History of Australian English

This post is not about Greek, although there are parallels with a couple of phases of the history of Greek.

I picked up Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English, while in Sydney. It's a history of Australian English for the general audience, written by Bruce Moore, a lexicographer at the Australian National Dictionary Centre. It's a bit more laundry-list lexicon-heavy than other linguists might do, but it's a very entertaining read, and has some interesting theories.

Moore puts forward the formation of an Australian English as a dialect koine in Sydney, within two generations of settlement, and then diffusing out of there rapidly. (There were no administrative barriers between provinces like in the States, hence the astonishing regional homogeneity of Australian English.) This is common sense, and reflects other koineisations (and creolisations). New Zealand has done a better job than Australians of tracking their linguistic history, and the accent data from the first generation of native born New Zealanders, available through recordings done in the 1940s, was critical to proving that contention. Their accents were not yet fully levelled, and even children growing up in the same small town had slightly different accents. It was only the second generation of native born colonists who had a local norm to peer pressure themselves into, and knock out any deviation.

In line with that, it was only after the second generation that dialect loans from Northern English and Scots into Australian English were possible. In the first generation, such words were still sensed as outliers from the emerging Southern-England based koine, and ruled out.

It was also good to see a serious treatment of how attitudes towards Australian English developed in line with attitudes to Australian identity. The rush of Australian republicanism in the 1880s accompanied the first scholarly interest in the version of English spoken here. The long sleep of my country's identity, as Federation transformed it into an Imperial lickspittle, also saw noone bother to look at Australian English between 1900 and 1965.

Australian English was traditionally stratified by class, divided into Cultivated, General, and Broad. Lawyers on 70s TV dramas all spoke Cultivated—which is pretty close to RP English. With the resurgence of Australian nationalism in the 80s, it is now unsafe to speak Cultivated Australian in public. Anything that drives a stake into the heart of Lickspittle Australia is OK in my book. (Or rather, *that* tradition of Lickspittle Australia. We are obeisant to other masters now. And it's not primarily the US any more either.)

General and Broad are still around, with Broad the Australian you'll hear from stereotypes on TV, and politicians in parliament (for similar reasons): "mɨstə spɜɪkʰə, ðɪ ɔnərəbl mɛmbə fə bæŋstæən ɪz ə bɐm". Moore reports Broad is on the decline, which is a bit of a surprise.

Moore's guess about the origin of Broad Australian is intriguing, though on flimsy evidence. What little longitudinal data we have from country speakers may suggest Broad Australian is newer than General Australian; his guess is that Broad arose in the World War I trenches, as a reaction against the British English the diggers heard around them. It was certainly also a reaction against the Cultivated Australian that started to be promulgated in the 1890s.

The funny thing is, commenters until the 1890s kept saying how Pure the Australian accent is. By that, they meant it didn't sound like any English accent in particular. It also didn't sound like Received Pronunciation, but that adverse comparison couldn't be made until RP itself became mainstream in British education, just before then.

Moore predicts Broad Australian will vanish because the Cultivated Australian it reacted against has perished, and the ideological dispute between Lickspittle and Patriotic Australia has settled down. (You may have discerned I have a slight bias in this matter.) I think Moore is underestimating the fissures in Australian society. But he rightly points out that now that the Australian linguistic situation has settled down somewhat, the emergence of a second generation immigrant koine ("wogspeak"), which defines itself against Anglo norms, can be seen more clearly. (The link is to an interview Simon Palomares did in 2004, and Moore cites it too: it's quite insightful. Some readers may recall Palomares as the Spaniolo in Acropolis Now.)

That's a different fissure though. In fact, even that fissure may be starting to play itself out, as the Mediterranean immigrants' children assimilate, and a new generation of immigrants take their place.

Oh, and that's Acropolis Now as in the '90s sitcom about Mediterranean-Australians, not as in the radio sitcom set in Ancient Greece by renowned Punctuation Nutjob Lynne Truss. (Obligatory Approving Link to the Great Smackdown by Louis Menand.) Here's hoping she does radio comedy more effectively than she does pedantry... ...Read more

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 Kerkyra (Corfu) was working as a copy editor in Venice, preparing Greek texts for publication. He was responsible for editing a couple of missals (typika). He also copied a manuscript of Porphyry. That's the kind of low-level scribal work you'd expect of a Renaissance humanist. As you'd also expect of a Renaissance humanist, his surname was Hellenised into something more reputable-sounding: after some hesitation, he ended up as Andronikos Noukios, Andronicus Nucius.

