Category: Linguistics

A number of Kaliarda words contain allusions to contemporary or older history and literature; Kaliarda speakers were clearly well-read: aɣiosaviatiko crab (Agios Savvas’ cancer hospital; Greek karkinos “cancer” and Latin cancer both originally mean “crab”) vavelo someone knowing foreign languages < Babel varavotekno criminal: “Barabbas child” venizeloðosmeni Constantinople: “given away by Venizelos” ɣerako bracelet: from […]

Kaliarda has a couple of puns: kolombos, xristoforos top: “Christopher Columbus” as soundalike of kolombaras dubloðikeliazo to be diplomatic: “double looking”; Standard Greek ðiplomatis “diplomat” sounds like “double-eyed” (dipl-ōma: “folded (document) < “doubled thing” read as dipl-omma “double eye”) *papi document, certificate: “duck”, but puns on German Papier “papers”, often demanded during the Nazi occupation […]

I am drawing this sequence to a close with posts on noteworthy classes of Kaliarda words from Petrpoulos’ dictionary. To begin with: I have already posted (and updated) the Romani words in Kaliarda; the Italian words are given in Minniti-Gonias have already been discussed; and the Turkish, French, and English words have been sign-posted by […]

I just noted that Nikos Sarantakos posted on his blog a report on the 1904 attestation of Kaliarda. I neglected to mention that he posted a full scan of the 1904 article (1904–11–25), which includes a couple of paragraphs left out in Spatholouro’s transcription, which I’d previously posted here. “Our journal is able to announce […]

Nikos Sarantakos has just published on his blog a report on Spatholouro’s finds in his blog comments of early attestation of Kaliarda, as already reported here. My thanks to him for disseminating Spatholouro’s findings more widely, as they deserve. There’s not a lot of new information in the article, but he does mention that Manganareas’ […]

Thanks to friend of this blog Kostas Karapotosoglou, I’ve consulted Raffaela Biondo’s honours thesis on Lubunca from Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice: Lubunca: Lo slang queer del turco. Usi e funzioni sociolinguistiche a Istanbul e Berlino. The research contribution of Biondo’s thesis is a survey of attitudes towards Lubunca by gay Turks in Turkey and Germany, […]

Just when I thought I was done. Anna T’s article I just posted on mentioned Nicholas Kontovas’ 2012 M.A. thesis on Lubunca, the Turkish Gay Cant that until now I only knew of from Khyuchukov & Bakker’s 1999 paper. The first 9 pp of Kontovas’ thesis are available online. They’re actually enough to answer a […]

Trying to wrap up this series, I’ve come across two more Kaliarda texts online. The first is a chapter from a 2010 novel by Thomas Korovinis, Ο γύρος του Θανάτου [The tour of death], with nine protagonists in Salonica of the 50s. One of them is a trans sex worker, and her narrative has a […]

I’ve left till late a comparison of Kaliarda with Dortika, the earliest researched of the Greek para-Romani cants; and the points to be made here have already been substantively made elsewhere, including in comparison with the Turkish Gay cant (which is also clearly para-Romani), and in Sechidou’s article on Greek para-Romanis. Kaliarda is different from […]