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Category: Modern Greek
Old Man Hare
[EDIT: followup post] As I already mentioned in the past, the occasional Early Modern Greek word ends up in LSJ, because it has been used in a scholion to explain an Ancient word, and LSJ figured they’ll take all the help they can get. Such a word is λαγόγηρως. Literally, it’s “Old Man Hare”. Actually, […]
Thanasis Costakis RIP
Thanasis Costakis, doyen of Tsakonian Linguistics, has died, and the next Tsakonian Studies conference at Lenidi will be held in his memory. I have not heard of his passing anywhere else, and cannot find an obituary online, so I assume it has been this past year. I was lucky enough to talk to him in […]
Where are the Tsakonian villages in Turkey?
I’m revising my paper on Tsakonian lexicostatistics, that I took a month off my PhD to write in 1997. (No idea what I’ll do with it yet.) As part of that, I needed to provide an updated map of where Tsakonian was spoken, including the villages in the Propontis, Havoutsi (Χαβουτσί) and Vatika (Βάτικα) (aka […]
Allemannic description of Tsakonian
I’d like the record to show that the Allemannic Wikipedia (as in the dialects of Switzerland, Southwest Germany, Western Austria) have an article on Tsakonian with stuff not seen elsewhere online, including some photos of Tsakonian greetings, and a list of villages with their Tsakonian names. In fact, they’re using a source I don’t happen […]
Analogy in third declension -ης nominals
If you’re blogging about language, and want a readership broader than two linguists to follow you, lexicon is easy to blog about: people get words. Grammar is harder to blog about: people get grammar only when they’ve been told they’re doing something wrong. And the operation of analogy on the declension of Ancient Greek—well, that’s […]
pessos and pinsus: a pedimental peculiarity
Sorry about that title. I promise not to do that too often. Over the last several months, I’ve been contributing translations to the Suda On Line project. (See writeup of project.) The Suda is a 10th century encyclopaedia cum dictionary, and often preserves information about Ancient Greece not available elsewhere. It also provides a lot […]
On the retreat of Polytonic
I’ve been putting off this post because I lost an earlier draft to a crash. The Cloud will come back to bite us yet; but until it does, why can’t I have access to the Cloud on the train? Without having to remember to top up my wireless modem? So, it started a few weeks […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tsakonian on YouTube
User kepleon has uploaded this past month four vids of someone telling primary school kids in Lenidi about Tsakonian, with examples, and singing in Tsakonian. Must follow up. I don’t agree with everything the guy says, but the nitpicking is not relevant. (But no, they don’t still speak Tsakonian in Turkey, and Costakis’ dictionary was […]