Andronicus also wrote three books. One was a translation from Italian that I can't find anything about online, and I don't have the book I read this from by my side.

The second was an account of his travels to Northern Europe, in Ancient Greek. That was the chance find at ANU: the 1962 edition of his Voyages. This is the kind of text I love, as you know from my adventures with Laonicus Chalcocondyles: lots of references to Western Europe through the ill-fitting garb of Ancient Greek.

Someone writing a travel account in the 1540s in Ancient Greek is no surprise: it was the learnèd language of the time, and writing in Modern Greek was simply not a serious option. The Voyages have been translated in French in 2003 (see also Google Books); and the publishers' blurb is taken with the antick garb of the language—

Nourri de culture classique, Nicandre rédige en grec (ancien !) ses observations des lieux et des gens. Cambrai dépeinte comme par Strabon, ou Paris décrite comme par Plutarque, ça ne manque ni d’étrangeté ni d’allure !

Brought up in Classical culture, Nicander writes up in Greek (Ancient Greek!) his observations of places and peoples. Cambray, depicted as if by Strabo; or Paris, described as if by Plutarch: something not lacking in either strangeness or allure!

But that is misguidedly exoticising what was a quite natural thing for a Renaissance Greek scholar to do. Noukios wasn't writing in Ancient Greek to be cute: he was writing in Ancient Greek because that's what scholars did.

In writing his account in Herodotan Greek, Noukios amped up his self-hellenisation all the way up to 11: he switched Andronicus (a good Byzantine name) to Nicander, just as Nicholas Chalcocondyles styled himself as Laonicus. The book is still inscribed as Nicander Nucius', but the 1962 editor de Foucault has titled it as being by "Nicander of Corcyra" (= of Corfu)—presumably with plenty of motivation by Noukios himself. That has misled at least one antiquarian bookseller to conflate him with the slightly more famous Nicander of Colophon, 2nd century BC.

Beyond the 1962 edition and the 2003 French translation, the section of the Voyages dealing with Nucius' stay in Britain was translated in English in 1841, and is available in full online courtesy of archive.org and the wonderful people of the University of Toronto.

(The book reviews for the French translation have pointed out that this is the reverse of the usual Orientalist voyage: an Oriental exploring the Occidentals. They did not say it that crudely, but I did still growl "screw you, Beef Eaters". Here's one more review.)

The third text Andronicus wrote (under the much abbreviated signature ΑΝ. ΝΟΥ. ΚΕΡΚ.) was the first Modern Greek rendering of Aesop.

The text has been published in a modern edition in 1993, but it had stayed in print for three centuries from 1543, in increasingly decrepit state, as a popular chapbook. The text's modern editor, Georgios Parasoglou (papyrologist at Aristotle U, Thessalonica), notes that the translation is pretty poor—it's a rush job, done to order. The Venetian publisher knew they had a market for fairy tales in Modern Greek, and grabbed the first copyeditor they had to hand for their churchbooks. Nucius for his part wasn't going to Nicander himself up for such a vulgar undertaking.

There is a surprise to Modern Greek readers here. Parasoglou feels the need to point out that no, it's not a surprise at all, Andronicus was neither the first nor the last scholar to write in both Ancient and Modern Greek. Indeed he was not. Cardinal Bessarion was a scholar's scholar; but his letters home were pretty close to vernacular. Hans-Georg Beck is renowned for pointing out that the first writers of Modern Greek, in the 12th and 14th centuries, must have been literate and cultured in Ancient Greek, and studies of early vernacular Byzantine novels are highlighting that they belong to the same literary tradition as the novels written in Ancient Greek a century before.

This all should be obvious: literate people knew both Ancient and Modern Greek, and wrote in both. But to a contemporary Greek, this does not compute. It does not compute that the current English Wikipedia page on Byzantine novels does not even mention the shift in language between the 12th and 14th century. It does not compute that the Classical Nicander and the Vernacular Andronikos could be the same person. Or, to use an example thanks to Notis Toufexis, it does not compute that Theodosius Zygomalas could complain (in Ancient Greek) how horribly degraded the Modern language had become—and then turn around and do a quite creditable translation into Modern Greek of the Stephanites and Ichnilates (ultimately from the Panchatantra).

