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Category: Modern Greek
Kaliarda VII: The Romani basis of Kaliarda, updated
I have found a copy of Montoliu’s paper on Kaliarda. I will post on it separately, but I’m going to use the opportunity to supplement the Romani etymologies provided by Poniroskilo on slang.gr, with the extensive etymologies provided by Montoliu. Where a term appears in both Poniroskilo and Montoliu, I have gone with Poniroskilo’s transliteration […]
Kaliarda VI: Revenioti
The trans activist Paola Revenioti has made a series of documentaries in recent years about sundry aspects of Greek society. On of these was a a documentary about Kaliarda in 2014; the trailer is available on YouTube: There is an interview with her on Lifo magazine about the documentary, as well as an extensive review; […]
Kaliarda V: Romvos, Angelou, Gkartzonika
I noted that there was a dearth of material online on Kaliarda. There is a dearth, but not as much as when I posted about it in 2010. I will come back to two more extensive sources in later posts: the 2015 documentary on Kaliarda by trans activist Paola Revenioti, and Katerina Christopoulou’s 2016 PhD […]
Kaliarda III: The Romani basis of Kaliarda
NOTE: Updates on The Romani basis of Kaliarda, updated. What Petropoulos had not picked up on in his first edition was that the base of the distinctive lexicon of Kaliarda is Romani—something that he had emended by the second edition. There is precedent for a Romani base in other Greek cants—notably the builders’ cant Dortika […]
Kaliarda II: Petropoulos’ description
Having given what little information Petropoulos gives about the gay community that spoke Kaliarda, I am moving on to discussion of the cant itself. I’m putting Petropoulos’ own linguistic observations up first, with some comments of my own. I’m going to be vacillating between Greek and IPA for this, because I want to make sure […]
The speakers of Kaliarda
I’ve namechecked Kaliarda, the gay Greek cant, several times on this blog. There is still a dearth of English-language information on Kaliarda; and since this blog is about making Greek linguistics more googlable in English, I’m going to attempt to remedy that. In this post, I’m going to start by giving what information is to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]