Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

How Greek accentuation works

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2011-02-06 | Comments: 6 Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, phonology

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 has happened:

The accentuation of ξέμαγκας follows the normal recessive default, which has survived into Modern Greek for compounds. Though μάγκας as a first-declension noun would not have allowed antepenult accent in Ancient Greek, the Modern system ignores that restriction for -ας, where there is no analogical form imposing the Classical penult stress (unlike -ης nouns). My notion was that the accent was preserved because ξε- was used quotatively, as with μα και ξε-μά.

If that paragraph made sense to you, what I am going to write about won’t have any real surprises. If not, stay tuned. What I’m going to build up, post by post, is an explanation of how accents work in compounds in Modern Greek. To get there, I will be going through

how accentuation works in Ancient Greek;
how it has changed into Modern Greek;
how compounds accent in Ancient Greek;
how Modern Greek has tried to realign the Ancient compound accent rules;
and finally, why a different construction made me get the accent wrong.

Towards the end, I’m going to do something silly; I’m going to try and work out the Modern accent rules for compounds on my own, rather than look them up. (Unless I find a good statement of the rules, next time I’m going through my photocopies in the garage.) Phonology was never my thing, so I haven’t researched the topic explicitly; and I don’t have the library access I used to. I’m reasonably sure someone *has* already worked these rules out. Me needlessly duplicating that effort promises to be fun for you, and embarrassing for me. Or vice versa.

So. How does Ancient Greek accentuation work? This is standard stuff for Ancient Greek grammar, but let’s run through it, because Ancient Greek phonology is not always taught properly—particularly in Greece. You can get the standard presentation from Smyth’s Grammar.

(And I rejoice that, by linking to the CHLT site copy of Smyth, I no longer have to link to Perseus’ buggy, clunky, crashy, crappy interface, even if where I link to is still the Perseus encoded Smyth.)

If you’re having to learn how to accent in the polytonic, particularly in Greece’s ossified paedagogical system, you are pummelled with the various possible permutations of accent on words:

oxytone: last syllable (ultima) has an acute: ἀνήρ
paroxytone: second last syllable (penult) has an acute: γέρων
proparoxytone: third last syllable (antepenult) has an acute: εὔλογος
perispomenon: last syllable has a circumflex: Ἀθηνᾶ
properispomenon: second last syllable has a circumflex: κοῖτος

If you actually try to work out how Ancient Greek accentuation works, though, things are simpler than that. There is one major distinction between kinds of accent in Greek. The rest are either subclasses, or minor exceptions.

The major distinction is, is the word accented as far back from the end as possible, or not? If it is, its accent is recessive. The Roman-era grammarians of Greek were rather more intelligent than the schoolmasters of Modern Greece, and they worked out that this distinction was more important; so they gave it a separate Greek name: barytone. (I know that Smyth says barytone is anything accented before the ultima, but barytone is usually used to mean recessive.)

With the five types we saw, barytone cuts across them:

	One syllable long	Two syllables long	Three syllables long
Oxytone	Barytone	Not	Not
Paroxytone	—	Barytone	Barytone if last syllable long
Proparoxytone	—	—	Barytone
Perispomenon	Barytone	Depends on proto-Greek vowels	Depends on proto-Greek vowels
Properispomenon	—	Barytone	Not

Let me explain. Accentuation in Ancient Greek is restricted to occuring in the last three (or four) moras of a word. A mora is like a syllable, only a long vowel or diphthong has two of them. So a word has recessive accent, if it occurs on the third last mora: that’s as far back as the accent can go. Except, the penult is treated as having only one mora, whether it’s long or short. (That’s the “or four”.)

If the ultima is short (that’s one mora), and we treat the penult as a single mora (that’s two moras), then the accent can be as far back as the antepenult (that’s three moras). e.g. ἄνθρωπος (short–long–short, moras: 1.1.1)
If the ultima is long (that’s two moras), then the accent can be as far back as the penult (that’s three moras). e.g. προσῳδίᾱ (short–long–short–long, moras: 1.2.1.2)
If the word is a properispomenon (circumflex on second last syllable), its ultima must be short: that’s how circumflexes work. So if that word has three syllables, it can’t be recessive: the recessive accent should be three syllables back. e.g. κυπρῖνος (short–long–short, moras: 1.2.1)
If the word is perispomenon, that always means that in proto-Greek, the final syllable was initially two vowels that have been contracted. For example, the citation verb ending -ῶ is proto-Greek *άω, *έω, or *όω. Homeric Greek in fact did still preserve *άω and *έω as verb endings, which is how Roman-era grammarians were able to work out the proto-Greek system.
If you look at what the proto-Greek vowels are behind a perispomenon, the accent could still be recessive. Proto-Greek *όω counts as three moras (short–long); that means *δηλόω is recessively accented, and so is its attested counterpart δηλῶ.

The mora restriction is confirmed by the behaviour of enclitics—words that are suffixed to a phonological word, without their own accent, so they end up adding to the mora count.

If a proparoxytone has an enclitic suffixed, its accent ends up not three, but four or five moras from the end of the new phonological word. To fix this, a secondary accent is added to the ultima. So ἄνθρωπος τις is phonologically /án.tʰrɔː.pos.tis/, with the accent now four moras back; to fix this, it is accented as ἄνθρωπός τις.
If a properispomenon has an enclitic suffixed, its accent ends up four or five moras from the end as well. Again, to fix this a secondary accent is added to the ultima. So κῆπος τις is phonologically /kɛ̂ː.pos.tis/, and the circumflex is now four moras back (kɛ̂ː is two moras, being long). This is fixed by accenting it as κῆπός τις.

Now with those rules, accent is distributed like this:

Verbs are in almost all cases recessive. There are a few inflections that aren’t recessive (see Smyth)—certain imperatives and optatives; and participles and infinitives, which behave like nominals. There’s also some interplay of the augment and accent, and there is real confusion about prefixed subjunctives and optatives; but our endpoint does not involve verbs, so I won’t spent any time on them.
Nominals—adjectives and nouns—are by default recessive.

That’s only a default, and it’s not a strong default. The following counts are taken from around 120,000 noun and adjective stems in LSJ and LSJ Supplement, for which the TLG lemmatiser has a definite analysis:

Recessive: 79,953
Ultima stress (syllables > 1): 30,401
Penult stress (syllables > 2, short ultima): 9096

So verbs in most inflections, and two thirds of all nominals, are recessive. That includes two-syllable–long words accented in their initial syllable, and one-syllable–long words. Most remaining nouns, and a few inflections, are stressed on the ultima. Penult stress—as distinct from recessive stress—is much less common: only a tenth of all nominals, and a few (though common) verb inflections—notably perfect passive participles, and most infinitives.

That’s Ancient Greek accentuation; how about Modern?

Modern Greek no longer has long and short syllables. The three-somethings-back restriction on accent location survives in most dialects of Greek, but now the “somethings” are just syllables (since any syllable just has one of them). Enclitics still generate secondary stress: άνθρωπος μου /ˈan.θro.pos.mu/ is accented as άνθρωπός μου (though nowadays people sometimes forget to write the second accent). κήπος μου on the other hand doesn’t need a second accent, since the accent in /ˈki.pos.mu/ is just three syllables back: there are no double moras for the η, because there is no longer a long vowel there.

Accent in Greek is now stress based rather than pitch based—which is why monotonic accentuation can dispense with the circumflex; and accent is still by default recessive. Recessive accent in Ancient Greek is defined by the accent going as far back as the Ancient moras allowed. Recessive accent in Modern Greek is defined by the accent going as far back as the Ancient moras allow.

… Seriously. What’s actually happened is, the location of stress is unchanged for any words that survived from Ancient into Modern Greek. So the Ancient rules for where the accent goes still apply to those words in Modern Greek. The only time where accent location is reevaluated, is when Greek-speakers realised there was something odd with where the accent now was; and the only reason for them to realise it is, they were comparing it to something else. Which means analogy.

Analogy has a long history of rearranging accentuation of feminine nominals; let’s go through some snapshots.

Diphthongs are long syllables, so a word ending in -οι should not be accented on the antepenult: the -οι already counts as two moras. However, most instances of -οι as an inflection, including the nominative masculine plural, are treated as short: ἄνθρωπος :: ἄνθρωποι, πρῶτος :: πρῶτοι.
The feminine nominative plural ending -αι is also treated as short: θάλασσα : θάλασσαι , πρώτη :: πρῶται
But does not mean -αι is recessively accented. If the feminine noun ends in short -α, it is accented on the antepenult in the nominative singular (θάλασσα), and the same happens in the plural, with its short -αι (θάλασσαι). Most feminine nouns, however, end in long -ᾱ (or -η, which developed from Proto-Greek -ᾱ). When those nouns are recessively accented, their accent stays on the penult in the singular, following the mora rule. But in the plural, their accent stays on the penult, even though -αι is supposed to be short: ἡμέρᾱ :: ἡμέραι, not *ἥμεραι. The accent may be recessive, but it’s more important for the nominative plural to have the same accent as the nominative singular.
That’s nouns. In adjectives, the feminine singular nominative also ends in in long -ᾱ (or -η). So if the adjective has recessive accent, the masculine and neuter singular (ending in short vowels) have the accent in a different place from the feminine, because of the feminine’s extra mora: δεύτερος :: δευτέρᾱ :: δεύτερον
But whereas the plural of ἡμέρᾱ is ἡμέραι, the plural of δευτέρᾱ is δεύτεραι. For the noun, the powerful analogy was between nominative singular and nominative plural. For the adjective, the analogy is not with the singular, but with the other genders in the plural: δεύτεροι :: δεύτεραι :: δεύτερα.
In the singular, the extra mora prevented the masculine and feminine from having their accent in the same place. In the plural, with -αι considered short, the extra mora is no longer in the way, and the pressure to match the masculine and neuter accent carries the day. For an adjective, as opposed to a noun, the other genders matter, and can force analogical change. In fact, that analogy is the only difference between feminine adjective and noun declension.
So far, we’ve seen analogy in Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek was constrained by moras not to clean up the accent discrepancy in the singular δεύτερος :: δευτέρᾱ :: δεύτερον. But Modern Greek has no moras.
Which meant Modern Greek speakers noticed that the accent of δευτέρᾱ was odd, compared to δεύτερος and δεύτερον, and fixed it. In addition, whereas Attic stopped -ᾱ going to -η after /r, i, e/, Modern Greek allowed -η after /r/ as well, which makes adjectives ending in -ρος -ρη -ρον look like other adjecives. (Adjectives ending in /-ios/ remained separate.)
Hence the singular of the adjective is now δεύτερος :: δεύτερη :: δεύτερο. That violates the Ancient mora rule; but there are no moras now to make that matter. Still, Modern Greek only violates the Ancient mora rule here, because there was good analogical reason to. ἡμέρᾱ has still kept its accent, as μέρα, and ἀγάπη has not changed to *άγαπη.

Unlike Ancient Greek, there are now nouns ending in -η which are accented on the antepenult—violating the mora constraint like δεύτερη does. But they too are the result of analogy: they are the third declension feminine nouns which in Ancient Greek ended in -ῐς.

Since -ῐς was short, if those nouns were recessive, they were accented on the antepenult: ἄνοιξις. Modern Greek got rid of its third declension quite comprehensively; when it came to these nouns (nom. -is, gen. -eos, acc. -in), the obvious thing to do was to move them across to the feminine first declension (nom. -i, gen. -is, acc. -i). The endings are pretty much the same in Modern Greek, so there was no good reason to shift the accent location: ἄνοιξις, ἀνοίξεως, ἄνοιξιν became άνοιξη, άνοιξης, άνοιξη.

If you’re brought up on Ancient Greek, άνοιξη is nonsensical: an eta has two moras, it can never be accented like that. For that reason, the conservative spelling was άνοιξι, keeping the etymological iota to avoid challenging the mora. But of course Modern Greek didn’t particularly care where the first declension endings were accented, when it carried them across to these third declension nouns. It didn’t bother changing where the old first declension feminines were stressed; but it had no reason to change where the old third declension feminines were stressed either. In the first case, accent conservatism preserves the old mora rule; in the second case, accent conservatism, plus analogy in inflection, throw out the old mora rule.

We just saw that Ancient Greek had first declension feminines with both a long -ᾱ/η (ἡμέρᾱ, δευτέρᾱ) and a short -ᾰ (θάλασσα). In the masculine, though, the first declension only ever ended in a long -ᾱς (or -ης). So καταρράκτης is recessively accented, and accent conservatism means it has not gone to *κατάρραχτης.

Modern Greek does have recessive nouns ending in -ας, like γέροντας. These have a similar origin as the recessive nouns in -η, such as άνοιξη. Masculine third declension nouns were all remodelled to look like first declension nouns, and the suffix of choice was /-as/, following after the third declension accusative /-a/. So γέρων, γέροντος, γέροντα was remodelled as γέροντας, γέροντα, γέροντα, after first declension ταμίας, ταμία, ταμία(ν): nom. -Ø, gen. -os, acc. -a was remodelled as nom. -as, gen. -a, acc. -a.

In fact the transition was so successful that most vernacular nouns in -ας come from third declension nouns; first declension nouns like ταμίας did not survive in colloquial use. Once the pattern was in place, proper names and other remodelled nouns could follow—like Καβάσιλας, or μάγειρας. Once again, the accent was wrong for Ancient Greek; once again, that did not matter in Modern Greek—but the accent disruption only happened because analogy introduced an innovation into the system.

Because of the innovation of recessive nouns like γέροντας, nouns like μάγειρας were introduced, which were impossible in Ancient Greek. Because of that pattern being established in turn, it because possible for the compound ξε + μάγκας to be accented ξέ-μαγκας—whereas Bacchylides could only accent προ + κόπτᾱς as Προκόπτας.

But that brings us to the recessive accentuation of compounds, which is next post.