It does not compute, because of the peculiar poison of Modern Greek diglossia. Noukios could write vernacular for hire, Zygomalas may even have written vernacular for fun, but still keep to Ancient Greek as their working languages. But in Modern Greece, you had to choose. In the 20th century, you were either a Demoticist or a Purist—a Longhair or an Ancestor-Worshipper. In Athens in the 1880s, you didn't even have that much choice—which is why Roidis had to deride Puristic in Puristic, and why the late 19th century pioneers of Demotic prose all lived in the diaspora.

And that binary thinking makes it comes as a surprise that Modern Greek was first written by men literate in Ancient Greek, and that the rhetoric in Libistros and Rhodamne has much in common with the rhetoric of Hysmine and Hysminias, even though they don't share datives and infinitives. The Modern battle between the languages blinds us to the obvious truth that, in earlier times, you didn't have to choose.

Which reminds me of another binarity of Modern choice that didn't used to apply. The Balkan Sprachbund, with the grammatical convergence of the languages spoken throughout the area, could only have happened if you had lots of bilinguals in the Balkans—indeed, trilinguals and quadrilinguals. After the Balkan Wars and population exchanges, and the State policy of discouraging minority languages, it's hard for a Greek in particular to picture what a plurilingual Balkans might have looked like. But the linguistic evidence for it is clear.

Similarly, the literal equivalence of oodles of Turkish and Greek proverbs gave rise to a famous paper, which got cited a lot at me when I was an undergrad. (Tannen, D. & Oztek, P.C. 1977. Health To Our Mouths: Formulaic Expressions in Turkish and Greek. Berkeley Linguistics Society 3. 516-534.) I was pretty disappointed when I finally read the paper as a postgrad. The authors were modern linguists, and they did what modern linguists tend to do: ignore anything done before Chomsky. (In particular, the extensive literature on Balkan and Turkish proverbs done in the philological tradition, through the early twentieth century.) And I knew several equivalent sayings that they had missed, which made me grumble about Deborah Tannen not being a native speaker.

(Yes, *that* Deborah Tannen: she started her academic career with Greek. She end up writing best-sellers looking at men's and women's language, after breaking up with her Greek husband—over miscommunications.)

But the common sayings shared between Turkish and Greek only make sense if there were substantial numbers of people bilingual in Turkish and Greek, enough to establish the same sayings either side. This doesn't accord with the modern Turkish or modern Greek image of Ottoman times; but there is no other sensible explanation.

So, what have we learned?

• We need to be jolted out of our preconceptions on occasion.
• Greek diglossia has a lot of baggage, and therefore carries a lot of preconceptions with it.
• And to jolt those preconceptions, it helps to have library shelves to browse through at random.

Because I don't have the books at hand, I'm grabbing the online renditions for samples. Here's Nicander of Corcyra, from the 1841 translation:

Ἅπαντες σχεδόν τοι, πλὴν ἡγεμόνων καὶ τῶν ἔγγιστα βασιλεῖ τυγχανόντων, ἐμπορικὰς μετιᾶσι πράξεις. Καὶ οὐ μόνον ἀνδράσι τοῦτο περίεστι, ἀλλὰ καὶ γυναιξὶν, ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πλεῖστον, ἐπιγίνεται. Καὶ δαιμονίως ἐς τοῦτο ἐπτοήνται. Καὶ ἦν ἐν ταῖς ἀγοραῖς καὶ ῥύμαις τῆς πόλεως ὁρᾷν γυναῖκας ὑπάνδρους καὶ κόρας, τέχνας τὲ καὶ συναλλαγμοὺς καὶ πράξεις ἐμπορικὰς ἐργαζομένας ἀνυποστόλως. Ἁπλοϊκώτερον δὲ, τὰ πρὸς τὰς γυναῖκας σφίσιν εἴθισται, καὶ ζηλοτυπίας ἄνευ. Φιλοῦσι γὰρ ταύτας ἐν τοῖς στόμασιν, ἀσπασμοῖς καὶ ἀγκαλισμοῖς, οὐχ οἱ συνήθεις καὶ οἰκεῖοι μόνον, ἀλλ’ ἤδη καὶ οἱ μηδέπω ἑωρακότες. Καὶ οὐδαμῶς σφίσιν αἰσχρὸν τοῦτο δοκεῖ.

