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Category: Linguistics
Accent in Modern Compounds: Speculations
Ancient Greek had mostly recessive accentuation in compounds, as we saw last post; there are exceptions, some nice, some messy, and a major group of exceptions with verbal nominals. If an Ancient Greek compound survived into Modern Greek, it had no reason to change accent location; we saw that for simple words as well, two […]
Accent in Ancient compounds
We left off with the tendencies on how to accent words in Ancient and Modern Greek. But our target (or at least, my target) is to work out the rules behind the accent of ξέμαγκας, a compound. Which means we now get to look at the rules for how to accent a compound in Ancient […]
How Greek accentuation works
In a previous post, I accented ΞΕΜΑΓΚΑΣ “the un-mangas, the ex-mangas” as ξεμάγκας. Nikos Sarantakos pointed out the correct accent is ξέμαγκας. I see why that is the correct accent, though it still looks wrong to me. To explain why, I’m going to spend the next few posts building up to this explanation of what […]
Aspiration questions
Nikos Sarantakos raised a few points about my previous post in comments. Rather than give a post-length response in comments, here’s a post-length response as a post: “b) hypercorrection re aspiration has produced some words that managed to get accepted like μέθαύριο or εφέτος.” Why those hypercorrections—”day after tomorrow; this year”, and not others? They’re […]
ἐκαληθεύω: an ill-fitting prefix in Choeroboscus
The prepositions of Ancient Greek, which were also used as verbal prefixes, had a rich and subtle semantics. As is the doom of all linguistic subtleties, the system has not survived, and the couple of dozen prefixes of antiquity have collapsed to a handful in the modern vernacular. (How does Nikos Sarantakos put it? Οι […]
Pontic infinitive, real and imagined
I too noticed the breathless article in the Independent, right after New Year’s Day, on the discovery of a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece. The actual Independent article is not as over-the-top as the daft lead-in article, which has done the rounds through the world’s press. I […]
Markos Vamvakaris: Ο ισοβίτης, Final verse
The reason why I picked Markos Vamvakaris’ song Ο Ισοβίτης for my ruminations on hiatus is its last verse, with its startling macaronic juxtaposition: όπως τον Έκτορα ο Αχιλλεύς τον έσουρνε στο κάροLike Achilles dragging Hector in his cart The clash isn’t just thematic of course, it’s also linguistic: Hector and Achilles are solemnly invoked […]
Markos Vamvakaris: Ο ισοβίτης
We saw a couple of posts ago the rebetiko musician Markos Vamvakaris in the 1930s, being more subject to the phonology of Puristic than Greeks might now expect of a singer extolling the underworld. Such an expectation says more about the romantic notions fomented by centuries of diglossia, than it does about the linguistic realities […]
στήτη, a post-Homeric ghost word
I posted in November about Leo Allatius, who coined a new word in the Greek literary corpus through a misreading of Pindar—or rather, perpetuating a mediaeval misreading of Pindar. But with the transmission of Classical literature as haphazard as it was, Allatius was not the only writer to have come up with such creative misreadings. […]
The hiatus of διαζύγιο “divorce”
Eighty year old recordings of popular music should tell you, for a normal language, how that language has changed in the interim. And so it is for Greek, as I’m finding by listening to the collected recordings of Markos Vamvakaris, 1933–1937. The catch is, diglossia has meant Greek is not a normal language; and the […]