Aspiration questions

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2011-02-02 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: Ancient Greek, compounds, Modern Greek, phonology

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 pretty commonplace notions, after all. LSJ has ἐφέτειος and ἐφετινός attested from ii AD, ἐφ’ ἔτος from ii BC, and καθ’ ἔτος from iv BC; so it’s an old hypercorrection—and I daresay not a savant one, but a product of the death-throes of when /h/ was actually still pronounced. The Latin-Greek glossaries record the “correct” μεταύριον, but I wouldn’t be surprised if μεθαύριον is also that old.

So they’re mis-aspirations, but i don’t think they are instances of trying to resurrect old /h/ and failing, like the learnèd instances I noted in Byzantium—like John of Gaza or Paul of Aegina. They don’t look like random misuses of /h/ either. μεθ’ αὔριον “after tomorrow” could well be an analogy from μεθ’ ἡμέρας “with the day = during daytime”; ἔτος “year” could even have had the variant /hétos/ in classical times.

c) you correctly point out the lack of elision in new coinages, albeit savant. This is something new in that even horrible hiatuses are tolerated like your μετα-αποικιακός [post-colonial] or even τηλε-εργασία [telecommuting] or the brand new νεο-οθωμανικός [neo-Ottoman], where the unelided type is equally frequent as the elided, despite the hiatus that stands out like a sore thumb. (I assume that hiatus means χασμωδία -if not, that is what I wanted it to mean).

Yup, hiatus is indeed χασμωδία. Hiatus-avoidance is a strong feature of Greek phonology throughout its history; but we are in a transparency phase now rather than a phonological smoothing phase. That’s a well-established seesaw in language change, between forms easy to break apart and understand—but harder to pronounce; and forms easier to pronounce, but harder to break apart. Hiatus-dodging is dead for prepositional prefixes in the modern vernacular: /para-/ for “overdoing something” is now just /para-/, whether it’s followed by a consonant or a vowel.

Similarly, /tile-erɣasia/ *is* ugly, but it has a straightforward justification: we now only have to retain one variant of tele- in our command of Greek, and not a tel- variant. Ancient Greek had τηλ-αυγής “far-shining”, and we’ve borrowed τηλ-αισθησία “extra-sensory perception” from the Classically-correct French télésthesie. But it’s inconceivable to me that “tele-employment” (say) would now be coined as anything but τηλε-ασχόληση. And we’re just not concerned about euphony any more.

In no small part, that’s because of having Puristic spelling pronunciations contaminate our phonology. We’re used to Ancient Greek loans and Puristic coinages sound ugly, because they violate modern (and for that matter ancient) phonotactics: we put up with monstrosities like εύθραυστος /efθrafstos/ (rather more pronouncable in antiquity as [ewtʰrawstos]). Why would be blink at /neooθomanikos/ or /tileorasi/? Learnèd words are *supposed* to sound ugly!

(And if we were Attically correct, after all, we’d never have called “television” τηλεόρασις: Attic had no time for /e.o/ hiatus either. It should have been τηλούρασις. But there’s no defending that lack of morphological transparency, when /tile-/ is a dead prefix anyway.)

a) disregarding of aspiration in new compound words is not a recent phenomenon but has started more than 100 years ago, with examples like μαργαριταλιεία or the somewhat later αυτοκινητάμαξα.

It’s no coincidence that Noun–Noun compounds (μαργαριταλιεία “pearl-fishing”, αυτοκινητάμαξα “rail-car”) dropped aspiration in learnèd Greek before Preposition-Noun compounds did. There are few prepositions and many verbs and nouns starting with /h/, so it’s a rule whose application is in your face—even if you no longer pronounce /h/. It’s an easy rule to remember to apply, because you see exemplars of the rule all the time.

On the other hand, how do you realise that you should aspirate Noun-Noun compounds in Ancient Greek, if you speak a Modern Greek with no /h/? Take ἅμαξα “cart”: to intuitively realise that you should aspirate a noun before it, once /h/ is dead, you need to have seen another compound ending in <hamaxa>, in which the preceding noun ending in /p t k/. There are two compounds of <hamaxa> in LSJ, and one more in Kriaras; none fulfil those criteria (ἁρμάμαξα, χειράμαξα, ἀλογάμαξα). So if you’re coining <autokinēt(h)-hamaxa>, you will *not* have seen any precedent to remind you to use a theta. You’re relying on the letter of the aspiration rule alone. A rule that is just orthographic juggling, as far as you’re concerned; so rather easy to slip up in.

So unlike prepositional compounds, you just don’t see enough examples ending in <-hamaxa>—or starting with <autokinēth->—to intuit the pattern of aspiration needed. Because the rule is about written and not spoken Greek, you need to be consciously checking every compound you make in learnèd Greek, to realise where you need to aspirate. With prepositions like <apo->/<aph-> and <hupo->/<huph->, OTOH, even in written Greek, you *expect* that you’ll aspirate eventually; so the check is not as onerous, and it will have a higher hit-rate. (Noone will get the rule right now, with Atticism banished; but people still had incentive to get it right last century.)

Which is why preposition-nouns and noun-noun compounds are a different story for the violation of aspiration. The prefix <aut(o)->—which Nikos highlighted in his own writing—is intermediate, because there *are* plenty of instances of aspirated <auth->: (Rattling off from LSJ: αὐθάγιος, αὐθαίμων, αὐθαίρετος, αὐθέδραστος, αὐθέκαστος, αὐθεύρετος, αὐθέψης…) So when Alexander of Aphrodisias writes αὐτοϋγιεία /auto–(h)yɡieía/ “health, in the abstract” instead of αὐθυγιεία /aut–hyɡieía/ , he really is linguistically innovating.

(Alexander of Aphrodisias, not Aristotle, is responsible for αὐτοϋγιεία btw! Alexander is citing a lost work of Aristotle, and may be modernising the aspiration.)

ἐκαληθεύω: an ill-fitting prefix in Choeroboscus

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2011-01-30 | Comments: 16 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek, Modern Greek
Tags: Byzantine Greek, compounds, Modern Greek, morphology, phonology

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 όμορφες διακρίσεις όμορφα καίγονται. Nice distinctions burn down nicely.)

The phonology of the prefixes, on the other hand, was the same as that of prepositions used as distinct words. This phonology was not particularly subtle, but it did have rules, which made sense in ancient phonology—although some prepositions dodged them. These rules have not survived into their much-attenuated modern vernacular counterparts.

The first rule is Elision: if a preposition ends in a vowel, that vowel is lost before another vowel. So μετα-μορφῶ /meta-morpʰɔ̂ː/ “I transform”, but μετ-εμόρφωσα /met-emórpʰosa/ “I transformed”; ἀντί-θεσις /antí-tʰesis/ “opposition” but ἀντ-αλλαγή /ant-allaɡɛ́ː/ “exhcange”, ἐπὶ τόπου /epì tópu/ “on the spot” but ἐπ’ ἀγροῦ /ep aɡrû/ “in the country”. A couple of prepositions never followed that rule: περί, πρό, and in later Greek ἀμφί.

The elision rule persisted for the rest in learnèd Greek, and indeed in 19th and early 20th century coinages: μετεκλογικός “post-election”, μεταπελευθερωτικός “post-liberation” (World War II). But it was abandoned in the vernacular’s prefixes (whose meaning has changed a lot):

Ancient	Modern
μετ-εῖπον /met-eîpon/ “I spoke amongst”	ματα-είπα /mata-ˈipa/ “I said again”
παρ-έτρωγον /par-étrɔːɡon/ “I nibbled”	παρα-έτρωγα /para-ˈetroɣa/ “I was over-eating”
ἐξ-ίδρωσα /eks-ídrɔːsa/ “I perspired”	ξε-ΐδωρσα /kse-ˈiðrosa/ “I stopped sweating”
ἐξαν-έρχομαι /eksan-érkʰomai/ “I come forth from”	ξανα-έρχομαι /ksana-ˈerxome/ “I come again”

If anything, its the next vowel which can get deleted in Modern Greek: ξαναέκανα or ξανάκανα /ksana-ˈekana ~ ksaˈna-kana/ “I did again”. And contemporary coinages, however well-educated, also no longer bother with elision.

“Anti-national”, which was coined in 1825, has elision: αντ-εθνικός. Usage has respected this: 9400 instances in Google of αντεθνικός vs. 93 of unelided αντιεθνικός. (Not least because the word got a lot of use out of the Colonels’ regime.)
“Anti-nationalist” on the other hand is very much a 20th century notion, and accordingly it lacks elision: αντι-εθνικιστικός (Google: 8:760).
The World War II coinage “post-liberation” has elision, μετ-απελευθερωτικός (Google count: 9:1)
But the Google count for “post-colonial” is 5:40 against elision, μετα-αποικιακός.

The second rule is aspiration: if a prefix ends in an unaspirated stop (once its vowel is lost), and it goes in front of a rough breathing, it becomes aspirated. In Ancient phonology, while /h/ existed, that is just common sense:

μετά + ἐμόρφωσε /metá + emórpʰɔːse/ > μετ-εμόρφωσε /met-emórpʰɔːse/
μετά + ἵστημι /metá + hístɛːmi/ > /met-hístɛːmi/ > μεθ-ίστημι /metʰ-ístɛːmi/
ἀπό + ἄνθρωπος /apó + ántʰrɔːpos/ > ἀπ-άνθρωπος /ap-ántʰrɔːpos/
ἀπό + ἥλιος /apó + hɛ́ːlios/ > /ap-hɛ́ːlion/ > ἀφήλιον /apʰ-ɛ́ːlion/
ἐπὶ αὐτοῦ /epì autû/ > ἐπ’ αὐτοῦ /ep autû/
ἐπὶ ἡμῖν /epì hɛːmîn/ > /ep hɛːmîn/ > ἐφ’ ἡμῖν /epʰ hɛːmîn/

The aspiration is concealed somewhat in the alphabet, because /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ are written as single letters, <φ θ χ>. But writing /met-hístɛːmi/ as μεθ-ίστημι is exactly what you’d expect to write using the Ancient Greek alphabet—so long as <θ> is pronounced something like /t-h/.

By the time of Christ, initial /h/ has disappeared, and /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ were on the way to their modern pronunciations as /f θ x/. So aspiration was no longer phonological common sense; it was becoming orthographic voodoo.

If a compound had survived from antiquity into your spoken language, you kept pronouncing it as an aspirated compound, even if you could no longer take it apart. That’s how ἀφίημι /apʰíɛːmi/ < /apó + híɛːmi/ “I let” has ended up, after much analogical reformulation, as Modern αφήνω: noone would even begin to think of prying /af-/ apart from /-ino/, because there is no such verb as /-ino/. If you were making up new compounds in the vernacular, the fact that there used to be an /h/ there is meaningless. In any case, with elision gone for prepositional prefixes, you wouldn’t get the chance to apply aspiration.

If you were writing in learnèd Greek, on the other hand, you still tried to apply aspiration to your compounds. But applying aspiration has now became a matter of rote memorisation: you had to remember which words used to start with an /h/ (and were still written with a rough breathing), and you would switch the final consonant of the prefix because the grammar books said so, not because changing a /p/ into an /f/ made any phonological sense to you. Because the spelling of Greek also retained rough breathings, correct spelling in polytonic Greek involved memorising tables of words starting with rough breathings—as everyone educated in Greece before 1981 still remembers.

Your correspondent is among the youngest people alive to whom ᾅδης ἅγιος ἁγνός “Hades, holy, pure” rings a bell. Or at least, he should be; but moral panic has brought the teaching of Ancient Greek forward; so “Hades, holy, pure” have now merely shifted from primary to secondary education.

So aspiration was a rule of Ancient Greek, that made no sense in the native language of the people still writing in Ancient Greek. That provides an opportunity for the rule to break down: for those writers to forget to aspirate their prefixes.

There are occasional such instances in Byzantium; and they are brought up in polemics against the polytonic. (Nikos Sarantakos in the linked piece cites ἀντυπουργήσειν in Constantine Porphyrogenitus and ἀντυπενεχθείσας in Gregory of Nyssa.)

One of the only linguistic arguments made for polytonic accentuation is that it enables you to do correct aspiration in compounds. The counterargument is that noone is using aspiration in compounding any more: peals of laughter would greet *ἀνθηλιακός “sun protection” or *ἀνθισταμινικός “anti-histamine”. And if you want to passively make sense of a compound like ἀφήλιον “aphelion”, there’s little point memorising that ήλιος “sun” takes a rough breathing. It’s more useful to deduce the rough breathing of ήλιος from ἀφ-ήλιον—or else, to do your rote memorising of /h/’s where it will have more of a pay off. Like learning English, and picking up Helium and heliocentric from there.

If the Byzantines slipped up in failing to aspirate compounds, we also expect them to do the opposite: to aspirate compounds where there is no justification in Ancient Greek. That is hypercorrection. Hypercorrection happens when speakers are trying to apply a rule in a language variant that is alien to them (such as the formal variant of their language). Speakers can’t readily apply the rule, because the conditions of the rule don’t make sense in their native version of the language. So they lurch for the more formal-sounding option from the rule, in the hope that it will pay off. English-speakers end up saying “between you and I”, because they can’t understand why they have to say “it is I” instead of “it’s me”.

Unsurprisingly, hypercorrect aspiration happens in Byzantine Greek. After all, it happens even now in Greece; Nikos Sarantakos mentions a teacher from Drama Prefecture so confident in his command of Ancient Greek (which he inflicted on primary school students), that he spoke against καθ’ επάγγελμα εκκλησιομάχοι, “professional anticlericalists”. That’s επάγγελμα, as in ἐπ-άγγελμα /epáɡɡelma/, and the prefix /ep(i)-/ has never begun with an /h/.

Hypercorrection in aspiration does not happen in Byzantine Greek as frequently as I’d expected; I’ve found maybe a hundred instances in the TLG. But it does happen often enough to show that not everyone was confident about how well they’d memorised their “Hades, holy, pure” tables.

