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Category: Modern Greek
The Trakatroukides and their language
This is a complicated story no matter how one tells it and from what vantage point, but I’ve put this off a few months too many. So, following on from the preceding post on the Trakatroukides, let’s take the story from the top. Again, thanks to Butcher of Yore for doing all the research. After […]
How I found out about the Trakatroukides
This post has been put off for a long time, and its sequel even longer; but one of its protagonists has just asked for it here, so I will not put it off further. This is a translation of a derailed comment thread last October, over at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ Blog, through which I […]
GTAGE: We have removed him John
The Golden Treasury of Anglo-Greek Expressions (GTAGE) at slang.gr (see my pretext for this thread) begins with the enigmatic syntax of the following idiom: we have not seen him yet, and we have removed him John: ακόμα δεν τον είδαμε, Γιάννη τον εβγάλαμε. The actually meaning of the phrase is rather more transparent: “we have […]
Mariupolitan transcribed through Russian ears
Challenging people on what phonemes they’re hearing, when they’re analysing a language: that’s thankless stuff. There are subtle continua of phonetics, and if you’re actually doing this kind of thing for a living, you rely on spectrograms and electropalatograms, with chocolate paste to tell where your tongue is actually moving. One’s ears? They hear what […]
The status of Urum
I’ve already posted about the seesaw in the Soviet Union of the ’30s between Demotic and the indigenous variants of Greek, Pontic and Mariupolitan. As I’ve also mentioned, Greek is not the only language spoken by the ethnic group around Mariupol. A minority instead speak the Turkic language Urum. A group identifying itself as Greek […]
Shevchenko in Mariupolitan and Urum
The following are translations of Taras Shevchenko’s Testament into Mariupolitan Greek and Urum. They appeared in 1993 side by side, in a volume of (mostly Greek) translations of Shevchenko, the Ukraine’s national poet. The texts appeared in Cyrillic—including Kostoprav’s abridged translation, which would originally have appeared in the Soviet phonetic Greek alphabet. The transliterations into […]
Demotic in the Soviet Union
In the short-lived Springtime of the Nationalities, in the late ’20s and early ’30s, the Soviet Union encouraged its multitudinous constituent ethniticies to develop their languages into modern instruments of proletarian thought. Many languages were first written down in that period, and it was a freewheeling time, just as it was in art, poetry and […]
Soviet Orthography of Greek
I’m working on a post on the Greek language politics of the USSR, which glancingly mentioned the spelling reform that took place there in 1925. Because it’s a topic that deserves to be presented separately, I’ll put it in a separate blog post. The material isn’t mine, it’s from the blogger Πόντος και Αριστερά (Pontus […]
GTAGE: Screw you and your car jack!
Language and slang.gr advisory Greeks on email have inevitably received at least twice joke emails that feature Greek phrases literally translated into English, to hilarious effect. (For moderate to small values of “hilarious”.) The humour lies in the fact that the Greek phrases are idioms, which cannot be translated literally, or that English and Greek […]
What is the longest word of Online Modern Greek?
I’ve been surveying the longest words of Modern Greek, thanks to a thread at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog. But that’s not the only place long words of Modern Greek can be reported from. I’ve made mention previously of Hellas-L mailing list, which is available publicly as Usenet group bit.listserv.hellas. I dropped off the list […]