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Can you recall a particular text that ignited your love of literature?
You merit of me, Anya of Lincoln, an answer with a gem in it. A shard of Sappho, perhaps. But that was in my thirties. An artfully naive ballad of Heine’s. But that was in my twenties. The children’s poetry of C. J. Dennis. I remember the LP I somehow got of him when I was 6; I remember thinking THE TRIANTIWONTIGONGOLOPE was a quizzical thing with a marching beat, but I don’t remember actually getting it as literature.
I could tell you I was translating Horace’s Odes from Latin when I was 11, and I’d be telling you the truth. But I’d be lying to you if I told you I got them as poetry. I was impressed by the last ode in the collection, the Exegi monumentum. But I hadn’t gotten what it was that he was boasting so highly of achieving.
The answer lies in my uncles’ and aunts’ and cousins’ dusty, high school anthologies of Modern Greek literature, from the 70s and 60s, that I pored over in my granddad’s shed. They gave me a sampler of what I’d like and what I wouldn’t: more Karyotakis, less Palamas, more Xenopoulos, less Papadiamantis. They situated excerpts of Modern Greek literature in a chronological context and tradition; they gave an overview of what had happened and changed between 1800 and 1950 (along with the bedrock of Greek folk song, that they all either referred back to or shrunk from).
And as a result, they gave me the caution to seek out the social and the literary context of what anyone was writing. They aren’t isolated, self-wrought monuments; they’re always latticed in with what came before and what after.
And they prepared me for four masters of Modern Greek. Each of them I read before I was 12. Each of them, in his own way, a master stylist. And each of them, more so than most in Modern Greek, acutely self-conscious about the language they used (and that’s saying a lot for Modern Greek).
- Nikos Kazantzakis, for the late novels. Long, picturesque, dramatic narratives; but cast in a language of robust, lively flexibility and shading. His vocabulary at times was over-dialectal, but in Greek that was an asset, not a liability: it made it all the richer and more vigorous. And his command of syntax was unrivalled.
- Constantine P. Cavafy. A much subtler taste to acquire, and it took me longer to. His style is exquisite, though much of it in the opposite direction from Kazantzakis. Eclectic rather than folksy; elite rather than populist; understated rather than effusive. Every word well-weighted, every shift in register a grimace behind a mask.
- Yannis Makriyannis. The Noble Prize winner Seferis cultivated a mythology around this illiterate general in the Greek War of Independence being the greatest stylist of the language, writing in the purest Demotic that has ever been. A lot of that is mythology; Makriyannis’ morphology has been contaminated plenty by Puristic Greek, and Modern Greek, like all literatures, was anxious to find its own Caedmon or Homer as a founder.
But (though the narrative gets bogged down in tedious details often), at his best Makriyannis really is that good. His syntax is guileless and powerful. It owes nothing to the pedants, and everything to generations of peasants, who know how to spin a good yarn in arresting language. - Οι τούρκοι υποψιασμένοι· να ’βλεπαν ρωμιό, κιντύνευε. “The Turks—suspicious; they saw a Greek, he was in danger.” You don’t know what a relief it is to a reader of Greek, after all the weight of centuries of Thucydides and calqued French, to be confronted with a sentence this bare.
- Nikos Tsiforos. Not a producer of high literature, and I have no doubt some Greeks are arching their eyebrows about now. He was a humorist, who started out with anecdotes about petty criminals, and branched out to serialised accounts of Greek mythology and history, their protagonists speaking and acting as if they were petty criminals. And his prose is a vindication of all the expressive potential of the Greek language. They really don’t write like him any more.
What English words of Greek origin don’t sound like they come from Greek?
- Glamour, as a Scots mutation of Grammar, from the same Education = Witchcraft equation that gave us Grimoire.
- Diocese. I had no idea until a month ago that this is just dioikēsis “administration”.
- For more palatalisation catching me unawares: cemetery from koimētērion.