So when John of Gaza writes καθ’ ἧμαρ “by day” (Anacreontea 6.93), the καθ’ leaves no doubt that he has got the breathing of ἦμαρ wrong. He’s trying to sound elevated by using a Homeric word; but he hasn’t got the Homeric aspiration to go with it.
When Ephraem the Syrian (or rather, his early Greek translators) write μεθέπειτα instead of μετέπειτα “afterwards” (De paenitentia, Frantzoles p. 81), they are making the same mistake as the teacher from Drama: /ep(i)-/ in /met-ep-eita/ has never begun with an /h/.
When Paul of Aegina writes ἀφ-ουροῦντας “urinating away” (Epitomae medicae, 3.18.5.26), he’s forgetting that the word is “urinate”, not *”hurinate” (or, given how Ancient Greek relates to Indo-European, *”surinate”).

So much for aspiration. Having gone through the rule violations in the TLG corpus, I wondered whether the rule for /ek-/ was also violated. That rule is: Movable /s/: ἐκ /ek/ becomes ἐξ /eks/ in front of a vowel. So ἐκ-βάλλω /ek-bállɔː/ “I throw out” but ἐξέβαλον /eks-ébalon/ “I threw out”, ἐκ τοῦτου /ek tûtu/ “from this” but ἐξ αὐτοῦ /eks autû/ “from that”.

But what is the likelihood that Byzantine writers would get the rule wrong? For a rule of Ancient Greek to be violated, the conditions for the rule have to be inapplicable to later Greek; that was indeed the case with aspiration, once aspiration had disappeared in the spoken language. Vowels, on the other hand, still existed in later Greek; so the rule for /ek/ going to /eks/ was still learnable by Byzantines, with reference to their spoken language.

The rule itself also needs to have been no longer applied in the vernacular, so that speakers trying to apply it to Ancient Greek could go astray: the vernacular would need to have used /ek/ before vowels as well as consonants (if indeed /ek/ survived at all), for writers to get the /ek ~ eks/ rule wrong in Ancient Greek.

As it turns out, ἐκ as a preposition did survive, in at least some dialects of Greek, as αχ or οχ, before both vowels and consonants. That does suggest that the alternation between /ek/ and /eks/ broke down in some locations, but not that it had globally broken down: most dialects of Greek don’t have a reflex of /ek/ at all. The prefix /ek-/ has also survived in the vernacular, again without the alternation of /ek/ and /eks/. But in the vernacular, it’s /eks-/, not /ek-/, which is in universal use.

Now that’s an odd development: speakers should have a devil of a time trying to pronounce compounds like /eks-vrakono/ “to strip naked, to un-pants” or /eks-xtenizo/ “to tussle hair, to uncomb”; so how did /eks/ end up taking over?

Here’s how: with verbs, Modern Greek has always preferred the aorist stem to the present, as the more regular formation. Unlike the present stem, the aorist stem ends in only a few, predictable consonants—mostly /s/. So the present was usually remodelled to line up with the aorist, with a few simple rules. (That’s where the Modern language got the idea that as many present stems as possible should end in /n/.)

The beginning of the aorist is regular too: the indicative aorist always began with an augment, which means it always began with a vowel. So while the present tense alternated between /eks-/ and /ek-/, the aorist indicative reliably used /eks-/: ἐκβάλλω :: ἐξέβαλον, ἐκβάλλετε :: ἐξεβάλατε, ἐξαγανακτῶ :: ἐξηγανάκτησα, /ek-bállɔː/ :: /eks-ébalon/, /ek-bállete/ :: /eks-ebálate/, /eks-aganaktɔ̂ː/ :: /eks-ɛːɡanáktɛːsa/.

In Modern Greek, unstressed initial /e/ was dropped; that made unstressed augments optional. So ἐκτένιζα /ekténiza/ “I combed” became χτένιζα /ˈxteniza/, and /eks-ekténiza/ could be metanalysed as /eks-eˈxteniza/ > /ekse-ˈxteniza/. The initial unstressed /e/ of the prefix /eks-/ was also dropped; so the prefix became /kse-/. With its /-e-/ no longer considered an augment, the /kse-/ prefix could be applied to the present as well as the aorist: ξεχτένιζα /kse-ˈxteniza/ “I uncombed”, ξεχτενίζω /kse-xteˈnizo/ “I uncomb”.

The prefix applies to nominalisations as well as verbs; so learnèd εκκίνηση “starting point” has the vernacular counterpart ξεκίνημα “beginning”. The ancient meaning of “movement out of” is retained with older compounds, such as ξεκινώ < ἐκκινέω “to move out from = to set off, to begin”. In productive use, though, it usually means undoing an action—like we saw with “uncomb” and “unpants”. The prefix even applies to nouns, though in a more ad hoc way; there is an old rebetiko song called Ο Ξεμάγκας, “the un-mangas, someone who has rejected being a mangas”. (In particular, giving up on hashish and bouzouki music.)

(You’d think I was looking for excuses to include YouTube videos in linguistics posts, or something…)

So, because /eks-/ survived in the vernacular as /kse-/, we don’t have strong evidence that /eks-/ was strange to the vernacular as a prefix, and that speakers would be going vernacular by using /ek/ before a vowel. On the other hand, while /eks-/ survived precisely because it preceded a vowel, it’s not like Ancient Greek offered any counterexamples with /ek/ preceding a vowel. So there would be little reason for writers to think that /ek/ before a vowel was a more proper way of writing—i.e. a plausible hypercorrection.

The /ek ~ eks/ alternation may have been on the way out; but any instances of /ek/ before a vowel in Byzantine writing, I conclude, would be infrequent; and they would more likely be thinkos, than harbringers of vernacular influence.

So, I did a search among unrecognised words in the TLG corpus, substituting /eks/ for /ek/. It’s a first cut; if Trapp’s Lexicon has already registered such compounds with /ek/ before a vowel, such a search would not find them. Nonetheless, while I just predicted that there wouldn’t be many instances of /ek/ before a vowel, I was surprised to have found exactly one such instance.

That one instance is from the pen of Leo Choerosphactes. We have already bumped into Leo in this blog, as the target of the rage of Constantine of Rhodes, which resulted in the longest adjectives of Byzantine Greek.

Choerosphactes’ instance is from a letter to Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria, with whom Leo was conducting diplomatic negotiations—sometimes from a Bulgarian prison cell. It is a short letter, but it could have been a lot shorter. Apparently, Simeon had sent Leo a letter, in which Simeon wrote an untruth which Leo found more telling than the prosaic truth. In other words, Simeon wrote a joke; and Leo reacts with all the awkward wordiness of someone puzzled at the invention of humour. Or lying.

G. Kolias. 1939. Léon Choerosphactès, magistre, proconsul et patrice; biographie—correspondance (texte et traduction). Texte und Forschungen zur Byzantinisch-Neugriechischen Philologie 31: 77–129. Letter 12.
Τοῦ αὐτοῦ, Συμεὼν ἄρχοντι Βουλγαρίας.
Θαῤῥεῖς πρὸς ἀλήθειαν, ἀρχόντων ὁ ἀληθέστατος, θαῤῥεῖς πρὸς τὰ λίαν ἐπαινετά· θέλεις δὲ καὶ τὸ σὸν οὐχὶ ἐν ἴσῳ τοῦ τῶν ἄλλων πιστεύεσθαι, ναί, καὶ τὴν δοκοῦσαν κατὰ παιδιὰν ἄρνησιν, ὁμοίαν εἶναί τε καὶ νομίζεσθαι τῆς ἑτέρων ἀληθοῦς κατανεύσεως. Δείκνυται οὖν ἡ ἐπιστολὴ ἀληθεύουσα πράγματι, κἂν δοκῇ τῷ γράμματι ψεύδεσθαι, ἵν’ ᾖ ὑπὲρ τὴν τῶν ἄλλων ὑποπτευομένην ἀλήθειαν ἡ σὴ σοφῶς ὑποπαίζουσα καὶ κωμικευομένη ψευδομυθία. Καὶ τοῦτο θαυμαστόν, καὶ τοῦτο γέμον φιλανθρωπίας, ἵνα, εἰ δοκῶν ψεύδεσθαι ἀληθεύεις, ἐκαληθεύοντός σου τίς ἔσται ὁ πιστεῦσαι δυνάμενος, ὡς ψεύσῃ πώποτε; Ὢ ψεύδους ἐγγραμμάτου, ἀληθείας ἐμπράκτου γέμοντος! Οὕτω δοκῶν ψεύδεσθαι ἀληθεύεις, καὶ ἀληθεύων οὐκ εἰς ψεῦδος αὖθις ἀποκλίνεις. Ἔῤῥωσο.

By the same, to Simeon Lord of Bulgaria.
You have the courage for truthfulness, most truthful of lords; you have the courage for matters most praiseworthy. And you want your writings not to be believed equally to others’; yea, nor do you want your denial, seemingly in jest, to be just like others’ truthful assertions, or even to be thought as such. So your letter is shown to be truthful in reality, even though it seems to be lying literally. Thus your sagely playful and antic telling of lies surpasses others’ supposed truthfulness. And this is a marvel, and a thing full of humanity: if you tell the truth while seeming to lie, then who can believe you would ever be lying, if you should stray from the truth literally tell the truth? Oh what a literate lie, full of truth in practice! Thus do you tell the truth when seeming to lie, and you do not deviate back into lies when telling the truth. Farewell.

The verb ἐκαληθεύω should be ἐξαληθεύω; but no such verb has been attested in Greek. If the rule about /eks/ was ever going to be violated, it would be in a verb such as ἐξαληθεύω, which was newly coined by the author. Any writer of Greek would have imbibed hundreds of verbs prefixed with /eks-/, from both the Classical language and his own vernacular; he’d be unlikely to get the prefix wrong on a verb he was already familiar with. Coining a new verb, he would momentarily been thrown into unfamiliar territory. And unfamiliar territory is where thinkos are likelier to happen.

The verb ἐξαληθεύω is not attested; but ἐξαληθίζομαι is. LSJ cites it from the Etymologicum Magnum, compiled a couple of centuries after Choerosphactes; but the Etymologicum is citing Photius, a generation older than Choerosphactes:

Διαπορεύεται δὲ τά τε ἄλλως περὶ θεῶν τοῖς Ἕλλησι μυθολογούμενα καὶ εἴ πού τι καὶ πρὸς ἱστορίαν ἐξαληθίζεται.
And he goes through all the other myths about the Gods told by the Greeks, and whatever is “out-truth-ised” in history. (Bibliotheca, Codex 239 p. 319a)

The difference between the -εύω and -ίζω suffixes is slight: having the condition or activity of X, vs. doing the action of X. ἐξαληθίζομαι, by that token, should mean something like “to act ‘out from’ about truth”. In a compound, /ek/ has the following meanings:

Out, from, off, away (cp. ἐξελαύνειν drive out and away); often with an implication of fulfilment, completion, thoroughness, resolution (ἐκπέρθειν sack utterly, ἐκδιδάσκειν teach thoroughly)

So “to act about truth thoroughly”, which makes more sense than “to act ‘out from’ about truth”. What sort of actions can you carry out with truth? Telling it; so ἐξαληθίζομαι should mean “to tell the truth thoroughly”. And LSJ’s gloss of ἐξαληθίζομαι is indeed, “to be truly recorded”.

ἐξαληθεύω in turn should mean something like “to have a condition ‘out from’ about truth”, or “to do an activity ‘out from’ about truth”. What condition or activity is associated with truth? Again, telling it. In fact, ἀληθίζω is glossed in LSJ as ἀληθεύω (scroll to the end, Perseus’ LSJ has conflated ἀληθίζω with ἀληθής), and ἀληθεύω is glossed as “to speak truth”. ἀληθίζω and ἀληθεύω are synonyms. ἐξαληθίζομαι and ἐξαληθεύω should also have been synonyms: Choerosphactes’ verb should have meant the same as Photius’.

[EDIT: The following paragraph is incorrect—see comment #1]

From the context, clearly it doesn’t. Choerosphactes has gone back to the literal meaning of /ek/, “out from, away”: his ἐξαληθεύω is “to do an activity of being away from the truth”, i.e. “straying from the truth”. It’s not the sense that occurred to Photius. And in fact, that too shows that Leo was in unfamiliar territory, when he coined the verb: he didn’t use the most obvious sense of /ek/ in context, but the most literal. It was literal enough to make him forget to modify the prefix /ek/, and to leave it, ill-fitting, as ἐκαληθεύω.

Pontic infinitive, real and imagined

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2011-01-23 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: morphology, Pontic, Tsakonian

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 didn’t comment on it at the time, because I was still on blog hiatus, and the over-the-top renditions I had seen made me roll my eyes. (Newspaper sensationalises science story, film at 11.) But if you read the actual article, interviewing the linguist involved (Ioanna Sitaridou), it’s reasonably sober, and tells you much of what you might have already gathered over the past few decades of Greek dialectology—and indeed, from this blog 🙂 .

The article is talking about the Muslim speakers of Pontic, who have stayed in Turkey after the 1922 population exchanges, in the Of valley. They call their language Romeyika, which is of course Romaic, the pre-Modern name for Greek. Linguists call it Ophitic, as a subdialect of Pontic Greek.

Ophitic is indeed somewhat archaic compared to other variants of Pontic, in its infinitive, and its preservation of Ancient οὐκ ~ οὐκί /uk ~ ukí/ “not” as uç (where the rest of Pontic has ‘κ’ [kʰ]). You’d expect such conservatism in a geographically and culturally isolated linguistic enclave. The “closest to Ancient Greek” claim, though, is a bit much; as Nikos Sarantakos pointed out on his Magnificent Blog,

just as every mother considers her child the must beautiful in the world, so too every researcher considers their field of study and research findings to be of exceptional importance.

We know why the researcher had to highlight the conservatism of Ophitic in the press release: that’s how you get funding, and Vahit Tursun, himself a Muslim Pontic-speaker now living in Greece, was quite happy to give her a pass:

For nearly twenty years we have been busying ourselves, writing and talking, yet we have not been able to convince Greeks and Greece of the existence of this culture, the danger that it will disappear, and how Greek it is. Leave Dr Sitaridou alone; maybe she can convince the English to do something about it.

Fair enough.

