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Tag: Modern Greek
Greek diglossia and how it isn’t
The term “diglossia” was coined for Greece; in fact, it was coined popularised by Psichari, who was once of the principals in the Greek diglossia wars. But the very fact that there were diglossia wars in Greece means “diglossia” was no longer the right word to describe what was going on in Greece. Diglossia is […]
Linguashmucks: Motorcycle Boy 1, Purity of Greek 0
Enough teasing: at last, here is the translation of Motorcycle Boy’s post “Linguashmucks” (Οι Γλωσσοκόπανοι). To lead in: my friend Diana, of the blog Surprised By Time (bringing the Mediaeval Peloponnese to life) forwarded me a link, and suggested I blog about it. The link was to an article in the Athens press (here in […]
What’s Londínon in the language of the Inglínes?
I’ve been working on lemmatising the TLG for, oh, over six years. And lemmatising the TLG includes lemmatising its proper names. The TLG is, in quantity, a mostly Byzantine corpus, even though the point of the TLG was ancient literature: the Byzantine corpus is what survived most. And in the absence of a Byzantine gazetteer […]
On nominalisations ending in -εία
A post on Greek spelling. You’ve been warned. The spelling of the noun ending -εία vs. -ία had come up a few months ago on the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, as an orthographic bedevilment. Modern Greek writers feel ἀμηχανία (awkwardness) about how to spell the ending, and they’ll be reassured to know the Byzantines felt […]
Old Man Hare
[EDIT: followup post] As I already mentioned in the past, the occasional Early Modern Greek word ends up in LSJ, because it has been used in a scholion to explain an Ancient word, and LSJ figured they’ll take all the help they can get. Such a word is λαγόγηρως. Literally, it’s “Old Man Hare”. Actually, […]
Analogy in third declension -ης nominals
If you’re blogging about language, and want a readership broader than two linguists to follow you, lexicon is easy to blog about: people get words. Grammar is harder to blog about: people get grammar only when they’ve been told they’re doing something wrong. And the operation of analogy on the declension of Ancient Greek—well, that’s […]
pessos and pinsus: a pedimental peculiarity
Sorry about that title. I promise not to do that too often. Over the last several months, I’ve been contributing translations to the Suda On Line project. (See writeup of project.) The Suda is a 10th century encyclopaedia cum dictionary, and often preserves information about Ancient Greece not available elsewhere. It also provides a lot […]
On the retreat of Polytonic
I’ve been putting off this post because I lost an earlier draft to a crash. The Cloud will come back to bite us yet; but until it does, why can’t I have access to the Cloud on the train? Without having to remember to top up my wireless modem? So, it started a few weeks […]