- Dram, and for that matter Dirham, as derivatives of drachma.
In the globalized digital world, how meaningful is the criteria of geographic proximity to define a sprachbund?
… A very good question, Clarissa!
On the one hand, not much, because English is in every household, though the telly and the interwebs. Now, where to find evidence for this?
Journalistic Greek is awash with ill-fitting calques from English, and syntactic loans and semantic field readjustments too, because the journalists spend their time reading (and paraphrasing) what they read in English.
… Except, 150 years ago, they were doing exactly the same with French. So Journalistic Greek is not more globalised now than any elite European lect was a century ago.
There’s a lot more evidence of this on the street. Calques like “give you a call”, say. Effortless codeswitching, even if it is heavily accented. This stuff is definitely going on now, and it didn’t even need to wait for the internet; the globalised mass media was enough, and that’s been in place for 50 years.
But still, that’s comparable to the French superstrate on Russian, or any number of other superstrates. A sprachbund, I think, needs more: it needs daily bilingualism in everyday life and the hearth. It needs people actively speaking English alongside Greek at the shops and at home, not just passively consuming it: that makes it much easier for the linguistic structures to commingle and be remoulded, outside of the occasional calque, and for the commingling to reach into morphology and in-depth syntax.
I don’t think we’re there yet. I think it’s not that far off though.
How are Greek Australians perceived in Australia?
I should know the answer to this, being one of them. But it’s actually reasonably hard to introspect this, especially as the novelty of Greek Australians has long since worn off.
I’m going to offer some stereotypes, but as I often do with this kind of question, I’m hoping for someone to step in with a better thought out answer.
- 1st generation. Factory fodder and fast food vendors. Insular, hard working, devious, loud, volatile. Bottom of the totem pole at the time.
- 2nd Generation. Surprisingly insular compared to other ethnicities: still speaking Greek (sometimes), still intermarrying. Arrogant disco bunnies. High achievers, although not everyone noticed at the time. Still loud and volatile compared to Anglo-Australians, almost certainly not compared to Greeks in Greece.
- 3rd generation. Assimilated. Held up as model minority. (The 60s are easily forgotten.) Now at last turning up in areas where high achievers didn’t need to: they are civil servants and musicians, not just lawyers and doctors. Don’t actually stand out that much anymore.
Two versions of Haidari: A Lost Original resurfaces
I find this fascinating.
You may not find this fascinating. It involves Greek music of the 40s.
I’ve been listening to Dalaras’ 1980 recording of wartime rebetika. I realised that one of the songs, Haidari, I had already heard before, and loved it. It’s a chilling song about someone about to be executed, in the Haidari concentration camp in Athens. Its lyrics and its music both have an astonishing urgency, with the music careening between panic and sorrow.
You could argue Dalaras’ 1980 recording is overproduced, too smooth. But it’s also oracular the way Dalaras manages. And it’s the version I’ve known and loved.
Run mother, fast as you can,
run and save me,
and free me, mother,
from Haidari.
For I am about to die
and I am condemned.
A seventeen year old boy
locked up in irons.
They take me from Sekeris St
[where the Sicherheitsdienst HQ was]
to Haidari
and hour by hour I wait
for Death to take me.
Now, it’s a miracle that the Wartime Rebetiko songs were recorded at all. They were not recorded during the war. With many of them pro-communist and most of them suspect, they were not recorded after the war. And that extended to this song, too, which was written in 1943 by the Master of Rebetiko, the Great Markos Vamvakaris.
And with the songs not recorded during the war, or after the war, an inconvenient truth surfaced about Haidari. Noone in 1980 was sure what the tune was. There were multiple tunes in circulation, and what Markos himself had set it to was unknown; Markos himself had died in 1972. All anyone knew was the characteristically curt description in Markos’ autobiography:
Then [after the war] I went back to perform at Amphissa nightclub. We’d play all my pre-war songs there. I’d written a few new songs in the meantime. One that went quite well was Haidari. A zeibekikos in the niavendi (Nahawand) scale. I didn’t record it. I sang it in parks [clubs].
