Tag: Tsakonian

Tsakonian documentary

By: | Post date: 2011-03-09 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
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Thanks to my friend George Baloglou, I’m passing on this news item from in.gr, on a new documentary on Tsakonian. Translations mine. See also the documentary website. Documentary description from the 13th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival site: Α γρούσσα νάμου / Massimo Pizzocaro, Elisavet Laloudaki In the Eastern Peloponnese, in a remote region under the shadow […]

κατσούλι “kitten”: where did the cutesy /ts/ come from?

By: | Post date: 2011-02-21 | Comments: 14 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Mediaeval Greek, Modern Greek
Tags: , , , ,

Tom Recht had a simple question in comments the other day, which admits of an almost simple answer. There is a catch, in that there is no clear phonological reason for what has happened, and I offer an unconvincing guess at it. Tom Recht’s question: I’m curious about the word κατσούλι, which is intriguingly similar […]

Pontic infinitive, real and imagined

By: | Post date: 2011-01-23 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: , ,

I too noticed the breathless article in the Independent, right after New Year’s Day, on the discovery of a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece. The actual Independent article is not as over-the-top as the daft lead-in article, which has done the rounds through the world’s press. I […]

Language minorities of Bithynia

By: | Post date: 2010-05-18 | Comments: 4 Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, History, Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: , , ,

The Wikipedia articles on Anatolian Bulgarians, English and Bulgarian, imply that Kızderbent was far away from the other settlements where Bulgarian was spoken. That’s why Bulgarians in Bulgaria became aware of the bulk of settlements in the 1860s, but Kızderbent was documented since the 1800s—and Shishmanov discusses Kızderbent in a separate chapter from the other […]

Thanasis Costakis RIP

By: | Post date: 2009-08-07 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: ,

Thanasis Costakis, doyen of Tsakonian Linguistics, has died, and the next Tsakonian Studies conference at Lenidi will be held in his memory. I have not heard of his passing anywhere else, and cannot find an obituary online, so I assume it has been this past year. I was lucky enough to talk to him in […]

Where are the Tsakonian villages in Turkey?

By: | Post date: 2009-05-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: ,

I’m revising my paper on Tsakonian lexicostatistics, that I took a month off my PhD to write in 1997. (No idea what I’ll do with it yet.) As part of that, I needed to provide an updated map of where Tsakonian was spoken, including the villages in the Propontis, Havoutsi (Χαβουτσί) and Vatika (Βάτικα) (aka […]

Allemannic description of Tsakonian

By: | Post date: 2009-05-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
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I’d like the record to show that the Allemannic Wikipedia (as in the dialects of Switzerland, Southwest Germany, Western Austria) have an article on Tsakonian with stuff not seen elsewhere online, including some photos of Tsakonian greetings, and a list of villages with their Tsakonian names. In fact, they’re using a source I don’t happen […]

Tsakonian song online

By: | Post date: 2009-05-05 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: ,

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 […]

Michael Deffner, scoundrel

By: | Post date: 2009-04-26 | Comments: 3 Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags:

In what little you get about Tsakonian online, you will on occasion see reverent references of Michael Deffner (1848-1934), renowned Tsakonologist, who so loved Tsakonia that he made his home in Leonidion, who wrote the renowned 1881 Grammar of Tsakonian and the renowned 1923 Dictionary of Tsakonian. The problem with what little you get about […]

Tsakonian on YouTube

By: | Post date: 2009-04-16 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek
Tags: ,

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 […]

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