Still, as Prof Angeliki Ralli pointed out in the Greek press (also reproduced at Sarantakos’ blog), Ophitic isn’t the only survival of the infinitive: it has also persisted in Southern Italian Greek. And in both cases, as in Early Modern Greek, the infinitive is much reduced—it’s still an infinitive in retreat, restricted to modal verbs. So you use the infinitive in these variants of Greek in phrases like “I want to talk” or “I can walk”, but not “Better to walk than to run” or “I told her to walk”.

(No, Tsakonian did not preserve the infinitive. It did however preserve the participle used as a verb complement at least up to 1930: Pernot records Costakis telling a fairy tale with the phrase (ο κούε) αρχίνιε κχαούντα “(the dog) started barking”, where Modern Greek only allows “started to bark”, άρχισε να γαυγίζει. And even that seems to have vanished soon after; in the texts Costakis recorded from the late ’40s on, there are no such participles.)

The infinitive is still a remarkable survival for Greek dialect, and it used to be a point of pride for linguists that Pontic had an infinitive. News of the Ophitic infinitive had reached the linguistic republic from Michael Deffner’s research on Pontic in 1877.

Deffner, M. 1877. Die Infinitive in den pontischen Dialekten und die zusammengesetzten Zeiten im Neugriechischen. Monatsberichte den Königlich Preussischen Akademie de Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 191-230. Berlin.

Yes, that Michael Deffner.

The problem with that claim was, the Pontic that refugees spoke in Greek had no infinitive. In 1977, this claim struck the linguist Tombaidis, himself the son of Pontic refugees: he kept reading that Pontic had infinitives, but there were no infinitives in the Pontic he spoke, or in any Pontic he’d ever heard. So Tombaidis circulated a linguistic survey among several Pontic speakers, and published his findings in:

Tombadis, D.E. 1977. L’Infinitf dans le Dialecte Grec du Pont Euxin. Balkan Studies 18: 155–174.

Tombaidis found that all but one of the speakers he surveyed didn’t use an infinitive; many of them indeed completely misunderstood the examples of the infinitive he showed them from Deffner’s research. Tombaidis could find no evidence of the infinitive surviving in any Pontic text or language use he had access to over the past century; and since Deffner was *that* Deffner, Tombaidis concluded that the claims of the infinitive were not to be trusted.

Greek linguists weren’t particularly aware of Ophitic until Peter Mackridge reported on them in 1987, and didn’t have ready access to Ophitic speakers:

(Mackridge, P. 1987. Greek-Speaking Moslems of North-East Turkey: Prolegomena to Study of the Ophitic Sub-Dialect of Pontic. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 11: 115–137.)

One of the archaisms Mackridge noted was the survival of the infinitive; so Deffner, it turns out, did not make the infinitive up. But it’s just as true that Pontic as spoken in Greece does not have the infinitive; nor is it likely that the infinitive died out the minute the refugees hit the shores of Greece. Ἀρχεῖον Πόντου, The Pontic Archive was publishing texts from its establishment in 1928, six years later; and folklore journals were publishing Pontic texts from a fair while before that.

What’s happened is straightforward: Christian Pontic had lost the infinitive some time after the Of valley converted to Islam (17th century, I think), but long before it was displaced to Greece and Russia. Christian Pontic had remained in some contact with the rest of the Greek-speaking world, and in any case was a much larger population, where innovations could travel.

Oh, that one speaker Tombaidis found who insisted he used the infinitive? Tombaidis can’t name him; but he drops enough hints on who he was. In retrospect, it’s clear why he insisted he used the infinitive too. No, he wasn’t a Muslim Pontian. He was Odysseas Lampsides (1917-2006), historian specialising on Trebizond, and editor of The Pontic Archive.

Of course, you don’t want to say on the record that a researcher is lying—even if the researcher is in this instance acting as a research subject. But then again, it needn’t be counted as lying: people can convince themselves they do all sorts of things linguistically. That’s why elicitation should not be the only tool you rely on in investigating a language. (As any syntactician has found who’s tried to work out whether a sentence of English is acceptable—and then repeated the exercise with five related sentences. After a while—you just can’t tell any more.

Markos Vamvakaris: Ο ισοβίτης, Final verse

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2011-01-19 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: Modern Greek, phonology, sociolinguistics

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 κάρο
Like Achilles dragging Hector in his cart

The clash isn’t just thematic of course, it’s also linguistic: Hector and Achilles are solemnly invoked in Puristic phonology; Achilles desecration of Hector’s corpse—τον έσουρνε στο κάρο, “dragging in his cart”—lands in a colloquial thud. It’s the kind of register switcheroo that Greek—and I imagine other diglossic languages—can exploit for artistic effect; it’s one of the main things lost in translation in Cavafy, for example.

So Homer had Achilles bind Hector to his δίφρος, his chariot-box; the word is obscure enough that Greeks now speak of his ἅρμα, the more generic word for chariot. Yet the hárma too is displaced in the song by a a vehicle rather more familiar to the 1930’s streetscape: κάρο “cart”. It’s a Romance word, and oddly enough, Alexander Pope chose the same word in translating the same passage: Proud on his car the insulting victor stood.

And when Achilles drags Hector, it’s not using the Ancient and Puristic verb έσυρε /ˈesire/, or even in the colloquial έσερνε /ˈeserne/; Markos uses the Athenian slang form έσουρνε /ˈesurne/.

Ironically, the sin of /ˈesurne/ against the standard language is that it actually preserves the upsilon of Ancient Greek (ἔσυρε /ésyre/.) It’s no good being an archaic dialect like Athenian, if none of the other dialects have stayed archaic—and if spelling pronunciation prevents people from realising that it’s archaic: that just gets your dialect called weird. (Hence Theodosius Zygomalas’ mistaken verdict in the 16th century, that Athenian was tragically the most corrupt dialect of Greek.)

On the other hand, the Homeric heroes are unrepentantly textbook in their pronunciation. The vernacular would demand Έχτορας /extoras/ instead of Έκτορας /ektoras/ for Ancient Ἕκτωρ /hektɔːr/. You will still on occasion hear κτ in learnàd loans pronounced as [xt], but it is decidedly out of fashion to write it so. But Alexander Pallis’ translation of the Iliad was written to follow Psichari’s ideal of a pure vernacular phonology; his Hector is indeed written down as Ekhtoras, but that’s not the translation Markos read in school, nor indeed the translation read in school now. Hector keeps his non-vernacular /kt/ in the song; and in the song, the non-vernacular /kt/ is jarring.

The modern ear is more shocked to hear the Achilles in his Puristic garb, as Αχιλλεύς /axiˈlefs/, a spelling pronunciation of Ancient Ἀχιλλεύς /akʰilleús/. To the modern ear, the only legitimate Demotic form is Αχιλλέας /axiˈle.as/, which has switched its third declension for the surviving first declension. Anyone still using the third declension (and unprononouncable) Akhilefs now is deemed ideologically suspect. Surely Markos should have known better than to use such a retrograde form.

But of course Markos in 1935 would have known no such thing. After all, there is nothing vernacular about the hiatus in /axiˈle.as/. It’s not the form he would have got at school; and it’s not the form Achilles would have, had it in fact survived as a vernacular name.

In fact, Αχιλλέας is a compromise form: it is a reconstruction of a mediaeval pronunciation, after the word switched declension, but before the vernacular’s grubby [j] got to it. So too βασιλεύς “king” /basileús/ became βασιλέας /vasiˈle.as/ in the Middle Ages, abandoning the now unpronouncable /vasiˈlefs/; but the modern vernacular form is βασιλιάς /vasiˈljas/, following the i > j /_V rule. Achilles should similarly have ended up as Αχιλλιάς /axiˈljas/ in the vernacular.

Noone has dared devise so self-consciously Demotic a form of Achilles… except, unsurprisingly, for Pallis. Hard though it may be for contemporary Greek speakers to credit, Pallis does in fact use Αχιλλιάς. But not only is Pallis an extreme of Psicharist phonology among modern writers; even Pallis was reluctant to clothe Achilles in that much synizesis. In Iliad I, he has 16 /axiˈle.as/, hiatus and all, and only two vernacular /axiˈljas/:

Μούσα, τραγουδά το θυμό του ξακουστού Αχιλέα, I 1
…
παρά άσ’ την μιάς και δόθηκε στον Αχιλιά απ’ τους άντρες I 276

So Pallis only dared break Achilles’ hiatus one time out of ten, and the subsequent vernacular standard didn’t even dare that much. Vamvakaris was not going to deliver a more Psicharist version of Greek than Psichari’s pupils. But nor was Vamvakaris going to come up with the post-Psicharists’ compromise form Akhileas—a form as artificial as the spelling pronunciation Akhilefs is, even if Greek speakers no longer realise it.

Of course, Akhileas was artificial and a compromise, but the post-Psicharists weren’t the only ones cowed by awe before Homeric names, and forced to Mediaeval compromises. Such a compromise can be seen in the name of the warrior Androutsos, a couple of generations before Psichari. By the start of the 19th century, Greek national awakening meant that Greeks started taking Classical first names, to assert that they too were Hellenes. And so Androutsos, born in Ithaca while has family was on the run from Roumeli, was called Odysseus.

Odysseus’ name is just as hostile to the vernacular as Akhillefs [axilefs]. The spelling pronunciation of the original name, /oðiˈsefs/, was unpronouncable and undeclinable. None dared come up with a Pallis-like reduction, which would rhyme with /vasiˈljas/. The contemporary standard has done the same: the Odysseus king of Ithaca is /oðiˈse.as/, and Odysseus Androutsos of Ithaca is recorded in Greek textbooks as /oðiˈse.as/.

But Androutsos’ contemporaries did at least vernacularise his name a smidgeon more than people now do. One of the many vernacular rules ossified thouɡh Puristic influx is that unaccented initial /o/ is dropped; so ὀλίγος /olígos/ “few” is now λίγος /ˈliɣos/, and ὡρολόγιον /hɔːrolóɡion/ “clock” is now ρολόι /roˈloj/. His comrades called Odysseus Δυσσέας /ðiˈse.as/, ‘Dysseas.

These are the shoals of Homeric proper names in Modern Greek; and this is why Markos used a more archaic version of Achilles then contemporary Greeks are comfortable with—not that /ektoras/ and /axile.as/, the versions they are comfortable with, are any more true to the vernacular phonology. And this is how Markos’ /ektora o axilefs/ sounds jarringly pedantic in the song, just as the mention of Hector and Achilles should.

It would be the cherry on the cake if his pronunciation of Hector and Achilles would also follow the pedantic hiatus of Puristic, and set up the phonological force field around them that the legal terms ισοβίτης and έφεση already carry. But in his scansion, Markos elides three syllables across word boundaries, in a most un-Puristic fashion:

όπως τον Έκτορα ο Αχιλλεύς τον έσουρνε στο κάρο
opws| ton e|ktora o ax|ilefs || ton e|surne| to ka|ro

Which means /ektora o axilefs/ is supposed to be pronounced [ektorw axilefs], in order to scan.

Well, you tell me what you hear; 2:53:

I head [ek.to.ra.o.a.xi.lefs], with each syllable distinct. What I hear is that, for all that his versifying has Hector cozy up to Achilles in synizesis, when he comes to singing the names, he balks. Even if he is singing in the voice of a murderous street thug, his street thug has been to school, and can’t shake the shade of Puristic, any more than Pallis could.

Which would be a nice example to end on, except that I have been listening to all of Markos’ early songs, and his singing does not support the conclusion. It turns out that Markos has trouble doing synizesis with a final -o, whether the words are colloquial or learnèd. The year before Ο Ισοβίτης, Markos recorded Στα σίδερα με βάλανε, “They’ve locked me in chains.” Yes, once again, the song’s subject is in prison for murdering a rival lover. Again, the metre is iambic heptameter, and again, there is a synizesis:

Φωτιά μεγάλη μʼ άναψες βρε άπιστη γυναίκα.
Μόλις θα βγω απ’ τα σίδερα θα σφάξω κι άλλους δέκα
fotja| meɣal|i m a|napses || vre a|pisti| ɣinek|a
molis| θa vɣo ap| ta si|ðera || θa sfa|kso kj a|lus ðe|ka
You’ve lit a great fire under me, you faithless woman
As soon as I get out of chains, I’ll kill another ten men

/θa vɣo ap/, “I’ll get out of”, scans as a single foot, two syllables: [θa vɣw ap]; and θα βγω απ’ is as vernacular a phrase as you can get. I hear Markos singing three syllables (1:18)—very distinctly:

So no, the hiatus in Markos’ singing of /ektora o axilefs/ is not indicative of anything.

Oh, did you notice the hiatus in /vre apisti/? With the vernacular-as-dirt vocative particle βρε “hey you!” I’d hate to think that disproves my entire argument; I’ll take the preponderance of hiatus around learnèd words as a statistical argument.

Which would be more convincing, had I actually done any statisics. THUD. Too honest for my own good, there…

Markos Vamvakaris: Ο ισοβίτης

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2011-01-18 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: Modern Greek, phonology, sociolinguistics

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 of 1930’s Peiraeus. But your humble correspondent, too, is subject to romantic notions, and your humble correspondent, too, was surprised.

There’s another song Vamvakaris did, in 1935, that runs along the same lines. It has even more Puristic in it, and in that song too the Puristic results in hiatus. The hiatus is so strong, that Vamvakaris the singer ends up doing more hiatus than Vamvakaris the lyricist. And the trigger for the extra hiatus is a namecheck of antiquity. But there’s a lot to say about the song—not all of it linguistic. So much to say in fact, that I’m going to hold over the lyricist/singer clash till the next post.

The song in question is not the 1937 Ήμουνα μάγκας μια φορά, “Once I was a mangas“, whose namechecking is thick and obvious:

Once I was a spiv, though with an aristocrat’s vein
Now I’ll be a scholar, like wise Socrates.
I’d be Paris, and steal away Helen
leaving Menelaus with his heart crushed.
I’d like to be Heracles when I first saw you,
to chop your head of like the Hydra.
What else do you want me to do to make you love me?
With a mind like that, you’ll be wanting to get with Xerxes.

