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Tag: text
“When I was a soldier, I ended up in Greece”
It’s been a little while since I’ve put up a language sample of an obscure variant of Greek; this is a sample of the Greek spoken in Calabria. Of the Greek spoken in Italy, the Greek of Salento is healthiest, with something like 20,000 speakers; the Greek of Calabria has less than a tenth of […]
Trakatroukika on YouTube
First up, thank you again to Butcher of Yore—and now Stazybo Horn as well—for sending me links continuously about Kızderbent. There is a lot to go through and assimilate, so this blog is going to turn into Kızderbent Central for the next week or so. [You will note btw that I keep saying Macedonian Slavonic […]
Shevchenko in Mariupolitan and Urum
The following are translations of Taras Shevchenko’s Testament into Mariupolitan Greek and Urum. They appeared in 1993 side by side, in a volume of (mostly Greek) translations of Shevchenko, the Ukraine’s national poet. The texts appeared in Cyrillic—including Kostoprav’s abridged translation, which would originally have appeared in the Soviet phonetic Greek alphabet. The transliterations into […]
Soviet Orthography of Greek
I’m working on a post on the Greek language politics of the USSR, which glancingly mentioned the spelling reform that took place there in 1925. Because it’s a topic that deserves to be presented separately, I’ll put it in a separate blog post. The material isn’t mine, it’s from the blogger Πόντος και Αριστερά (Pontus […]
Maximus of Gallipoli, Geneva, 1638: Mark 13:1-22
I’ve been off for a week, and things on this blog have been a little salty-languaged of late (and will get so again: there’s a nice list of slang.gr idioms I’m planning on walking through). To offer some respite from all that, I’m posting an excerpt from the translation of the New Testament into Modern […]
Manuel Chantakites, Away from Crete, 1420
Rather than continue from the previous post by presenting the theoretical framework of documentary texts, I will instead give a sample of that kind of text. This is one of the absurdly few private letters we have in the vernacular from the Early Modern period. It’s such a rare thing, Kriaras’ online dictionary abbreviates it […]
Malamirovo, Bulgaria, 813
We have very, very, very little vernacular material from the Dark Ages, between Leontius of Neapolis in vii AD, and Michael Glycas’ Prison Verses from 1158. A couple of acclamations, the odd proverb, a song half-written down by Anna Comnena, a song reconstructed from a 16th century curse against mice, a few legal deeds from […]
Tsakonian song online
For our next text in our tour of Greek linguistic oddities: this collection of Tsakonian songs has been online for something like ten years, and it’s about time I tried to translate the one song in Tsakonian. Before I do, a trap for the unwary. The first song, Σου ‘πα, μάνα, πάντρεψέ με “I told […]
Judaeo-Greek Genesis 11:1-9
What text to publish as a sample of the 1547 Judaeo-Greek Torah? The obvious Genesis 1 has already been scanned in by the Jewish Languages site. And a good thing too, because my photocopy of that page is really crap. Valetas included Genesis 9, the story of Lot. Well, if you’ve been trained as a […]
Tsakonian on YouTube
User kepleon has uploaded this past month four vids of someone telling primary school kids in Lenidi about Tsakonian, with examples, and singing in Tsakonian. Must follow up. I don’t agree with everything the guy says, but the nitpicking is not relevant. (But no, they don’t still speak Tsakonian in Turkey, and Costakis’ dictionary was […]