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Tag: sociolinguistics
Andronikos Noukios, aka Nicander of Corcyra
There won’t be much from me here this month, as I’ve been on the road and still am. However, a chance discovery I made at the ANU Library leads to another superficial post on Greek diglossia; with me away from my books, that’s as much as I can do. In the 1540s, Andronico Nunzio from […]
Heracleses of the Crown
I don’t want to get into the habit of retweeting what other bloggers say, it was annoying enough when Instapundit and Atrios started doing it. I also don’t want this blog to get *too* Classicist-friendly, because there’s plenty of Modern Greece stuff to talk about that has nothing to do with The Antick Burden. But […]
Who first coined the term “diglossia”?
Contra the Common Wisdom of the West which I repeated at the start of last post, “diglossia” was not first used by Psichari. It’s plausible if he did, given how thorough his critique of contemporary Greek diglossia was; but Psichari wasn’t the only person critiquing Greek diglossia. The first person to use “diglossia” to refer […]
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 […]
Μετά χαράς: supplemental
Philip points out that ípeto in the Dittamondo excerpt is also Greek: of course! And here, the commentary: “ípeto” Είπε το(ν) “He told him”. Obvious error for Είπα το(ν) “I told him”. I’m going to take the clitic on face value as accusative, confirming that whoever told degli Uberti about how a Macedonian peasant might […]
Μετά χαράς: archaisms in spoken Greek, 1350
When I was researching the background to the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds in 1999, I came across Charles Gidel’s 1864 Imitations faites en grec depuis le douzième siècle, de nos anciens poèmes de chevalerie, which was the first mention of the Quadrupeds in scholarly literature. Early Modern Greek studies officially kicked off in 1870, with […]
News in Tsakonia, 1895
When Thanasis Costakis, fresh out of high school, sat down in 1930 with Hubert Pernot to give him language data, Tsakonian was still quite different from Standard Greek, not just in morphology, but syntax as well. The phrase I keep coming back to is αρχίνηε κχαούντα “he started barking”: participles could still be the complements […]