No, the song in question is from a couple of years earlier. Its injection of antiquity works, because it’s not laid on thick: it’s linguistically out of place—yet strikingly appropriate to its thuggish context. The song is Ο ισοβίτης, “The Lifer”:

Στη φυλακή με κλείσανε ισόβια για σένα
τέτοιο μεγάλονε καημό επότισες εμένα
Εσύ ‘σαι η αιτία του κακού για να με τυραννούνε
οι πίκρες και τα βάσανα να με στριφογυρνούνε

Τώρα θα κάνω έφεση μήπως με βγάλουν όξω
κακούργα δολοφόνισσα για να σε πετσοκόψω
Να σου ‘χυνα πετρέλαιο κι ύστερα να σε κάψω
και μέσ’ στο ξεροπήγαδο να πάω να σε πετάξω

Εφτά φορές ισόβια τότε να με δικάσουν
και στη κρεμάλα τ’ Αναπλιού εκεί να με κρεμάσουν
Ψήνεις ενόρκους δικαστές τούς πλάνεψε η ομορφιά σου
καί με δικάζουν ισόβια για να γενεί η καρδιά σου

Με τη ραδιουργία σου μπουζούριασα το χύτη
δίχως να θέλω μ’ έκανες να γίνω ισοβίτης
Τέτοια μεγάλη εκδίκηση αν τηνε ξεμπουκάρω
όπως τον Έκτορα ο Αχιλλεύς τον έσουρνε στο κάρο

They stuck me in jail for life because of you
That’s how great a sorrow you’ve made me swallow
You’re the cause of my ills, for them to torment me,
and for disappointment and troubles to whirl around me.

Now I’ll lodge an appeal, in case they let me out,
you evil murderess, so I can chop you to pieces.
I’d pour petrol on you and then burn you
and I’d go throw you into the well.

Then let them condemn me to seven life sentences,
and let them hang me at the gallows of Nauplion.
You entice jury and judges, your beauty has tricked them,
and they condemn me to life for your heart’s whim.

Because of your intrigue, I knocked off the metalworker (?)
Without me meaning to, you’ve made me a lifer.
Oh what revenge I’ll have if I get out of here,
Like Achilles dragging Hector in his cart.

I’ll allow myself my bourgeois indignation at the protagonist; we should remember, of course, that Markos could act, and wasn’t necessarily saying it was his own wife he was planning to immolate—any more than that he had a crush on a teamster in Ο Αραμπατζής, or that he was a housewife abandoned by a drunken husband in Ο γρουσούζης. Still, the mangas that Markos sung about were no feminists.

Of course, when I told a female friend (rather more clued in to gender politics than me), that I was writing about a singer before he stopped singing about wife-beating for more bourgeois topics, she retorted that wife-beating is pretty bourgeois. Touché.

The song has a visceral grimness to it, precisely because of its nonchalant thugishness, and that does make it arresting. Which makes the trick he pulls in the final verse all the more effective. It’s incongruous to invoke the Iliad in a song about some low-life in jail. And yet, this isn’t just lightly worn high school learning: Markos has learnt his Iliad all too well. Achilles’ wrath, which made him desecrate his opponent’s corpse, is condemned by Homer himself as “shameful”, ἀεικέα (Iliad XXII 395). Achilles’ wrath is no more highminded than the lifer’s planned immolation.

Or these reenactments, courtesy of the US secondary education system:

The song has a fair amount of Puristic words in it, as we’d expect of a song not only with a shout out to the Iliad, but also several mentions of the legal system: ισοβίτης “life sentence”, ισοβίτης “lifer”, έφεση “appeal”, ενόρκους “jurymen”—as well as πετρέλαιο “petrol” (“stone-oil”, a learnèd coinage), αιτία “cause”, and ραδιουργία “intrigue”. There’s potentially one more learnèd word, in a passage which isn’t terribly clear.

In the beginning of the final verse, Markos sings that he has μπουζούριασα το /xiti/. Neither word is extant now, and if we ask the internets, we find that μπουζουριάζω means to put someone in jail. slang.gr’s illustration is eloquent enough:

Τι κάνεις ρε στρατόκαυλε, με το μαχαίρι του ράμπο στην πορεία; Θα σε μπουζουριάσουν ρε καραγκιόζη!
What the hell are you doing, you army nutjob, carrying Rambo’s knife in a protest march? They’ll lock you up, you maroon!

Or another instance, from indymedia, with indymedia’s known anti-cop animus:

Κι εγώ θα θελα να κάθομαι και να τα παίρνω, αλλά το να μπουζουριάζω αθώο κόσμο, δεν είναι δουλειά, είναι ντροπή.
Oh I’d love to just sit around and earn money too; but locking up innocent people is not a job, it’s a disgrace.

In the thread at rebetiko.gr discussing this lyric, an etymology is offered from μπουζού “hiding place, jail”, which in turn is said to come from Italian bozzolo “cocoon”.

But of course, Markos’ Lifer isn’t supposed to be in jail for imprisoning his rival, but killing him. It turns out that μπουζουριάζω has a second meaning, “to eat up”. That definition is given in a 1932 song, Το λεξικό του μάγκα, “The mangas’ dictionary”. The song actually predates Greek recordings of rebetiko (those are mandolins on the recording, not bouzoukis), but it describes the lexicon of the same social circle, from the safe vantage point of the musical revue:

(3:16: Το μαχαίρι λέω λάσο και το τρώω μπουζουριάζω: “I call a knife a λάσο, and “eat”—μπουζουριάζω.)

Poster κκ in the rebetiko.gr thread has worked out that the second meaning applies in Markos’ song: to “eat someone” (τον έφαγα) is long-standing slang for killing someone, and Markos has made the expression more vivid by substituting a slang word for “eat”.

The problem is who the /xitis/ is that the Lifer has killed. Poster κκ—and just about all copies of the lyric online—assume it’s a χίτης, a Chi-man. The Chi-men were members of the paramilitary organisation “Organisation X” (Chi in Greek, of course); the Chi-men appear to have been rather more enthusiastic fighting communists than Nazis, and are now roundly reviled in Greece.

The catch with having Markos talking about Chi-men is, the Organisation was still ostensibly formed to resist the German occupation, and it was formed in 1941. Barring an undocumented talent for soothsaying, Markos is unlikely to have been singing about dispatching Chi-men in 1935. The only other likely match for /xitis/ is χύτης, a pourer—in particular, someone who works in a foundry (where metal is poured out).

So speculated by Aris in post #4. Now χύτης is a learnèd word, κκ’s response to Aris betrays the anti-diglossic romanticism that haunts all Modern Greeks:

Even if Markos really did mean a foundry worker, I imagine he’d use πασπαλιστής “smearer”, καρούλιας “reeler”, or some street word—not the kind of vocabulary you’d find in the Statistical Classification of Branches of Economic Acitivity or the Ministry of Finance.

… A learnèd word like έφεση “appeal” or ραδιουργία “intrigue”, you mean. True, it’s more of a surprise for how Markos names the victim in the song; but this is hardly the song to expect Markos’ Demotic to be pure and unsullied from officialdom.

There’s another suggestion on a forum that χύτης is short for χυτοσίδερο, “cast (poured) iron”, referring to prison bars. That would bring us back to μπουζούριασα meaning “imprisoned”, but grammatically it doesn’t stand.

But we’re supposed to be talking about hiatus.

Vernacular phonology, we have seen, avoids hiatus; and vernacular metrics reflects vernacular phonology. If your vernacular verse has a vowel next to another vowel, they are supposed to be slurred together into the one syllable; to have a metrical break between two vowels is poor versifying. Verse textbooks inveigh against it, but they inveigh against it because vernacular verse itself—in folksong, in the Cretan Renaissance, in the Heptanesian School—all avoided it. Thus the national anthem of Greece written by Dionysios Solomos, to pull up the first example I could think of, starts:

Σε γνωρίζω από την κόψη
του σπαθιού την τρομερή
σε γνωρίζω από την όψη
που με βια μετράει τη γη.
se ɣno|ˈrizo a|ˈpo tin| ˈkopsi
tu spa|θiˈu tin| trome|ˈri
se ɣno|ˈrizo a|ˈpo tin| ˈopsi
pu me| ˈvia me|ˈtrai ti| ɣi

The metre is trochaic tetrameter: Dumdee Dumdee Dumdee Dumdee, Dumdee Dumdee Dumdee Dum. Eight and seven syllables to the line. If you take all the /i/s in the IPA at face value—with all hiatus—you’re going to have several syllables left over.

For the metre to work, μετράει is two syllables, /me.ˈtraj/ rather than /me.ˈtra.i/: perfectly vernacular, and that’s how the word is still pronounced. βια is also vernacular, reduced to one syllable; the word has now been displaced by the learnàd βία, in two syllables.

(At this point I could get sidetracked by the debate over whether Solomos used the word with its vernacular meaning of “haste” or its learnèd meaning of “violence”—a debate held in Greek parliament no less. I won’t get sidetracked this time, but I think it’s clearly the latter, which would make Solomos deliberately vernacularised the word, and consistently did so to avoid hiatus, as he actually wrote down in his notes on metre. The irony is, Solomos’ native dialect of Zante actually *has* hiatus; so he pronounced both “haste” and “violence” as /vi.a/, but followed standard Greek in versifying both as /vja/. Cornaro before him may have also vernacularised the word βια—though I think Erotokritos II 215 still refers to haste, even if in reference to a lion.)

The slurring of a vowel before another vowel (synezesis) also applies across word boundaries; so γνωρίζω από /ɣnorizo apo/ is pronounced as four syllables, [ɣno.ri.zw a.po].

And that slurring is regular in vernacular verse. Versifiers nowadays offend against it, because the language itself, tempered by Puristic, no longer finds hiatus offensive. But hiatus still sounds wrong in verse (if your ear is suitably trained), because verse as a tradition is aloof from the phonological mess of the spoken tongue.

Now Vamvakaris, it has to be said, was not much of a versifier. He does hiatus without good reason, and he does occasionally add or miss a syllable. So it’s not that we can draw ironclad conclusions from the hiatus in his verse. Still, we can see an informative pattern with respect to learnèd words.

Let’s try to jam his lyric to its metre—politikos stichos, iambic heptameter, the default Greek metre of the past millennium: ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ // ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ ˘

sti fi|laki| me kli|sane || isov|ia| ɣja se|na
tetjo| meɣa|lone| kajmo || epo|tises| eme|na
esi| se eti|a tu| kaku || ɣja na| me ti|ranu|ne
i pi|kres ke| ta va|sana || na me| strifo|ɣirnu|ne

tora| θa ka|no e|fesi || mipos| me vɣa|lun o|kso
kakur|ɣa ðo|lofo|nisa || ɣja na| se pe|tsoko|pso
na su| xina| petre|leo || ki iste|ra na| se ka|pso
ke mes| sto kse|ropi|ɣaðo || na pa| na se| peta|kso

efta| fores| iso|via || tote| na me| ðika|sun
ke sti| krema|la t a|naplju || eki| na me| krema|sun
psinis| enor|kus ði|kastes || tus pla|nepse i e|morfja| su
ke me| ðika|zun iso|via || ɣja na| ɣeni i| karðja| su

me ti| raði|urɣi|a su || buzu|rjasa| to xi|ti
ðixos| na θe|lo m e|kanes || na ɣi|no i|sovi|tis
tetja| meɣa|li ekði|kisi || an ti|ne kse|buka|ro
opws| ton e|ktora o ax|ilefs || ton e|surne| to ka|ro

A bit busy; let me explain.

A foot is delimited by | : there should be two syllables per foot, but for the last.
|| is the caesura, the midverse break; synezesis, contracting two syllables into one across the break, is not allowed in traditional versification.
Learnèd words are in italics.
/j/ is used where synezesis has happened within a word, consistent with vernacular phonology. No learnèd words have a /j/.
Blue is synezesis across a word boundary, consistent with vernacular metrics.
Orange is an extrametrical syllable not explained by hiatus.
Red is hiatus within a word.
Magenta is hiatus across a word boundary.

Markos has hiatus at the caesura; since the break at the caesura is so strong, such hiatus can be ignored, and can’t be held up as a major fault of his versification. The extra syllable in ke me| ðika|zun iso|via, on the other hand, is a pretty basic blunder.

And in μεγάλονε /meɣalone/ “big”, Markos has added an -e to the nu movable, the liaison consonant. The vernacular allows this for pronouns, as the song shows: αν την-ε ξεμπουκάρω “if I unclog her” = “If I get out of jail”. But for nominals like μεγάλονε, it’s a sign the versifier has given up, and is begging for an extra syllable. It’s an old poetic license—instances turn up in Early Modern Greek; but they’re limited to verse. By my aesthetic, that makes it bad verse.

The thing is, if you discount caesuras, hiatus is limited to learnèd words. Admittedly, that’s a circular argument, since hiatus is characteristic of learnèd words anyway. But notice that we have several instances of learnèd words starting with a vowel—etia, efesi, isovia, isovitis—which trigger hiatus with the preceding word, rather than synezesis. The vernacular words don’t do that; in fact, we have a synezesis of three syllables mooshed into one in the vernacular pla|nepse i e|morfja| su [planepsj emorfja su].

Hiatus before a vernacular word happens only with a caesura, which doesn’t count. Hiatus is allowed before a learnèd word, caesura or not: the force field of Puristic can block the word from cosying up to its predecessor—kano| efe|si, ɣino| iso|vitis—just as it blocks hiatus within the word. But such hiatus it is not compulsory: esi se eti|a has hiatus within learnèd /etia/, but not in front of it. meɣa|li ekði|kisi also skips hiatus separating it from the preceding word.

The reason why I picked this song is its startling last verse. In that last verse, the Homeric names don’t trigger hiatus across word boundaries, just like ekðikisi didn’t. Or maybe Vamvakaris did sing a hiatus after all. Then again, maybe that wasn’t hiatus that Vamvakaris was singing.

It’s open to some question what Vamvakaris is actually doing phonetically with the last verse. But I’ve run enough over length in this post, to defer discussion till the next.

στήτη, a post-Homeric ghost word

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2011-01-11 | Comments: 5 Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics
Tags: Ancient Greek, lexicography, philology

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.

