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Category: Linguistics
Rumi & Walad: Cantabrigensian Contribution
I forwarded my posts on Rumi and Sultan Walad to Petros Karatsareas, who is in fact doing his doctoral work on Cappadocian morphology in Cambridge, and who had written me to ask what I thought of those texts a couple of months back. (I’d been intended to put them online for a while, but kept […]
Placenames of Kievan Rus’
A culture confident in itself (or arrogant, same thing) will assimilate foreign place names and personal names, bending them to its language. Thus did Kshayarsha become Xerxes, and Shoshenq, Sesonchosis. Thus did Svyatoslav become Sphentísthlavos, and Dagobert Takoúpertos, and Saint-Gilles Isangéles. Thus did Hujr become Ógaros, and Ma’di Karib Badichárimos, and Kormisosh Kormésios. Thus, in […]
Malamirovo, Bulgaria, 813
We have very, very, very little vernacular material from the Dark Ages, between Leontius of Neapolis in vii AD, and Michael Glycas’ Prison Verses from 1158. A couple of acclamations, the odd proverb, a song half-written down by Anna Comnena, a song reconstructed from a 16th century curse against mice, a few legal deeds from […]
Tsakonian song online
For our next text in our tour of Greek linguistic oddities: this collection of Tsakonian songs has been online for something like ten years, and it’s about time I tried to translate the one song in Tsakonian. Before I do, a trap for the unwary. The first song, Σου ‘πα, μάνα, πάντρεψέ με “I told […]
Belléli vs. Hesseling
I said last post that I would scan whatever was on Belléli’s review of Hesseling and put it online. I won’t, the printout is very hard to read, and the Hebrew and the French italics are recoverable only from context. (My Hebrew, of course, is context-free.) The bad quality of the printout is not so […]
Judaeo-Greek Genesis 11:1-9
What text to publish as a sample of the 1547 Judaeo-Greek Torah? The obvious Genesis 1 has already been scanned in by the Jewish Languages site. And a good thing too, because my photocopy of that page is really crap. Valetas included Genesis 9, the story of Lot. Well, if you’ve been trained as a […]
Judaeo-Greek Torah, Constantinople, 1547
I’d earlier mentioned in passing Dirk Hesseling’s publication of the Judaeo-Greek Torah (published 1547, not 1543); so I thought I’d regale you with a passage. First, though, a lot of digression. We don’t know a lot about Judaeo-Greek at all; Julia Krivoruchko (who contributed the online description of Judaeo-Greek) has been working in the area, […]
Michael Deffner, scoundrel
In what little you get about Tsakonian online, you will on occasion see reverent references of Michael Deffner (1848-1934), renowned Tsakonologist, who so loved Tsakonia that he made his home in Leonidion, who wrote the renowned 1881 Grammar of Tsakonian and the renowned 1923 Dictionary of Tsakonian. The problem with what little you get about […]
Rumi and Sultan Walad, linguistic notes
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 […]
Rumi and Sultan Walad, literary notes
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 […]