The Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität published its first fascicle in 1994 as a joint project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Bonn, under the direction of Erich Trapp, and after a decade of preparatory work. The Lexikon started out as the Dictionary of Byzantine Greek focussing on the 9th to 12th centuries—but, in […]
In a previous post, I mused that the use of καλή σου ἡμέρα “Good day to you” in Constantinople, in texts such as De Cerimoniis from the 10th century, was problematic—since by then the dialect split was meant to be in place, between genitive pronouns in the South (Southern Italy), and accusative pronouns in the […]
Welcome to Exarchia: But lets take a look and see if we can discover the truth. What is Exarchia? Is it right to portray the area as an evil den of anarchists and criminals living in a neighborhood that is beyond the law, something like the town of Deadwood in the HBO series? Actually it […]
In two previous posts, I had gone through the Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions (GTAGE) approach to Alexis Tsipras’ odd translation of the Greek saying We’ve eaten the donkey—and the tail has been left over for us. (Or: We’ve gone and eaten a donkey; are we to get stuck on the tail?) as There is […]
The first recorded instance of μουνί “cunt”, as I reported in 2010, is in the epilogue of John Tzetzes’ Theogony, written in the 1140s (based on when the patron who commissioned it was active). The next attestations are from the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds (1364), and the excommunication of a priest (1383). At the time, […]
The PAWAG—Poorly Attested Words of Ancient Greek site has been relaunched as Words In Progress: Supplementary Lexicon of Ancient Greek. The site is an initiative by Franco Montanari who is responsible for the Vocabolario della lingua greca (recently translated into English as the new Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek): The WiP – Words in Progress […]
The Early Modern Greek site is back after being inactive for a while, and its curator Notis Toufexis is making up for lost time posting new entries on editions and digitised manuscripts. There is also an associated Facebook group.
I’ve just discussed Kostas Karapotosoglou’s proposed Greek etymology for μουνί “cunt”, which he advanced in 2008 as an alternative to both the problematic Greek proposals to date, and the Italian proposals to date, which Italians themselves are not enthusiastic enough (although Tasos Kaplanis has argued for one here.) In the Italian proposal article, I noted […]
I’d mentioned in the previous post that Italianists, at least, believe that Venetian monín “cunt” derives from Greek μουνί “cunt”, rather than vice versa. We know that the word was current in both Venetian and Greek at the same time, and in fact it had made it into the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, as monín de […]
In Etymologies and attestation of μουνί, I had reviewed the proposed etymologies of Modern Greek μουνί “cunt”. By far the easiest course would have been to derive μουνί from Venetian monín “cunt”; but it turns out that the Venetian word likely originates from the Greek, rather than vice versa. The etymologies I reviewed were listed […]