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What do the Greeks think of the Pontic Greeks who converted to Islam?
Greeks in recent years have established contact with the Pontic-speaking Muslims of the Of Valley, who remained in Turkey after 1923. (Their autonym for the language, unsurprisingly, is Romeyka.) They are renowned as devout Muslims, prominent in Islamic learning. (One might ruefully speculate that they feel they have something to prove.) Any promotion of the Greek dialect has unsurprisingly being viewed with suspicion by the Turkish state, and its most prominent advocate Ömer Asan has been prosecuted by the government, and has moved to Greece.
(See Greek-speaking enclaves in Pontus today: The documentation and revitalization of Romeyka (Chapter 8) – Keeping Languages Alive)
What do Christian Greeks think of them? This is necessarily speculative, but I’m drawing on both introspection, and on a couple of Greek TV programs I have seen.
Awkward. On the one hand, they are a living connection to the Lost Homelands. They have preserved a language which in Greece itself is emblematic but moribund. They are friendly to the waves of refugee descendants going on pilgrimage back East. They are, in one sense, Our People.
In another sense, they remain the Other. They are clearly Not Our People. They are clearly Muslim Turks, not Crypto-Christians as the nationalist narrative would much prefer. They are those who got to stay when Our People were made to leave.
I watched a program where an old Muslim Rum sang a Christian song he remembered from his youth, on Greek TV, with several Christian Pontic guests present. The guests looked moved.
But they also looked profoundly unhappy.
How do I say “I am proud to be a Sufi Muslim” in Koine Greek?
I trust, OP, you appreciate the… clashiness of your request. Even if Rumi actually did write some verses in Greek.
I guess, καυχῶμαι μουσουλμάνος σουφιστὴς ὤν. You won’t find “Mussulman” in any Koine texts, but you certainly find the adjective in the 12th century. You won’t find “Sufi” in Byzantine Greek either, and Ottoman Greeks would far likelier have referred by name directly to the Mevlevi Order they were familiar with; but I don’t think the modern reference to “Sufist” would be out of place.
Well, no more than the whole sentence would be, really. 🙂
Why did Benjamin of Tudela write that the Vlachs in Greece were treating travellers of Jewish origin better? Why did the Vlachs tell him, “that’s because we are cousins”?
Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller from Spain, visited Greece around 1170, when the Jews of Greece were all Romaniotes (Greek-speaking). Benjamin’s fellow Sephardic Jews only moved to Greece when they were expelled from Spain, three hundred years later. So whatever was going on, it was not because of any linguistic kinship between the Vlachs’ Aromanian language and any Greek Jews’ Ladino language.
Might it have been an appeal to Benjamin’s Ladino? No; language does not come up at all. The sum total of what Benjamin writes about them is:
From there it is a day’s journey to Sinon Potamo, where there are about fifty Jews, at their head being R. Solomon and R. Jacob. The city is situated at the foot of the hills of Wallachia. The nation called Wallachians live in those mountains. They are as swift as hinds, and they sweep down from the mountains to despoil and ravage the land of Greece. No man can go up and do battle against them, and no king can rule over them. They do not hold fast to the faith of the Nazarenes, but give themselves Jewish names. p.18Some people say that they are Jews, and, in fact, they call the Jews their brethren, and when they meet with them, though they rob them, they refrain from killing them as they kill the Greeks. They are altogether lawless. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Itinerary Of Benjamin Of Tudela
Wherever Sinon Potamo is, it is two days walk from Gardiki, Trikala; so Benjamin was in Thessaly, where there is a substantial Vlach population.
As you can well imagine, historians have found this intriguing. That doesn’t mean it’s true; Benjamin of Tudela also claimed a Jewish Kingdom in Ethiopia, which recent scholarship is sceptical about (Desperately seeking the Jewish Kingdom of Ethiopia: Benjamin of Tudela and the Horn of Africa (twelfth century)).
The Vlachs in the area openly rebelled against Byzantium two decades later, and may not have been willing to accept Byzantine religious suzerainty, so Greek priests may have been in short supply in Vlach Thessaly. While most Greeks don’t use Old Testament given names, Cypriots do, Bulgarians did, and maybe Vlachs did too; a credulous Benjamin could well have run with that as evidence of something.
I think what’s likeliest is, the Thessaly Vlachs welcomed Benjamin as a non-Greek, were intrigued by his background, and told him some tall tales to impress him.
How is the letter Y (ypsilon) pronounced in modern Greek and how was it pronounced in ancient times?
Our guesses for Ancient Greek are that it was /u/ in most ancient dialects of Greek, and /y/ (German ü) in Attic.
Upsilon was the last letter to change pronunciation in Modern Greek, to /i/. <oi> had also come to be pronounced as /y/ in late Antiquity (they are routinely confused, only with each other, in the proto-Bulgarian inscriptions); it too went to /i/.
- We have a poem from 1030 AD making fun of the new pronunciation (Michael the Grammarian’s irony about hypsilon: a step towards reconstructing byzantine pronunciation): a rustic priest is ridiculed for pronouncing <xylon> the modern way.
- We have evidence from placenames indicating the old pronunciation was around in the 1100s and 1200s (Koryfoi > Old French Corfu, Oinoe > Turkish Ünye).
- We have archaic dialects of Greek—Old Athenian, Tsakonian—in which the reflex of upsilon is [ju], just as French /y/ went to English [ju] (pure).