In the sixth verse of the Iliad, Homer introduces the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseis:

ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
from the time when first they parted in strife,
Atreus’ son, king of men, and brilliant Achilles

διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε literally means “the two of them stood apart contending”. But διαστήτην is a strange verb for those who post-date Homer: it is too archaic to be understood readily.

The verb is archaic enough to lack an augment—the prefix that obligatorily indicates past tense in Classical Greek: where Homer used δια-στήτην /dia-stɛ́ːtɛːn/, later Greek would expect δι-ε-στήτην /di-e-stɛ́ːtɛːn/. Later on still—by the end of Classical Greek—the dual number of the verb fell out of use; Greek by then would expect not the dual διεστήτην, but the plural διέστησαν.

So διαστήτην did not look familiar to speakers to later Greek as a verb. What it did look like, though, was a feminine accusative noun, since -ην is the first declension ending for that case. Since spaces were not normally marked between words in Ancient writing, it would be easy for ΔΙΑΣΤΗΤΗΝΕΡΙΣΑΝΤΕ to be read as διὰ στήτην ἐρίσαντε, “contending for an X”.

Reading διαστήτην as διὰ στήτην means that you have unearthed a brand new noun in Homer, and now you need to come up with a meaning for it. It’s not the first time readers of Homer were faced with such a challenge, and the way out was provided, as it often was, by context. Achilles and Agamemnon were contending for Briseis; since Briseis was a woman, and στήτην seems to be a feminine noun, it follows that Homer has the noun στήτη, meaning “woman”.

Some Homerically clueless poet later on, in the same mindset as Allatius, followed along with this misconstrual of Homer: he used στήτη as a noun in his verse, to mean “woman”. In fact he went a step further than Allatius: Allatius cited πεδαφρόνων just as he read it in his Pindar; but this poet was pretending to write in Doric, so he switched dialects in the inflection, and came up with the genitive στήτας, not στήτης.

To make things even worse, another poet, within the next century, used this ghost word στήτας again, in a poem clearly derived from the first poet’s conceit. (“Of the writer nothing is known; he was obviously acquainted with the [first poem]”.) Both poets were pedants, more concerned with crafting poesie concrete than using words anyone had heard of. Clearly Homeric learning had fallen unpardonably far.

The poets in question are Theocritus (in his poem shaped like a Pipe) and Dosiadas (in his poem shaped like an Altar). In the 3rd century BC. You can see their handiwork at theoi.com, reproducing the 1912 Loeb edition and translation.

In the 3rd century BC, of course, Homeric scholarship was just getting started: Aristophanes of Byzantium might have worked in Alexandria at the same time as Theocritus. And we can be smug about misreadings like διὰ στήτην now, but five centuries after the Iliad was written, scholars had to start somewhere trying to make sense of Homer’s antiquated Greek. Those scholars’ attempt to make sense of Homer led them to invent Western grammar. So we should cut Theocritus and Dosiadas some slack.

Here are the phantoms of στήτη in action:

LSJ, στήτα:

στήτα, ἁ, pseudo-Doric, = γυνή [woman], Theoc.Syrinx 14, Dosiad.Ara 1. (The form arose from a false reading of Il.1.6, διὰ στήτην ἐρίσαντε having quarrelled about a woman, cf. Eust.21.43, Sch.D.T. p.11 H.)

Dosiadas, Altar, 1

Εἱμάρσενός με στήτας
πόσις, μέροψ δίσαβος,
τεῦξ’
I am the work of the husband of a mannish-mantled quean, of a twice-young mortal

Note that in the 1912 Loeb, writing to a more literate audience, J M Edmonds could afford to translate obscure Greek into obscure English: quean, “1. a disreputable woman; specifically: prostitute; 2. chiefly Scottish: woman; especially: one that is young or unmarried”.

Theocritus, Syrinx, 13-20:

ψυχὰν ᾇ, βροτοβάμων,
στήτας οἶστρε Σαέττας,
κλωποπάτωρ, ἀπάτωρ,
with which heartily well pleased, thou clay-treading gadfly of the Lydian quean [i.e. Omphale], at once thief-begotten and none-begotted

Scholia in Theocritum, Syrinx 14:

Without the scholia to Theocritus, we’d be even more lost than Theocritus was before Homer:

στήτας οἶστρε Σαέττας: τουτέστιν ὁ οἶστρον ἐμβαλὼν τῇ Λυδῇ γυναικί. φασὶ γάρ, ὅτι ἡ Ὀμφάλη ἡ Λυδὴ οἶστρον εἶχε περὶ τὸν Πᾶνα πολύν. τὸ δὲ στήτη ἡ γυνή, Σαέττης δὲ τῆς Λυδῆς.
That is, the gadfly poking the Lydian woman. For he is saying that Omphale, the Lydian, had a great gadfly (= sexual excitement) about Pan. And στήτη means “woman”, while Σαέττη means “Lydian woman”.

I think this is our only source form knowing what a Saetta was. It’s not our only source for knowing what a στήτη is:

Scholia on Homer, Scholia Recentiora [more recent scholia] by Theodore Meletiniotes (codex Genevensis gr. 44), I 6:

[διαστήτην] διὰ τὴν στήτην, διὰ τὴν γυναῖκα.
διαστήτην: for the στήτην, for the woman.

Hesychius

στήτα· γυνή
στήτα: woman

Though Hesychius does Contain Multitudes:

Hesychius:

στήτην· ἔστησαν, δυϊκῶς
στήτην: “they stood”, in the dual

Some scholars, at least, had worked out what had gone wrong—fully and astutely (Melampous or Diomedes’ grammatical commentary), or almost but not quite (Eustathius of Thessalonica):

Eustathius of Thessalonica, Commentary on the Iliad, Vol. 1 p. 35 (van der Valk):

Ἰστέον δὲ […] ὅτι περιέργως τινὲς ἐπιβαλόντες Θεοκρίτου στήτην τὴν γυναῖκα εἰπόντος γράφουσιν ἐνταῦθα «διὰ στήτην ἐρίσαντο», ἵνα λέγῃ ὁ ποιητής, ὡς διὰ γυναῖκα ἤρισαν. ὁ δὲ τούτοις προσέχων εἴη ἂν φιλόκαινος.
Note that oddly enough, some authorities, imposing Theocritus’ στήτη “woman” here, read this as διὰ στήτην ἐρίσαντο, so that the Poet ends up saying that they “contended for a woman”. To pay attention to such readings would be an infatuation with novelty.

Commentary on Dionysius Thrax‘s Art of Grammar, by Melampous or Diomedes, p. 11 (Hilgard, Grammatici Graeci vol. 1.3)

Ἕως ἐνταῦθά ἐστιν ὁ ὅρος τῆς γραμματικῆς. Εἴπωμεν οὖν αὐτόν· «γνῶσις τῶν παρὰ <τοῖς> τὰ ἔμμετρα καὶ ἄμετρα γράψασιν ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλεῖστον εὑρισκομένων». Διὰ τί δὲ εἶπεν «ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλεῖστον»; Ἐπειδή τινες λέξεις ἅπαξ που ἢ δὶς εἰρημέναι εἰσίν, ἃς οὐ πᾶσα ἀνάγκη εἰδέναι τὸν γραμματικόν, οἷον οἱ γρῖφοι. Τί δέ εἰσιν οἱ γρῖφοι; Τὰ ζητήματα τὰ δεινά· […]
ἢ ὡς ἐν τῷ βωμῷ τοῦ Δοσιάδου ἡ γυνὴ εἴρηται στήτη, ἐπειδή τινες τὸ παρ’ Ὁμήρῳ διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε οὕτως ἐξηγήσαντο, διά τινα γυναῖκα. Σύριγξ δὲ καὶ βωμὸς ποιήματά τινά ἐστιν ἐμμέτρῳ τῷ σχήματι καὶ τῇ διατυπώσει τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν ἔχοντα. Τὰ οὖν τοιαῦτα ζητήματα εἰ μὲν ἐπίσταται ὁ γραμματικός, ἐπαινετέος ἐστίν, εἰ δὲ μή γε, οὐκ ἔστι μέμψεως ἄξιος.
This much is the definition of grammar. Let us add: “the knowledge of most things written in verse and prose”. Why “most”? Because there are some words which have been used just once or twice, which it is not essential for the grammarian to know, such as riddles. And what are riddles? Difficult questions […]
Or, as in Dosiadas’ Altar, where στήτη is used for “woman”, because some people interpreted Homer’s διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε as referring to a certain woman. And the Pipe and the Altar are poems in verse form and named for their appearance. Now if a grammarian knows about such matters, he is to be praised; but if not, he does not merit condemnation.

The hiatus of διαζύγιο “divorce”

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2011-01-05 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: compounds, Modern Greek, phonology, sociolinguistics

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 artificial influence of Puristic has meant that 80-year-old Greek is in some words more archaic, and in some words less archaic, than the modern Standard.

This is not the first time someone has thought of mining rebetika recordings for linguistic evidence, btw; Amalia Arvaniti & Brian Joseph have published a study of what old recordings tells us about the shift in Athens fron [mb] to [b]—another shift which the hand of Puristic has weighed heavy on. Whether this has been looked at as well—well, I’m behind in my reading.

The phenomenon noticable in Vamvakaris, as an intrusion of Puristic, is hiatus (χασμωδία). Hiatus is the phenomenon of a vowel next to another vowel counting as two syllables; for example, συκέα /si.ˈke.a/ “fig tree” or Τουρκία /tur.ˈki.a/ “Turkey” being three syllables. Hiatus is something the Modern vernacular does not do.

In fact, hiatus was something that Attic Greek wasn’t comfortable with either— which is why a lot of vowel pairs and triples in Homeric Greek ended up reduced in Attic, in various forms of contraction and elision. The more vernacular the Attic, the more reduction in vowels; that’s why only in Aristophanes, our most vernacular of Attic authors, do we get contractions like πρωὐδᾶν [prɔːudân] from προαυδᾶν [proaudân] “to decalre beforehand”.

The modern vernacular went further in getting rid of hiatus than the ancient vernacular. In particular, the modern vernacular reduces vowels next to other vowels, making them non-syllabic. So while the medieval form for “fig tree” is συκέα /si.ˈke.a/, the modern form is συκιά /si.ˈkja/, and just two syllables long. Likewise, διαβάζω “I read” is pronounced /ðja.ˈva.zo/, not /ði.a.ˈva.zo/. In fact, it’s a universal rule of the vernacular (outside of some archaic dialects, notably Zante and Mani), that /e/ or /i/ before another vowel, stressed or not, turns into [j]. In phonetic notation, e, i > j /_V.

(The Attic form of “fig tree”, incidentally, was not συκέα /sykéaː/, but συκῆ /sykɛ́ː/. Attic used vowel contraction as its own way to address hiatus.)

The universal rule e, i > j /_V means that the vernacular form of “Turkey” should be not Τουρκία /tur.ˈki.a/, but Τουρκιά /tur.ˈkja/. Tell that to a Greek now, and they’ll guffaw: calling Turkey Τουρκιά has the prerequisite of the speaker wearing a kilt and brandishing a musket. (That is to say, people now only know of the form Τουρκιά from folksong.) Tell that to a Greek two hundred years ago, when people were wearing kilts and brandishing muskets—and they’d agree that Turks indeed came from Τουρκιά. That was the word for Turkey back then, and it followed the normal development of Greek vowels.

So why has the modern standard gone backward? What has changed in the past two hundred years to make the language evolve backwards? Puristic, of course; that’s the kind of thing Puristic does.

Puristic pronounced words as they were spelled in Ancient Greek (though it conveniently ignored the fact that the pronunciation of the letters had changed, which made several spelling pronunciations awkward). Iota was a vowel, so in written Greek it should not be pronounced as anything but a vowel: it couldn’t be pronounced as a [j]. When in fact people did start writing down the vernacular in the 19th century, under the shade of Puristic, the vernacular’s [j] were such a nuisance for how Puristic treated spelling, that they got a diacritic added to them, as I have written up elsewhere: vernacular δι̯αβάζω /ðja.ˈva.zo/ vs. learnèd διαβάζω /ði.a.ˈva.zo/. As Yannis Haralambopoulos has astutely pointed out, the vernacular wasn’t so much written down in the 19th century, as transcribed.

So if a word was vernacular, it had /j/’s; if a word was learnèd, it had /i/’s. Even if was exactly the same word, the pronunciation difference means Standard Modern Greek now has minimal pairs to distinguish the two.

άδεια as a vernacular word, “empty”, has two syllables, [ˈa.ðja]; the selfsame άδεια as a learnèd word, meaning “leave of absence” (an “empty” day), has three syllables [ˈa.ði.a].
βιάζω in its vernacular sense of “hasten” is two syllables, /ˈvja.zo/; the verb originally meant “to force”, and its learnèd meaning of “rape”, it has three syllables, /vi.ˈa.zo/. (The vernacular word for “rape” is bound to the society that used it before Puristic: ατιμάζω “dishonour”, so it no longer has the same connotations as βιάζω.)
Ancient παιδία /pai.dí.a/ “children” has survived in the vernacular as παιδιά /pe.ˈðja/. Ancient πεδία /pe.dí.a/ “fields” has been revived in Puristic (denoting fields of expertise, or force fields); being learnèd, it is pronounced /pe.ˈði.a/.

And because the modern linguistic standard is a messy mixture of Puristic and vernacular, the two phonological systems coexist: some registers, and some words, follow the rule e, i > j /_V, some do not.

Having two phonological systems coexist is workable; in fact, that’s how Standard Modern Greek works. To a contemporary speaker of Greek, it is inconceivable that “fig tree” should be anything but /si.ˈkja/, and it’s just as inconceivable that “Turkey” should be anything but /tur.ˈki.a/. To a neogrammarian like Psichari, adamant on the Exceptionlessness of sound change, this jumble was unacceptable: the language of Greece should be the vernacular, and it should follow vernacular rules. It’s what makes linguistic sense.