According to Markos’ son Stelios, Markos himself barely remembered the song, and the recording went ahead with music that Stelios wrote.
It’s an amazing tune, like I said. But it’s no zeibekikos; the article above describes it as a tsifteteli. It’s not in Nahawand scale. And if you think about it (and know the styles), there’s nothing ’40s about it: it’s a setting that wouldn’t make sense before 1960.
What happens if you find Bach’s completion to his last fugue? Or Schubert’s completion of his Unfinished Symphony? Or a Requiem that Mozart finished all on his own, without Süssmayr? Would it be what you expected? Would you want to risk disappointment?
And how much more of a risk would it be, if it was like this song, where the music wasn’t even the original?
Well, I found out today that Markos had remembered the original tune just fine, and a recording surfaced a couple of years ago from 1966.
That blog article was: Το αυθεντικό ‘Χαιδάρι’ του Μάρκου Βαμβακάρη από χαμένη ηχογράφηση του 1966
The audio is abominable, and Markos was never a great singer, but…
… The striking thing about the original Haidari: it’s exactly what you’d expect from Markos in 1943. It follows the path he’d laid out in his 1930s Peiraeus style. It’s jaunty, not desperate (outside of the wavering of Markos’ out-of-tune tenor: the desperation is very subtle). It’s ordered, not impassioned, with all the familiar tropes and Mozartian symmetry of the 30s. It thumps along at a fast pace. It’s not as imaginative and soaring as his son’s setting: after all, his son had benefitted from 40 years of broadening of the bouzouki repertoire. And its tone, ultimately, is all fatalism and little panic.
And it has three more stanzas, one of which is heard in the recording (and all of which had been published in 1947):
You should see Death’s sword,
mother, how it changes things,
oh, and how it will take way
mother, everyone’s life.
And when you see me dead, mother,
tell the other mothers—
for they too have ached
with even greater sorrow—
That I have seen their children
bound in chains,
dressed in the uniform of the condemned,
and unjustly slain.
… I think the new version is greater, it dares more, it feels more. Yet the understated, ordered, fatalistic original, numbly wrapped up in the familiar old tropes and symmetries, is probably truer to how Markos felt, as he saw Jews and resistance fighters being dragged off to Haidari.
When did Greeks as a people adopt surnames?
Corroborating Anestis Samourkasidis’ answer: Vote #1 Anestis Samourkasidis’ answer to When did Greeks as a people adopt surnames?.
If you peruse Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire part I, you will see sporadic surnames in the 7th and 8th century; e.g. I PBE: Ioannes 9 : Ἰωάννῃ σπαθαρίῳ, τὸ ἐπίκλην Στρούθῳ “John the spatharios [military office], nickname/surname Strouthos”. Surnames were still rare, and you’ll notice that PBE I doesn’t even use surnames in its index (hence 607 Johns in its database). Certainly by the 12th century, surnames were universal.
Irrefragable
Remember when Dennis Miller was commentating the NFL, and peppering his commentary with obscurity after obscurity, and a panoply of blogs popped up to offer exegesis to the befuddled masses?
This here blog may be that for the Magister, and I don’t want the Magister to start getting all self-conscious about his recondite lexis.
Don’t think that’s a likely outcome though.
irrefragable is another word from the Magister that is new to me:
Aristotle makes a version of this point — an unruly, inconvenient, irrefragable truth
There is no “view from nowhere”; subjectivity is irrefragable and ineluctable
impossible to refute <irrefragable arguments>
impossible to break or alter <irrefragable rules>
So why is it different from irrefutable? Because it’s got the etymology of “unopposable, irresistable”
Since at least 1533, irrefragable has been used as an English adjective modifying things (such as arguments or data) that are impossible to refute. It derives from the Late Latin adjective irrefragabilis (of approximately the same meaning), which is itself derived from the Latin verb refragari, meaning “to oppose or resist.” Irrefragable rather quickly developed a second sense referring to things (such as rules, laws, and even objects) that cannot be broken or changed. There was once also a third sense that applied to inflexible or obstinate people.