Almost all, indeed, except the nobles, and those in attendance on the royal person, pursue mercantile concerns. And not only does this appertain to men, but it devolves in a very great extent upon women also. And to this, they are wonderfully addicted. And one may see in the markets and streets of the city married women and damsels employed in arts, and barterings and affairs of trade, undisguisedly. But they display great simplicity and absence of jealousy in their usages towards females. For not only do those who are of the same family and household kiss them on the mouth with salutations and embraces, but even those too who have never seen then. And to themselves this appears by no means indecent.

And here's Andronikos Noukios, in a sample from the greek-language.gr review of translations from Ancient to Modern Greek:

Λάφι και αμπέλιον

Το λάφι από τους κυνηγούς έφευγεν και εκρύπτη εις αμπέλι. Και όταν απέρασαν οι κυνηγοί, το λάφι ενόμιζεν ότι έγλισεν. Άρχισε να τρώγει εκ τα φύλλα της αμπέλου και, επειδή ανακάτωνε τα φύλλα, εστράφησαν οι κυνηγοί και είδασι το λάφι και το εδόξεψαν. Λοιπόν αποθνήσκοντας έλεγε ότι: «Δίκαια έπαθα, διότι δεν έπρεπε να αδικήσω εκείνην οπού με εφύλαγεν».

Ο μύθος δηλοί ότι όσοι αδικούσιν εκείνους οπού τους ευεργετούσιν, ο θεός τους κολάζει.

Deer and Vineyard

The deer was fleeing the hunters and hid in a vineyard. And when the hunters passed, the deer thought it had escaped. It started eating from the vine leaves, and because it was rustling the leaves, the hunters turned back and saw the deer and shot arrows at it. So dying the deer said: "This serves me right, for I should not have maltreated her who was safegaurding me."

The fables means that whoever harms those who do them good, God punishes them.

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Lerna: Hitler finds out that the Greek language has no more than 200000 words

Travelling as I am in the U.S., I'm going to be light on blogging here at Hellenisteukontos (well, even lighter than usual); any blogging I do is going to be travelogues in The Other Place (once I'm somewhere worth traveloguing about.) But I've just found out that Stazybo Horn, honoured member of Team Fortier who has also stopped by and commented here, has taken That Downfall video, and subtitled it... with reference to the Lerna Myth. And a shout out to this Lerna thread! A blessing on your house, Stazy!

(To view Greek subtitles, turn on Closed Captioning, bottom right control next to Volume and Full Screen. My annotated translation into English follows.)