In a Greece not under the shadow of Puristic, linguistic sense could have prevailed. Vincenzo Cornaro, three centuries before Psichari, managed to slot into his Erotokritos a few learnèd words in the vernacular garb Psichari called for: μοιότη /ˈmjo.ti/ “similarity” (V 126), as an updating of ὁμοιότης /o.mi.ˈo.tis/, is pure Psichari, and βέβαιο “certain” in IV 1599 is clearly meant to be two syllables, /ˈve.vjo/ (ό,τι γενή σ’ αυτούς τσι δυο βέβαιο να το κρατούσι).

But the 1880s wasn’t the 1590s; Psichari’s call for consistency was dismissed as extremist, not least when the Demotic was finally enshrined as the official language of Greece, as “a Demotic without dialect features or extremism” (άνευ ιδιωματισμών και ακροτήτων). The words now are βέβαιο /ˈve.ve.o/, and ομοιότητα /ˈo.mi.ˈo.ti.ta/: the inflection is vernacular. but the phonology isn’t. What has been enshrined, not just by the state but also by the people, was the compromised language Psichari abhorred.

Not just Psichari abhorred it, either. Compromises don’t just offend against neogrammarian linguistics, they also offend against literary aesthetics. Cornaro is renowned for avoiding hiatus studiously. But not completely: learnèd words have always been a perturbance in the vernacular. Even in the seeming Eden of Erotokritos, some of the learnèd loans were still too much under the shadow of antiquity to escape hiatus: the 1590s wasn’t really the 1590s either.

Cornaro’s εβεβαίωσεν “he assured” IV 1512 is the same stem as βέβαιο, but here is clearly /e.ve.ˈve.o.sen/.
Cornaro uses περικεφαλαία “helmet” three times, each with hiatus as /pe.ri.ke.fa.ˈle.a/.
As Nikos Sarantakos has written, Georgios Souris mocked the Psicharist Alexandros Pallis’ περικεφαλιά /pe.ri.ke.fa.ˈlja/ in Pallis’ translation of the Iliad, which modernised the word Cornaro didn’t dare modernise. But even Pallis vacillated between hiatus and non-hiatus for this stubborn learnèd word. In the modern standard, it has remained with a hiatus.

So when Demotic started being manumitted as a literary language, authors started hankering after an uncontaminated, pure Demotic. As Peter Mackridge likes to argue, literary Demotic is itself an artificial, puristic code. And Greeks have been looking since for a holy grail of untutored, internally consistent vernacular, clean and plain-spoken. Like Cornaro’s Erotokritos (if you ignore his hiatus—and he really does not have much of it.) Like Makriyannis’ Memoirs (so long as you concentrate on his vibrantly oral syntax, and don’t notice the telltale final /n/s that Makriyannis took in from the Puristic he heard every day.)

Or just like the song lyrics of Markos Vamvakaris, the abbatoir’s apprentice and hashish addict who begat a new style of music. The world of street thugs and addicts he depicted was as common as dirt; surely it should be as vernacular as common dirt, too.

But of course, Markos was not brought up in cotton wool in Arcadia; he went to school in Puristic, and interacted with officialdom in Puristic, not least in his brushes with the law. His baseline is vernacular, of course; but Puristic words do show up in the lyrics, and their phonology stands out all the more because the baseline is more consistently vernacular than the contemporary language is.

After all that preamble, I’ll give just one example here; I have a more extensive example next post. First, Markos dedicates a song to his divorce in 1936, and the word for divorce, διαζύγιο, turns up twice in the song (0:25, 2:57).

The word διαζύγιο is learnèd, as you would expect of the Modern Greek legal system; the vernacular has a verb for divorcing, χωρίζω “to separate”, but the noun χωρισμός “separation” is generic enough to mean “parting”. Being a learnèd word, διαζύγιο has learnèd phonology; so it has five, Puristically-correct syllables: /ði.a.ˈzi.ɣi.o/. That is how Vamvakaris sings it, both times in the song. The hiatus is completely out of place against Vamvakaris’ vernacular.

The hiatus is also out of place, it turns out, against the standard of 2010, because the word for “divorce” is now familiar enough to yield a syllable. In a concession to vernacular phonology, διαζύγιο now has four syllables: /ðja.ˈzi.ɣi.o/. Its first syllable follows the vernacular rule, like διαβάζω. Its last syllable does not.

Admittedly, the Triantaphyllidis dictionary keeps the old pronunciation, and gives it as [δiazíjio] (i.e. [ði.a.ˈzi.ʝi.o]). But a longitudinal study of YouTube says differently:

Πέτρος Κυριάκος: Η γραμματική του μάγκα (1932) (1:30: 5 syllables):
Μητσάκης-Τατασόπουλος: Το Διαζύγιο (Να πας) (1953) (2:26: 5 syllables)
Κώστας Βίρβος, performed by Βαγγέλης Περπινιάδης: Διαζύγιο Θα Πάρω, (1950s?) (0:15: 5 syllables)
Πάνος Γαβαλάς: Διαζύγιο (1950s?) (0:46: 5 syllables)
Γρηγόρης Μπιθικώτσης: Τι τραβάω (1963) (2:31: 5 syllables)
Γιώργος Ζαμπέτας: Ο Πιτσιρικάς (1966) (1:04: 5 syllables)
Θέμης Ανδρεάδης – Νατάσσα Γερασιμίδου: Το διαζύγιο (1977) (2:36: 5 syllables)
Παπαδοπουλος-Δημητριου: Το διαζύγιο (1991) (0:26: 4 syllables)
ΣΥΓΑΠΑ ΦΑΚΕΛΟΣ “ΔΙΑΖΥΓΙΟ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΙΔΙ” Νο 1 (2009) (0:12: 4 syllables)
Conn-x And the star is you- Θέλω διαζύγιο (2010) (0:12: 4 syllables)

Getting dates for some of the tracks was not possible; and because songs get rerecorded in Greece a lot more than in the Anglosphere, there was a high margin of confusion. Before I found Mitaskis’ 1953 song, for example, I found Glykeria’s 1993 cover—which of course used the same number of syllables for διαζύγιο (2:26), by now anachronistically:

Still, there seems to be a story here. Before the abolition of Puristic, διαζύγιο is sung like in Puristic; by the 1990s, it loses its first syllable. What I’m missing is songs from the period when the transition must have happened, looks like between 1977 and 1991. In other words, the ’80s, when Demotic was enshrined as the state language, and the fervour of the socialist government to do away with Puristic swept away several formerly accepted shibboleths—such as the archaic first declension vocatives like καθηγητά.

This doesn’t mean Psichari has had his revenge. In fact, what has happened rather messier linguistically, though unsurprising sociolinguistically. Instead of two phonological systems, one Puristic and one vernacular, we now have a spectrum between the two systems, and words of learnèd origin are adrift between the two rules. So διαζύγιο now starts vernacular, and ends learnèd: /ðja.ˈzi.ɣi.o/, not /ði.a.ˈzi.ɣi.o/ or /ðja.ˈzi.ɣjo/. διάβρωση “erosion” can lose its hiatus (1:22, 2:25, /ˈðja.vro.si/):

or keep it (0:04, 0:13, /ði.ˈa.vro.si/):

The speaker at 2:50 in the first video does not use the word διάβρωση, but he is overloading on hiatus anyway, in a rather pompous kind of public speaking. So hiatus is now clearly a register feature—and unpredictable: it’s a sociolinguistic variable, rather than a purely linguistic variable.

Ghost words revived in Allatius

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2010-11-13 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek
Tags: Ancient Greek, Byzantine Greek, compounds, lexicography, lexicon

The canon (patchwork though it is) of Greek lexica that I described a while back has a fair representation of German scholarship: Lust Eynikel & Hauspie, Bauer Danker Ardnt Gingrich, Trapp.

The oddity is that German scholarship wasn’t represented there for the Classical period. Yes, LSJ is a major work, and DGE is more comprehensive still (if only I would live to see it completed). But it’s odd that the Germans didn’t corner the market in Ancient Greek lexicography in the 19th century, when they ruled Classical philology.

As it turns out, Wilhelm Pape’s Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache (revised by Max Sengebusch in 1880) is competitive with LSJ, with 99,000 headwords against LSJ’s 116,000. Given that LSJ, published in 1940, covers an additional 60 years worth of papyri and inscriptions, Pape’s dictionary has nothing to be ashamed of.

I’ve recently had occasional to compare it against the other lexica of Greek: I keep trying to fill in gaps in lexical coverage hither and thither—for reasons that should be obvious to the regular readership I’ve been neglecting. Of those 99k, 545 lemmata are absent from the other lexica, but still turn up in the TLG corpus. That’s a lot of lemmata, given that dictionaries have been making a point of filling in each other’s gaps (Trapp in particular).

There are a few reasons for Pape’s 545 not to have been recorded anywhere else. Pape has not picked up the allergy to Late Antiquity that LSJ did. This allergy has meant that pagan late antiquity is the least well covered period in Greek lexicography. As more inscriptions and papyri turned up, LSJ displaced late entries with the newly found earlier entries. With these late entries attributed to no author more specific than “Eccl.” or “Byz.”, LSJ wasn’t desperate to hold on to them, to begin with.

Pape has the same dismissive “Byz.” attribution for its late entries; but it has not undergone the same kind of cull—to the benefit of the Greek Anthology and Oribasius.

And, to my surprise, of the scholiasts. The scholiasts are something of a discomfort to lexicographers. Scholiasts provide their own definitions of Classical words, so Classical lexicographers care about the words the scholiasts use. But scholiasts explain Classical words to post-Classical audiences, by using decidedly post-Classical vocabulary. Which means that documenting the scholiasts puts Classicists in the Mediaeval Greek business. (Not always wisely, as seen with LSJ’s mishandling of στοίχημα “wager”.)

There is a smaller group of lemmata in Pape which the other lexica overlook for different reasons—and which by rights should not be turning up in a Classical corpus at all. The text of the Classical canon is described by lexicographers following standard editions; but the manuscripts they work from had a lot more variability than the lexicographers now need to account for. Our modern edition of Pindar has established that Pythian Ode 8.74 reads

πολλοῖς σοφὸς δοκεῖ πεδ’ ἀφρόνων

to many he seems wise among fools

So we are not interested that in some mediaeval manuscripts, the last two words πεδ’ ἀφρόνων “with the non-prudent” were run together as πεδαφρόνων “of the after-prudent”—or, as Pape has it:

πεδά-φρων, ον formerly appeared in Pind. P. 8.74, and was explained as Aeolic for μετάφρων, someone who is wise later, after the deed; Böckh writes it as πέδ’ ἀφρόνων.

Once Böckh settled that πεδάφρων did not exist in Pindar, πεδάφρων ceases to be of interest for Classicists.

But the people who read those mediaeval manuscripts thought πεδάφρων existed. The scholia are commentaries on mediaeval versions of the Classical texts, and reflect the mediaeval understandings of those texts. If the scholia describe these misreadings, they perpetuate them, even after we have cleaned up the source text (to our best judgement). So our Thucydides 8.91.3 now reads

ἦν δέ τι καὶ τοιοῦτον ἀπὸ τῶν τὴν κατηγορίαν ἐχόντων, καὶ οὐ πάνυ διαβολὴ μόνον τοῦ λόγου

This was no mere slander, there being really some such plan entertained by the accused.

Somewhere along the line διαβολὴ μόνον “mere slander” was metanalysed as διαβόλιμον ὄν “being liable to slander”. The scholiast accordingly tries in the margin to make sense of the word they saw in the main text. Our main text is emended, but the margin still counts as text in the Greek corpus:

διαβόλιμον ὄν: ἤτοι καὶ οὐκ ἔχοντος τοῦ λόγου διαβολὴν (?), οὐδαμῆ εἶχεν ὁ λόγος διαβόλως (?)
being liable to slander: namely, not having slander in speech (?); the speech was in no way slanderous (?)

(You can thank Karl Hude, who edited the scholia, for the incredulous question marks.) Thomas Magister also recorded the word in his “Selection of Attic nouns and verbs”—although he was reluctant to go so far as to commend it:

Διαβόλιμον Θουκυδίδης λέγει τὸ διαβεβλημένον· καὶ οὐ πάνυ διαβόλιμον ὂν ἀπὸ τῶν Μεγάρων τὴν Σαλαμῖνα παραπλεῖν. σὺ δὲ διαβεβλημένον λέγε.
liable to slander is what Thucydides calls something slandered. “Without it being liable to slander that they should sail by from Megara to Salamis”. But you should say “slandered”.

You should also not trust Thomas’ reading of Thucydides; the sailing from Megara to Salamis is from Thucydides 8.94.1, a few pages on, and the mission talked about as διαβόλιμον was heading to Eetonia near Piraeus.

The mediaeval manuscripts were not just read by the Byzantine scholiasts and lexicographers, though. The manuscripts—and the scholia and lexica explaining them—were how the Byzantines learned the Classical language, on which they modelled their own literary language. That means that διαβόλιμον is of interest in the study of later Greek. Sure, it’s a ghost word, like dord, and it was never part of any spoken form of Greek.

But if the text of Pindar that Byzantine writers read said πεδάφρων, then writers would assume it to be real enough: no less real than μετάφρων, which they could have coined in their own, Atticist learnèd Greek. No less real, for that matter, than embiggen.

The main reason these ghost words were taken up was that the ghost words did make sense on their own: they could be analysed according to the rules of Greek compounding. If you know how Classical Greek works, you already know that διαβόλιμον really does mean “liable to calumny”, because -ιμος is a real suffix (cf. ἀγώγιμος “carriable”); and once you know that πέδα is Aeolic for μετά, you know that πεδάφρων must somehow mean “after-mined” (cf. ἔκφρων “out of one’s mind”). The misreading of διαβολὴ μόνον or πεδ’ ἀφρόνων is not alien to spoken language after all; it’s the same metanalysis that gives us adder or newt—or helipad or pollute. So it may look like Byzantine Greek writers were asking for this kind of bogosity, by slavishly relying on flawed manuscripts for their models; but what they came up with was not that different to what spoken language has done elsewhere.

