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Category: Linguistics
What’s Londínon in the language of the Inglínes?
I’ve been working on lemmatising the TLG for, oh, over six years. And lemmatising the TLG includes lemmatising its proper names. The TLG is, in quantity, a mostly Byzantine corpus, even though the point of the TLG was ancient literature: the Byzantine corpus is what survived most. And in the absence of a Byzantine gazetteer […]
Old Man Hare: Etymology
I didn’t get to hit the books on Old Man Hare, but I’ve had enough feedback from readers and blegs that I can tell somewhat more of a story than last time. Let’s start with what we know.Byzantine: We know of four mediaeval instances of the word. In Suda, 10th century, λαγώγηρως is used to […]
War of Troy
For far, far too long, scholars have treated Early Modern Greek literature as linguistic quarry, and have neglected these texts as literature in their own terms. Over the past couple of decade, this injustice has finally started to be redressed, as the Romances in particular have gained much deserved attention. This post, on the other […]
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 […]
Old Man Hare
[EDIT: followup post] As I already mentioned in the past, the occasional Early Modern Greek word ends up in LSJ, because it has been used in a scholion to explain an Ancient word, and LSJ figured they’ll take all the help they can get. Such a word is λαγόγηρως. Literally, it’s “Old Man Hare”. Actually, […]
Thanasis Costakis RIP
Thanasis Costakis, doyen of Tsakonian Linguistics, has died, and the next Tsakonian Studies conference at Lenidi will be held in his memory. I have not heard of his passing anywhere else, and cannot find an obituary online, so I assume it has been this past year. I was lucky enough to talk to him in […]
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 […]
Lerna VIIa: Classical and Late vocabulary
Here, I’ll try making some sense of how the vocabularies of Greek have shifted between the corpora. This is where we got to. Lemmata Excluding Proper Names TLG + PHI #7 (viii-XVI, +tech +christ +inscr/pap) 214,381 172,646 TLG (viii–XVI, +tech +christ -inscr/pap) 201,823 162,009 LSJ Corpus (viii-VI, +tech -christ +inscr/pap) 159,636 124,215 Mostly Pagan (viii–IV, […]
Lerna VId: A correction of lemma counts
Last post had its share of egg on my face, showing systematic overcounts of word forms in the corpora. This post is another healthy serving of omelette, correcting the lemma counts given in Lerna VIa. The overall story is: There are less distinct word forms in the PHI #7 corpus than I thought There are […]