THEODORE ANDREAKOS,* Educ. Insp. (Ret'd), Hon. Prof. Tech Coll.: The longhairs* are counterattacking. They have occupied Wordpress and are heading towards Blogger. They include Sarantakos, Neostipoukeitos, and from the other flank Lexilogia and Periglwssio. From the eastern front, we have opuculuk,* nickel and yannisharis.	Theodore Andreakos: prominent letter-writer in the recent debate in the Athens press over the word count of Greek. longhairs: advocates of Demotic, from their bohemian appearance in the 1900s. opuculuk: opuculuk.blogspot.com, URL of The Other Place, where Yr Obt Svt posts from.
ADOLF: Have Kounadis* attack them, with the ten million words.	Antonis Kounadis: member of the Academy of Athens (representing Engineering), whose April talk on the gajillion words of Greek launched the whole Lerna saga in the Athens press and the blogosphere.
THEODORE ANDREAKOS, Educ. Insp. (Ret'd), Hon. Prof. Tech Coll.: Mein Führer... Kounadis...
EURIPIDES STYLIANIDES:* Kounadis is a laughing stock. They've reduced the word count to 200,000.	Euripides Stylianidis: Minister for Education in 2008, taken in by the Lernaean Myth in a speech. Notoriously, the speech included a folk etymology of έντερο "intestine" as ἐντὸς ῤέω "I flow within"
ADOLF: ... The following will stay behind. Andreakos, Kounadis, Stylianidis, and Adonis-Spyros.*	Adonis Georgiadis: Greek right wing politician, publisher, author, and TV host. Prominent in nationalist philippics on the Greek language. His original name is Spyros, and his critics delight in pointing out the affectation of his name change.
ADOLF: FUCK MY IN-TEST-INE!* We'd talked through Kounadis' mission! How did he manage to mess it up?! What do I keep collecting Liddel–Scotts for him for? You've forgotten all your graves and rough breathings*—I won't even mention your iota subscripts! You can't recite a single iamb in Aeolic!	in-test-ine: See above, έντερο. Graves and rough breathings: the polytonic accentuation system, a rallying point of linguistic conservatives after the disuse of Puristic Greek.
ADONIS GEORGIADIS: The man of many devices...*	The man of many devices : the beginning of the Odyssey: Iambic in Modern Greek translation, at least.
ADOLF: We'd already got up to 120 million words!
ADONIS GEORGIADIS: Mein Führer, Euripy did try...
ADOLF: The TLG says as much! 5,000,000 words! Even English has overtaken us! What the fuck are you learning in your academies anyway? Just how to stick clubs up omegas' privates?* Sarantakoses and Tipoukeitoses! They should be impaled on the Colossus' torch! Hanged on the Themistoclean Walls! Them and Maria and Diver and Pi-Squared. And that Stazy.	clubs up omegas' privates: A humorous verse in 1964 by Dinos Christianopoulos lamented that the abolition of iota subscript would deprive the Greek script of "its smallest obscenity": omega with iota subscript, ῳ, which looks slightly like a depiction of anal sex if your mind is dirty enough. With the iota subscript long abolished, the verse is routinely brought up in any discussion of the polytonic.
I never went to any academies. But I have glorified my language, by turning the world into mincemeat. Linguists! What did I sit and learn duals and infinitives for? 120 volumes,* I read them one by one. I even read about the God of the Jews.* He too was in my language. Millions of words; not one fewer!	120 volumes: As was pointed out in the letter-writing saga, if Greek really did have five million words, Liddell-Scott would have 120 volumes, not just one (or two, depending on the edition). God of the Jews: The Septuagint is included in the TLG corpus.
SECRETARY: Hush, Lady Madonna...*	Hush, Lady Madonna: Despina "Madonna" is a plausible first name, but this is an allusion to the folksong verse beloved of Greek irredentists: "Hush, Lady Madonna, and cry not so; after years and times pass, they will be ours once more." The song gave its title to Herzfeld's influential critique of the politicisation of Greek folklore
ADOLF: A pity I copied so much just to break my hand in.* Now where will I find 60 million terms? That's it. We've dipped the boat. Sarantakos has pulled our pants down. But if you think I'm going to start using monotonic accentuation, you're mistaken. I'd rather lick a kouros' "pears".* 200,000 words, he says...	to break my hand in: An allusion to a comment by Cornelius, the polytonicist gadfly of Sarantakos' blog, that he used to voluntarily copy out polytonic texts in school "to break his hand in", gratified to find Babiniotis is now recommending the same. "My mother would say that was contrary to any paedagogical principle; I replied it was the monotonic system that was contrary." pears: απίδια, euphemism for αρχίδια "balls"

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The 23 to 29 Apolloniuses of Classical Literature

I'm parking this posting here for lack of somewhere else to park it. (It's not strictly language-related, but I'm realising philology posts are probably better pitched here than in The Other Place.)

In my day-job capacity, I'm posting on the fluidity of identity in repositories—how, particularly if you're relying on computer deduplication of identity, there will always be some tentativeness about who is identified as the same person. Repositories have to deal with that tentativeness, rather than hardcoding identity. This is an issue Wikipedia often comes up against, having to split off one article subject from another.

And I was reminded of the morass of Apolloniuses in Classical literature, particularly among medical authors. There are no less than potentially 13 medical authors we know of called Apollonius, according to the TLG Canon of Greek Authors and Works (3rd ed.). Potentially 13, potentially just 9; f.i.q. "possibly the same person as", appears several times in the listing:

• 0680 Apollonius of Memphis, iii BC, cited in Galen
  
• 0741 Apollonius f.i.q. Apollonius of Memphis, iii BC?, cited in Aëtius
  
• 0660 Apollonius of Citium, i BC
  
• 0792 Apollonius of Pergamum, I AD?, cited in Oribasius
  
• 0739 Apollonius f.i.q. Apollonius of Citium or Apollonius of Pergamum, i BC/I AD?, cited in Alexander of Tralles
  
• 0789 Claudius Apollonius, I AD, cited in Galen
  
• 0747 Apollonius Archistrator, f.i.q. Claudius Apollonius, I AD?, cited in Galen
  
• 0782 Apollonius of Tarsus, before II AD, cited in Galen
  
• 0810 Apollonius &
• Alcimion, I AD, cited in Galen
  
• 0790 Apollonius Mys, i BC
  
• ?? Apollonius Opsis
  
• 0817 Apollonius Organicus, f.i.q. Apollonius Opsis, i BC?, cited in Galen
  
• 0791 Apollonius Ther, f.i.q. Apollonius Opsis, i BC?, cited in Oribasius

(Note: links are to the Catalan Wikipedia.)

