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Category: Ancient Greek
DGE Vol VII
Volume VII of the Diccionario Griego-Español (ἐκπελλεύω–ἔξαυος), intended to be the most comprehensive dictionary of Ancient and Early Middle Greek, has been published in 2009, and is available for purchase. (I’ve just ordered it.) I found the new volume by googling; you’d be none the wiser about that from the DGE’s own web page, which […]
Lerna: Hitler finds out that the Greek language has no more than 200000 words
Travelling as I am in the U.S., I’m going to be light on blogging here at Hellenisteukontos (well, even lighter than usual); any blogging I do is going to be travelogues in The Other Place (once I’m somewhere worth traveloguing about.) But I’ve just found out that Stazybo Horn, honoured member of Team Fortier who […]
The 23 to 29 Apolloniuses of Classical Literature
I’m parking this posting here for lack of somewhere else to park it. (It’s not strictly language-related, but I’m realising philology posts are probably better pitched here than in The Other Place.) In my day-job capacity, I’m posting on the fluidity of identity in repositories—how, particularly if you’re relying on computer deduplication of identity, there […]
Deictic force of Hellenistic demonstratives
Quick note: Ἐν Ἐφέσῳ notices from the linguistics literature that the meaning of demonstratives in Modern Greek depends on their position: αυτό το μπουτάκι “that-one the pork-joint” is more physical deixis (“that pork joint which I’m pointing at”), whereas το μπουτάκι αυτό “the pork-joint that-one” is more discourse deixis (“that pork joint which I mentioned […]
Nastratios in Pagdatia
A thread last month at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog, about insulting commentary on a candidate MP from the Muslim minority, got derailed in comments (the way good comment threads do) into a discussion of whether there was any point teaching Ancient Greek in high school in Greece. The reason why Ancient Greek is taught […]
A mutant optative in Galen
I feel guilty, on occasion, that I blog about soft linguistics here—language and identity, spelling conventions, linguistic geography—at the expense of hard linguistics: phonology, morphology, even *shudder* syntax. It’s easy to post about diglossia, because it’s fun social stuff that everyone has an opinion about; it’s much harder to get worked up about optatives. Because […]
Lerna: Epilogue
Καλοσωρίζω κάπως καθυστερημένα τους αναγνώστες του Βήματος που ενδεχομένως να βρέθηκαν σ’ αυτό το ιστολόγιο, και τους καλώ να εντρυφήσουν όσο τους βαστά στα νερά της Λέρνας… I never did close off the Lerna series of posts, on the count of lemmata of Greek and the urban legends that have grown around its misinterpretations. Part […]
On nominalisations ending in -εία
A post on Greek spelling. You’ve been warned. The spelling of the noun ending -εία vs. -ία had come up a few months ago on the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, as an orthographic bedevilment. Modern Greek writers feel ἀμηχανία (awkwardness) about how to spell the ending, and they’ll be reassured to know the Byzantines felt […]
Lerna VIIc: Variants
The various counts of lemmata that I’ve been putting out for the last while have made little mention of the difficulty in deciding whether two forms belong to variants of the same lemma, or distinct lemmata. The judgement call is difficult enough within a homogeneous language, with slight variations in derivational morphology. It’s even worse […]
Lerna VIIb: Lemma counts and proportion of text recognised
We can keep dredging lemmata up to move towards a target of 300,000. But of course for a living language, as Modern Greek now is and as Ancient Greek once was, there is no ceiling in lemmata: people can always make up new words, and do. And because dictionaries will never exhaust what words people […]