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Category: Linguistics
αγορίνα I: The patriarchally safe meanings
I was asked to weigh in a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, on the provenance of the contemporary Greek slang word αγορίνα. It’s a term I myself, being in the diaspora, had not heard before this year, and I was suitably taken aback when I did first hear it. (“She’s calling me a female […]
Future Imperfect
Latin and Greek both had an indicative tense called the Future Perfect. The tense described a event occurring in future time, but with perfective aspect—something complete in the future. The future perfect fits neatly into the matrix of possible tenses of Greek: it has the reduplication of Greek perfect tenses, but the -s- ending of […]
Counterpoint: Against Derivational Morphology
Matt Treyvaud has refuted my argument in In Defence of Derivational Morphology, in the following comment which I’m happy to repost: “Speciesism” was a better choice than “specism” for the English word. Even an English speaker who was perfectly fluent in Latin would have chosen “speciesism” if they had any taste at all. To the […]
In defence of derivational morphology
In my post on the formation of speciesism, I noted that Speciesism is a coinage so clueless about how Latin works, it could only have been coined in English, and in English after people stopped learning classical languages, at that. (It dates from 1970.) The -es in Latin is an inflection. You never ever put […]
The Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität is complete
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 […]
Is the σου in καλή σου ἡμέρα out of place in Northern Greek
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 […]
ουγκανιά and αντισπισισμός
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 […]
GTAGE: The Tsipras Edition Part #3
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 […]
Did Tzetzes write the first attested instance of μουνί?
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, […]
PAWAG is back as Words In Progress
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 […]