Our problem in working out who is who is that almost all of them are cited in passing in other medical authors, so we have very little to go on. The Online TLG Canon only represents works published under a distinct author's name, even if only as Testimonia. So it only refers to two of them, Of Citium and Mys. The other 11 authors also have Testimonia, in Galen and Oribasius and Alexander of Tralles and Aëtius, but they haven't been published independently.

So the 2009 Online Canon has more limited coverage of types of author than the 1990 Print Canon (though a longer time range). The Print Canon includes all ancient authors we know about. The Online Canon only includes those authors with texts represented in the corpus, and that is determined by an editor publishing text under that author's name. So if an Apollonius has been cited in Galen, and an editor publishes that citation as a Fragment of Apollonius, Apollonius will have an entry in the Online Canon, and will link to the published text in the corpus. If we only have secondary source material on the Apollonius from Galen, and an editor publishes that material as Testimonia on Apollonius, the Online Canon will still have an entry, because the point of the author entry is to navigate the corpus.

If OTOH an editor has never combed Galen for Apollonius, the Print Canon will still mention the Apollonius as cited in Galen (as a cross-reference), but the Online Canon will not have an entry for him, because it doesn't have a discrete text for him. That places the Online Canon notion of authors at the mercy of their editorial history; but the Online Canon is documenting edited texts.

The 9–13 medical Apolloniuses in the TLG Canon are joined there by 16 other Apolloniuses in Ancient literature:

• 1167 Apollonius (Biographer), wrote a Life of Aeschines
  
• 0394 Apollonius (Comic)
  
• 1404 Apollonius (Grammarian)
  
• 1170 Apollonius of Aphrodisia, historian
  
• 1169 Apollonius of Athens, another historian
  
• 2283 Apollonius, yet another historian
  
• ?? Apollonius (a mathematician), f.i.q. Apollonius of Tyana, putative author of the Apocalypse of Adam
  
• 0569 Apollonius (Paradoxographer)
  
• 0550 Apollonius of Perga, mathematician
  
• 0619 Apollonius of Tyana, philosopher
  
• 1171 Apollonius of Ephesus, theologian
  
• 1168 Apollonius the Sophist, author of Homeric Lexicon
  
• 4259 Apollonius Cronus, philosopher
  
• 0082 Apollonius Dyscolus, grammarian
  
• 2491 Apollonius Molon, historian
  
• 0001 Apollonius of Rhodes, Epic poet

The English Wikipedia knows of 16 non-medical Apolloniuses (but five of them are not in the list above), and no less than 21 physicians called Apollonius, since they're not restricted to medical authors. And Wikipedia is just as aware of the f.i.q. issue. The German Wikipedia's list has 24 Apolloniuses, and they don't seem to overlap completely with the English list. The Catalan Wikipedia's list wins, with 18 medical and 39 non-medical Apolloniuses. And its list is even less clean.

Even adding in places of birth, nicknames, and the genres they wrote in, there is difficulty in differentiating these Apolloniuses. If we had enough metadata on them, after all, instead of passing mentions in Galen, we wouldn't be seeing all those f.i.q. For 0741 Apollonius and 0739 Apollonius, we're reduced to distinguishing them by who else they might be confused with. And the medical Apolloniuses may all be obscure (only Of Citium gets his own English Wikipedia page); but the other Apolloniuses include a major Late Epic poet (0001), the founder of Western grammar (0082), a major figure in Roman religious history (0619), a primary source in Homeric scholarship (1168), and an important contributor to the development of 3D geometry (0550). If it wasn't for places of birth and nicknames, we would not know who we were talking about.