And so it is no surprise that πεδάφρων shows up in the TLG too, even if it is not in the TLG’s Pindar. It turns up in someone who has read Pindar in those corrupted manuscripts, and is happy to show his reading off. But this is not a scholiast or lexicographer. This time, it’s a reader who is producing literature of his own: Leo Allatius, in his poem Hellas, written in the 17th century. (A couple of centuries before Böckh.)

My Ancient Greek isn’t as good as I might make it seem, and Allatius’ run-on syntax doesn’t make it easier; but this is how I think he uses πεδάφρων—in the same genitive πεδαφρόνων as in the pre-Böckh Pindar.

ΕΛΛΑΣ γάρ εἰμι, τέκνον, ΕΛΛΑΣ, ἧς κλέος
ἄσβεστον ἔργοις τιμίοις πεπραγμένον,
διελθὸν ἔπτη πρός τε γαῖαν, καὶ διὰ
πόντου πέρασσε νυκτός, ἠδ’ ἠοῦς λάχος,
ἠδ’ εἴ τι ποῦ ἐστι λαιά, κἀπιδέξια
συμφραδμόνεσσι τηλόθεν γ’ ᾠκισμένον,
πεδαφρόνων γὰρ οὐδὲ μικρόν μοι μέλει,
ὃ ΓΑΛΛΙΚΟΙΣ στήθεσφι τοῦδ’ ἄχρις χρόνου
ἄφθαρτον ἐμπεφυκὸς ἀγλαΐζεται. (vv. 196–204)
For I am Hellas, child, Hellas, whose inextinguishable
glory, carried out in honourable deeds,
is past, has crouched down to the ground, and has
passed through the sea of the night: this is the doom of the dawn;
but it is also what is there in a place, that is dwelled in
left and right by counsellors from afar,
(for I do not care the slightest for those wise after the fact):
a thing which is splendid in Gallic breasts
growing incorruptible to this day.

Pindar is not the only Classical author whose fractured words turn up in both Allatius and Pape. ναυβάτης “ship-walker” turns up in several Classical sources—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon). The most obscure source is Lycophron:

καὶ τὰς Ἐρεμβῶν ναυβάταις ἠχθημένας προβλῆτας ἀκτάς (vv. 827–828)
and the jutting shores of the Erembi, abhorred by mariners

The TLG’s edition of Lycophron dates from 1964; Pape in 1880 records ναυάτης as Lycophron’s reading, and also has it as a variant reading in Euripides, IT 1380. Our Lycophron and Euripides have now been cleaned up to read ναυβάτης; Allatius’ had not, so that his poem has the first appearance of ναυάτης in the TLG corpus:

Ἀργοῖς ἐρετμοῖς πόντος, εἰ καὶ μαίνεται,
κλύδωνί τ’ οἰχθείς, ψάμμον ἐκβράζει βυθοῖς,
βύκτας ἀέλλας ἡμερώσας ναυάτης,
οἰηΐοις τε νηὸς ἰθύνας δρόμον,
πρὸς ὅρμον ἔλσεν ἀσκηθὴς σόον σκάφος. (vv. 233–237)
Though the sea rages, and throws up sand from the depths,
departing with slow oars and through the billow,
the mariner calms the blustering whirlwind,
and straightens his course with the ship’s rudder,
to shelter the vessel unscathed in its anchorage.

(If you go searching the TLG for ναυατ-, btw, ignore Ναυάται in Germanus I, Narratio de haeresibus et synodis ad Anthimum diaconum 48. His Nauatae predate Allatius by eight centuries, but they are Novatianists, a sect, as you would expect in an anti-heretical text.)

The misreading of ναυβάτης as ναυάτης is unsurprising: they sound the same in Modern Greek, [naˈvatis]. Unlike πεδάφρων or διαβόλιμον, ναυάτης doesn’t mean anything on its own in Greek. It was taken up because it still looks like another real word of Greek, ναύτης “shipper = sailor”, which has survived into the Modern language. Copyists simplified ναυβάτης into ναυάτης, and then figured that Euripides was just using ναύτης with an extra α in the middle. The Ancients did strange this like that, after all, didn’t they?

(The Baroque did strange things too, just in a different way.)

Outside the lexicographers and scholiasts, there aren’t many instances of such rejected readings turning up in literary Greek. ἠπίαμα “cure”, as defined in Pape, is a metanalysis of Herodotus 3.130 ἤπια μετὰ τὰ ἰσχυρὰ προσάγων “supplying both mild and strong (medicine)”; the misquote turns up in Constantine Porphyrogenitus De virtutis et vitiis II p. 11, and Suda, delta 442; but that doesn’t count as new usage. The run-in εὐ ναιόμενος “well-dwelling” of Iliad 14.255, which Pape allows as a single verb, turns up as a distinct verb not just in commentators, but also in Galen (Kühn 18b p. 763). But that’s it. (I thought I saw an instance in Gregory of Nazianzen’s aping of Homer, but I can’t find it.)

That may mean that Allatius’ Greek is more derivative than his forebears; I have my doubts, given how Byzantine literary culture worked. Since I did not track down words already defined in Lampe and Trapp, it’s likelier that any earlier such repurposings had already been dealt with there.

… And so I return to blogging. Missed it.

“When I was a soldier, I ended up in Greece”

By: Nick Nicholas | Post date: 2010-07-15 | Comments: 5 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: Italiot, text

It’s been a little while since I’ve put up a language sample of an obscure variant of Greek; this is a sample of the Greek spoken in Calabria.

Of the Greek spoken in Italy, the Greek of Salento is healthiest, with something like 20,000 speakers; the Greek of Calabria has less than a tenth of the speakers, but is significantly more archaic. The sample is taken from Minuto, D., Nucera, S. & Zavettieri, P. 1988. Dialoghi Greci di Calabria. Reggio Calabria: Laruffa. pp. 56–58.

The book includes four recorded conversations in Greek from the early 1980s, from Chorio di Roghudi, Gallicianò, and Bova. The texts were gathered by Domenico Minuto, who taught himself Greek and participates in the conversations; they include both old-timers, and younger semi-speakers.

The text below is from villagers originally from Chorio di Roghudi, including the 19–year-old Pietro Zavettieri (whose idea the collection was), his father, his grandmother, and his uncle. The text’s spelling is based on Italian (e.g. <scero> /ʃero/ “I know”, corresponding to standard ξέρω), with the following additions:

<ch>	x
<gh>	ɣ
<th>	θ
<ddh>	ɖː
<j>	j
<sz>	z
<z>	ts
<zz>	tːs

<ddh> is a convention of Calabrese; as in Calabrese, <ddh> reflects historical /ll/. So <addho> /aɖːo/ “other” sounds something like an American drawled “add-draw”, but corresponds to earlier Greek ἄλλο, /allo/. (Just as Calabrese iddha “she” comes from Latin illa.)

The story is revealing, of the type I like to feature in The Other Place: what happens when the Greek-speakers of Italy find themselves at war with the Greek-speakers of Greece. It’s very easy for Greeks to lose sight of it, but through the inhabitants of Roghudi and Calimera spoke Greek, they live in Italy, and their ancestors have lived in Italy for anything between a thousand and three thousand years. Which means they are Italian. Still, Pietro’s unnamed uncle did not end up the worse for wear for it, when he was with the occupation forces in Greece.

I’ll post linguistic commentary separately. Following a common convention of Italiot Greek texts, I italicise the Romance words (many of which are inflected in Greek).

Zio: San immo ssordàto ejàna stin Grècia; ce ìmmaston dio; mu ipe: «Pame oden abucàto pu echi tundo spiti na tu zitìome ticandì na fame.» Ipan egò: «Pame, ma egò en tu ccapèo.» Ecìno ipe «Esù tu ccapèi ti platèi to greco.» Ipan egò: «En tu ccapèo.» Allùra tu ipan egò: «Platèspe esù: an ecìni platèu ce tu ccapèguo, allùra egò platèo; andè, den platèo proprio.» Tutos ode ejài ecì; tu ipe: «Thelo ligon alàdi, enan pumadòro, ligon ala, na camo mian nzaláta, na fao, ti immo nisticò.»	Uncle: When I was a soldier, I ended up in Greece. And there was two of us. He told me: “Let’s go down here where that house is, to ask them for something to eat.” I said: “Let’s go, but I won’t understand them.” He said: “You will understand them, because you speak Greek.” I said: ” I won’t understand them.” So I said: “You talk: if they talk and I understand them, then I’ll talk; if not, I’m not talking at all.” This man goes there; he told him: “I want some oil, a tomato, some salt, to make a salad to eat, because I have not eaten.”
Tutos ode, o greco, canni: «Ma egò, san de capèguo, ti en scero ecìno pu leghi, en scero, ecìno pu den mu leghi! Ti mu steki lègonda?» San egò ecàpespa ecìno ti eplàtespe manachòstu, ce ipe ola tunda pràmata, tu ipan egò: «Scerise ti theli? Mian stampa alàdi, enan pumadòri, enan crommìdi, na cami mian nzalàta na fai, ti pinài.»	That man, the Greek, goes: “But me, if I can’t understand him, I don’t know what he is saying, and I don’t know what he is not saying to me! What is he telling me?” When I understood what he said on his own, and he said all that, I said to him: “You know what he wants? A little oil, a tomato, an onion, to make a salad to eat, because he is hungry.”
«Ah! Esù leddhé! leddhé! leddhé! Pùtthen isson esù? Putthen isso?» «Putthen immo? Stratiòtes, italiàno.» «Pos’ ecàmese na pàise me tin Italìa? Esù isso leddhé!» Ipan egò pos’ ècama na pao in Itàlia! «M’ epiàsan priguinèri ce arte immo obblighemméno na pao methétu!» Leghi: «Esù leddhé! Ecìno pu thélise, issa a disposiziòni sto spiti ton dicòmmu!»	“Ah! You, brother! brother! brother! Where are you from? Where?” “Where am I from? Soldiers, Italian.” “How did you end up going with Italy? You are a brother!” I told them how I ended up going with Italy! “They captured me as a prisoner and now I am forced to go with them!” He said: “You, brother! Whatever you want is at your disposal in my house!”
Pietro: Vrete esì! Zio: En calò o den en calò? Minuto: En calò, po den en calò? Pollì calò.	Pietro: Well look at that! Uncle: Is that nice or what? Minuto: It’s nice, how can it not be? Very nice.
Zio: Arte canno àddonen discúrso. To stesso in Grècia. Poi immasto dio pu epìgame viàta ismìa; ejàmmasto ce etrovèspame enan tabakkìno. Sce tundo tabakkìno etrovèspame octò, deca eciúndo greco. Pos arrivèspame ecióssu, mas efèrai ena, ena giro peròtu, possi ìssai eciòssu, na pìome. Poi egò eghìrespa na tus offrèspo ecinòne. C’ ecìni mu errifiutèspai; iche ton bbarìsta, ipe: «Sanàrte sa offrèusi ecìni, avri, methàvri, tu sonnite offréspi esì.» Dopu ti epìame nduttu, ce mas edùcai ciòla enan pakètto sicarètte, peròma ti ìmmasto dio, èrchete o barrìsta ce mu ipe: «Vre ti avri su amènome ode.» «Ma egò den ercho ode» tu ipan egò, «jatì egò en iscèro ta fatti po ppasi.» «Esù avru èrchese ode; sto tali oràrio ti s’ amènu tèssere, pende ghinèke, ti thelu na ivru po pplatèvghise esù to greco.»	Uncle: Now I’ll tell another story. Also in Greece. There were two of us who always went together. We went and found a tobacconist. At that tobacconist’s we found eight, ten of those Greeks. As we arrived there, they brought us a round for each, everyone who was there, to drink. Then I tried to treat them. And they refused me; the barman was there, he said: “For now they are treating you; tomorrow, the day after, you can treat them.” After we drunk everything, and they moreover gave us a packet of cigarettes each, there being two of us, the barman came and told me: “Look, tomorrow we’ll wait for you here.” “But I won’t come here”, I said to him, “because I don’t know how things will go.” “You’re coming here tomorrow, at such and such a time four or five women will be waiting for you, because they want to see how you speak Greek.”
Ejàmmasto! Ejàmmaston ecì. Epettòame eciàpanu, pu iche mian addhi stanza ce eciòssu accheròai crùnnonda ce chorèonda ce na gustèspu emmè pos to eplàtegua to greco. Pinnonda, cànnonda ecì, emmèna to fucìli mómine. Dopu ti epìame, echorìstima c’ ejàssame ta fàttima. San arrivèspame a un certu puntu, mu canni tutos addo: «Ce to fucìli to dicòssu pu ene?» Tu ipan egò: «Ecì èmine.» Leghi: «Pu to thorìse ple! En su to donnu ple.» Ipan egò: «Condofèrrome, thorùme, an mu to donnu mu to donnun.» Me tin strata ortèo ena pu èrcheto me ton fucìli ton dicòmmu. Mu ipe: «Esù isso leddìdi dicòmma. An den isso leddìdi dicòmma to muskètto en to ìthore ple.» C’ ecòspame ecì.	We went! We went there. We got up there, where there was another room, and inside they started playing music and dancing and enjoying how I spoke Greek to them. Drinking and entertaining myself there, I left my gun behind. After we drank, we started to leave. When we got to a certain point, this man goes to me: “And where is your gun?” I told him: “It’s back there.” He said: “You’re not seeing it again! They won’t give it back.” I said: “We’ll go back, we’ll see: if they give it to me, they give it to me.” Along the way I meet a man coming with my gun. He said to me: “You are our brother. If you weren’t our brother, you would never have seen your musket again.” And we broke off there.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Email Address

Join 329 other subscribers
August 2026

M T W T F S S

1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

« Jul

Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

Set Union of Greek and Linguistics

Pages

Categories

How Greek accentuation works

Aspiration questions

ἐκαληθεύω: an ill-fitting prefix in Choeroboscus

Pontic infinitive, real and imagined

Markos Vamvakaris: Ο ισοβίτης, Final verse

Markos Vamvakaris: Ο ισοβίτης

στήτη, a post-Homeric ghost word

The hiatus of διαζύγιο “divorce”

Ghost words revived in Allatius

“When I was a soldier, I ended up in Greece”

Subscribe to Blog via Email

See also

Top posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Meta