat of the vocative in Modern Greek. […]
Michalis Bourboulis wrote the lyrics for Your Firework Eyes. Michalis Bourboulis has been interviewed about his greatest songs, including Your Firework Eyes. You can be a great artist, and still be a dick. For that matter, you can be a great artist, and still be clueless about what you’ve wrought. Bullying Stamos Semsis, the songwriter […]
Your Firework Eyes, Τα βεγγαλικά σου μάτια, is a 1995 song (Lyrics: Michalis Bourboulis, Music: Stamos Semsis), first sung by Giorgos Dalaras, and covered the following year by Dimitris Mitropanos. It is a moving, fragile, beautiful song about the loss of love. And there are some interesting things about how it was put together, that […]
I am about to post here on late song renderings by Dimitris Mitropanos, and there’s something about what he did with his late repertoire that was special, but that I couldn’t quite put a name to. Mitropanos had a decades-long career as a Laiko artist: he worked in the mainstream Greek bouzouki pop tradition, singing […]
I have consolidated my old Quora posts http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/2016-10-01-what-did-your-language-sound-like-1-000-years-ago/ and http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/2016-10-05-what-did-your-language-sound-like-500-years-ago/, and just had it published in Greek on Nikos Sarantakos’ blog: https://sarantakos.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/nikolaou-3