So, you not only can’t refute it, you can’t stand up to it and resist it; and the “it” is like a law or a rule, not just an argument someone makes.
Of course, the Magister can himself be pretty irrefragable at times. In whichever of the senses you prefer. (Handy hint: he likes obsolete, archaic senses of words.)
Why don’t Asians in Australia have the Australian accent?
As other respondents have said, (a) it depends, and (b) they do. Reflecting on the Asian Australians I’ve known in the past thirty years:
- People who’ve come off the boat naturally aren’t going to have an Aussie accent. Duh. Although I’ve spoken of a counterexample here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who are some people you know who became fluent in a foreign language as an adult?
- Second generation Asian Australians will, by default, have an Aussie accent. Of course. I haven’t noticed someone who doesn’t.
- In fact, I contrast second generation Asian Australians with second generation Greek Australians. There is a distinctive Greek-Australian accent that I can pick out in 40 year old and 50 year old 2nd gen Greeks: it’s not Greek at all, it’s overcentralised, and a little overenunciated. I don’t recall something similar with Asian Australians. But as I keep protesting, I do have a tin ear.
- Some Asian Australian schoolfriends and acquaintances have been on the Cultivated Australian/Vaguely British side. That correlates with Taiwan (not sure how), and with Hong Kong (a bit more obvious how).
- On the other hand, my fellow engineering student from Shepparton in rural Victoria, predictably, had one of the more ocker accents I’ve ever heard. Mate.
Why does NACLO use “living” languages in some of its questions?
This is a more general question: why would linguistic Olympiads and competitions in general use for their puzzles real, non-obscure languages, which someone among the the contestants may already know?
I know nothing about NACLO in particular, and I will offer some speculation which I still think relevant.
- Oversight: “meh, noone will know Turkish”. Which of course is pretty lazy. And that’s why fieldwork linguists pick their own language of interest, which they can be reasonably sure noone will know. I was never a fieldworker, but when I set assignments, I’d make a point of using Tsakonian. I’ve seen a fair few Australian Aboriginal languages in assignments. I’ve also seen Klingon, although I don’ t think that’s nowadays a more obscure choice than Hungarian.
- On the other hand, if the puzzle or quiz is not just about “work out what this means, and give a one sentence answer” but “give an analysis of this data”, then the choice of language doesn’t matter in most cases. Maybe 0.5% of the people sitting the Olympiad know Turkish or Hungarian. The number of people able to come up with a cogent linguistic analysis under exam conditions will be a smaller proportion: native speakers aren’t linguists out of the box. Admittedly, not massively smaller.
- And if you’re going to write a non-trivial question, making up a toy language is not going to cut it. You’ll want a language whose mechanics have been worked out, so that you can ask intelligent questions around it. But honestly, if you’re picking Hungarian or Turkish over, I dunno, Lakota or Mandinka, I go back to point #1. Pretty lazy.
What is the etymology of etymology, and is it good etymology or bad etymology?
I think I get your question. Is the etymology of etymology subject to the Etymological fallacy?
The etymological fallacy is a genetic fallacy that holds that the present-day meaning of a word or phrase should necessarily be similar to its historical meaning. This is a linguistic misconception, and is sometimes used as a basis for linguistic prescription. An argument constitutes an etymological fallacy if it makes a claim about the present meaning of a word based exclusively on its etymology. This does not, however, show that etymology is irrelevant in any way, nor does it attempt to prove such.
And the answer is, of course it is. Etymon is from the Greek for “true”. Not “true origin”, just “true”—as in “true meaning”. As in, the truth of the word is to be found in its origin.
That’s your etymological fallacy right there.