- And most sensationally, Nikos Pantelidis has recently published a paper unearthing evidence he finds persuasive, that the /y/ pronunciation survived in Old Athenian (the original dialect of Athens, before it was overwhelmed by Peloponnesian settlers in the new Greek state) until the 1840s: https://www.researchgate.net/pub…
Why is “damn” considered a dirty word while “condemn” is not?
Because, for better or worse, damn is what God does, and condemn is what a judge does. So damn picked up the religious and then blasphemous connotations which condemn never had, which made it much more eligible as a profanity. Profanity is all about the current taboos in society.
Why do Greek textbooks and paradigm references disagree on pluperfect endings, and how do I determine which are more standard for Attic vs Hellenistic?
If you want to go digging about this kind of thing, go digging in a German grammar. Dig in something that spends 300 pages on the different variants of verb ending.
Kühner–Blass, §213.5.
The original Pluperfect Active endings in the singular were -ea, -eas, -ee(n), which contract in Attic regularly to –ē, -ēs, -ein.
The variants –ein, -eis, -ein involved remodelling of the 1sg and 2sg endings after the 3sg ending –ein, and the middle aorist –ēn, -ēs, -ē. This first shows up in Isocrates and Demosthenes—so during the Classical period in Attic; that’s why you’re seeing both taught in grammars. The –ei– diphthong spreads to the Plural in “later” authors (that is, in the Koine: Aristotle, Plutarch); those are the endings you hesitate to consider “dubious” in details.
It’s hard for me to say which should be considered standard. A historically-oriented approach will go with the older endings, so those with the etas. And grammars of Classical languages tend to be historically-oriented. That’s what Smyth lists in its summary table (§383); the variant endings in Demosthenes are mentioned in passing in §701. For that matter, I’d be surprised if the teaching of Koine features the plurals in –ei– prominently.
Who could show me an example of the ending -κειμεν?
Well, this is a “late” (i.e. Koine) variant of the 1pl pluperfect active ending -κεμεν, as in “we had untied, ἐλελύ-κεμεν”. So you won’t likely get a Classical form.
The earliest instance I find is in Aristotle, Metaphysica 1041a:
καίτοι κἂν εἰ μὴ ἑωράκειμεν τὰ ἄστρα, οὐδὲν ἂν ἧττον, οἶμαι, ἦσαν οὐσίαι ἀΐδιοι παρ’ ἃς ἡμεῖς ᾔδειμεν
However, I presume that even if we had never seen the stars, none the less there would be eternal substances besides those which we knew
After that, it’s Josephus, Philo, Plutarch and Appian.
When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?
I’ve put off answering this question for ages, and I’ve finally looked at the classic work on the topic, Vryonis: Decline of Medieval Hellinism in Asia Minor
Here’s the quick summary.
- The Turks came from parts East, in several waves: first the Seljuk Empire, then the various emirates that ended up being incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.
- There were two stages in the Turkification of Anatolia: 1071 (Battle of Manzikert) through ca. 1300, and 1300 through ca. 1500.
- In the first stage, there was conquest, massacres, migration, economic disruption, and forced conversions. Yet in 1300, there were still enough Christians in the emirates in Anatolia, that the capital tax on Christians was their largest source of revenue.
- The population of Christians in Western Anatolia plummeted over the next two centuries, so that by the early 16th century the proportion of Christian to Muslim households in the Anatolia Eyalet was 8000 to 520,000. (In the Rûm Eyalet by contrast, which had remained under Christian control up to 1461, Christian households were still 30%.)
- The population of Christians plummeted, of course, because Greek-speaking Christians became Turkish-speaking Muslims. Greek clergy continually refer to their flock dwindling, and to Christians converting. The number of bishoprics in Anatolia dwindled from 54 to 17, with depopulated sees merged into their neighbours.
- Not only was the Greek church much less empowered to retain the allegiance of Christians, with its property confiscated and its prestige diminished, but there was significant Islamic missionary activity as well (the Bektashi Order, the Mevlevi Order, the Futuwwa).
The word Ἀρσένιος (Arsenios) is latinized to Arsenius. Does the word θηλυκός (thēlykós) have a latinized form other than femina?
Bit of a misunderstanding here. The proper name Arsenius, Greek Arsenios (as in Arsenio Hall) is derived from the Greek word for ‘man’, arsen. But it was not the normal word for “masculine”, and LSJ records arsenios meaning “masculine” only once in a third century AD papyrus. The normal word for masculine was arsenikos (seemingly as in arsenic; in fact arsenic is from the Arabic al-zarnīq, which Greeks noticed sounded just like the Greek for “masculine”).
OP wonders, if the word for ‘masculine’ in Greek ended up in Latin, did the Greek word for ‘feminine’, thēlykos, end up in Latin as well? The Greek word for ‘masculine’ didn’t really end up in Latin, though, except as a name, and Google returns no hits whatsoever for +thelycus. So I’d be surprised if it did.
Is it true that most linguists assert Basque has not substantially changed?
Not to my knowledge. The late Larry Trask, preeminent vasconist of his time, spent a lot of leisure time refuting inane claims about Basque being related to every language on earth, and part of his armoury as a historical linguist was that such inane efforts made use of modern Basque dictionaries, whereas both what we have reconstructed of proto-Basque, and what little we know of Aquitanian, the ancestor of Basque, are phonologically different.