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Tag: philology
War of Troy
For far, far too long, scholars have treated Early Modern Greek literature as linguistic quarry, and have neglected these texts as literature in their own terms. Over the past couple of decade, this injustice has finally started to be redressed, as the Romances in particular have gained much deserved attention. This post, on the other […]
Judaeo-Greek Torah: Comment from Krivoruchko
Julia Krivoruchko, from the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism project at Cambridge, has just responded extensively on my post on the Judaeo-Greek Torah and the controversy between Hesseling and Belleli on publishing it. (Matters which, as I already knew, she knows a lot more about than I do.) Because it’s not clear to me that […]
Response to Kaplanis on Early Modern monotonic
These are my reactions to Kaplanis’ paper on using the monotonic for Early Modern texts. Vernacular Polytonic is Absurd: Nolo Contendere To start with, I agree with the position that applying the polytonic to Modern Greek is capricious and arbitrary and a blockage for learners. Triantafyllidis was the linguist Kaplanis cited (with tildes for circumflexes) […]
Kaplanis on Polytonic in Early Modern Greek editions
So. I’m going to summarise the Mona Lisa with a doodle, and Tasos Kaplanis’ paper on Polytonic in Early Modern Greek editions with a dot point summary. It’s my summary, not his, and I invite comment on whether it’s a fair summary (including from him). In all, I sort of agree intellectually with his conclusion; […]
Belléli vs. Hesseling
I said last post that I would scan whatever was on Belléli’s review of Hesseling and put it online. I won’t, the printout is very hard to read, and the Hebrew and the French italics are recoverable only from context. (My Hebrew, of course, is context-free.) The bad quality of the printout is not so […]
Judaeo-Greek Torah, Constantinople, 1547
I’d earlier mentioned in passing Dirk Hesseling’s publication of the Judaeo-Greek Torah (published 1547, not 1543); so I thought I’d regale you with a passage. First, though, a lot of digression. We don’t know a lot about Judaeo-Greek at all; Julia Krivoruchko (who contributed the online description of Judaeo-Greek) has been working in the area, […]
Rumi and Sultan Walad, literary notes
I’ll get into linguistic observations separately, but some literary notes here, including comments on the restoration of the text, and on its cultural particularities. The use of the Greek theological term σκήνωμα “hut, tabernacle” for the mortal body is noticeable, and establishes that Walad had been talking about Christianity with the local Greeks, and didn’t […]
Rumi and Sultan Walad, Konya, mid-1200s
I’ve just put online the various transcriptions available of the Greek verses written by Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273) (yeah, *that* Rumi), and Rumi’s son, Sultan Walad (1226-1312). I’m going to comment on the editions and the linguistics in the next couple of postings. Rumi and Walad wrote bits of Turkish and Greek among their […]