Things are slightly better now with the invention of surnames, and recording years of birth in the Library of Congress record. But only slightly: confusion is certainly still possible. There is now a profusion of identities that people write under in cyberspace; if anything, that's now making things even worse. But that's a topic for my day-job blog...
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The Motley Word

I continue the random miscellanea postings with a website I did not know about, and stumbled on because of a posting I will write next week. The Motley Word (Παρδαλή Λέξη) is a crowdsourced dictionary for Greek dialects, like Urban Dictionary and its Greek counterpart, slang.gr

The Motley Word has all the poor quality you'd expect of a crowdsourced project without critical mass of participants; they don't even provide for correction yet. So it's not going to supplant the Academy's dialect dictionary, the Historical Dictionary Of Modern Greek, any time soon. Sure.

But that's harder to say when the Historical Dictionary hasn't budged past delta in twenty years. (I see there's at least funding to digitise their holdings.) And the glossaries of mainstream dialects, as opposed to the more distinct variants like Pontic or Tsakonian, have been pretty motley themselves.

More meta-importantly, the Motley Word shows that speakers of the dialects still care, and it's still a resource. A resource I'm going to make use of soon—here's a hint, but I haven't started writing yet, so shhhhh...

So: excellent work! (And thank God noone's done Tsakonian :-)

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 this novel form commented on at The Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog is too interesting not to pass on to Classicists.

(And yes, I get much of my material from Sarantakos. That's why I keep calling the blog The Magnificent. That, and I like establishing a private language; hence "The Other Place".)

One of Sarantakos' concerns is good language use. So he lampoons instances in the press or from politicians of bad language use. What good and bad language use is of course a prescriptive matter—and I have to say, I'm pretty much cured of the anti-prescriptivism of linguistic orthodoxy: prescriptivisms can have their own internal linguistic reality, and they certainly have a social reality. Prescriptivism in Modern Greek is complicated, like the language itself is. It's no longer about how Attic a form is; now it's about how vernacular a form is, how glaring a translationism from English it is, or how boneheaded a misapplication of Attic it is.

The "first linguistic gaffe after the elections", taken across by Sarantakos from a thread from Nikos Ligris in lexilogia.gr, was a politician's disparaging reference to two major members of the outgoing government. He called them The Heracleses of the Crown, using an established metaphor referring to the old coat of arms of the Kingdom of Greece:

But the plural of Heracles he used was not the Classical Ἡρακλεῖς. Nor was it the vernacular Ηρακλήδες.

(I've already posted on why that is the plural formation for vernacular first-declension nouns. Yes, Heracles is now first declension: the third declension is dead in the vernacular. And yes, that plural *is* historically still third-declension, because the declensions hybridised.)

No, the plural form the politician used was οι Ηρακλειδείς του στέμματος.

Now, Ἡρακλειδεῖς is in no way a plural of Ἡρακλῆς. It is a plural of *Ἡρακλειδεύς, and the -ιδεύς suffix on that word was used in antiquity to denote the offspring of an animal or a family member: ἀετιδεύς "young eagle", λυκιδεύς "young wolf", υἱιδεύς "son of a son", γαμβριδεύς "son of a brother in law". LSJ has one inanimate diminutive use in an inscription, θυριδεύς "little gate = window frame", and the most widespread use of the suffix is also diminutive rather than offspring: ἐρωτιδεύς "cupid, depiction of Eros [Cupid] in sculpture or painting". But there is no Ancient use of the suffix as a patronymic: the Offspring of Heracles are the Heracleidae, Ἡρακλεῖδαι.

It turns out though that the fans of Heracles FC, the oldest football club in Thessalonica, have taken to calling themselves Ηρακλειδείς. Amused by their claims to antiquity, rather than to actually winning championships, fans of Ares FC and PAOK FC have taken to calling them "The Old Ladies" instead.

So we can reconstruct what happened. An Attic plural Ηρακλείς in Modern Greek is hopeless: it is homophonous with the singular Ηρακλής [iraˈklis], and it uses a third declension noone has heard of. (They would especially not have heard of it because this particular declension pattern in -κλῆς is restricted to proper names, and plurals of proper names are rare.) A vernacular plural Ηρακλήδες is still felt undignified: you can use it about your cousins called Heracles, or to express contempt about the Heracleses and Theseuses of legend (and it sounds as clunky as Heracleses does in English); but the fans of Heracles FC would never refer to themselves so commonly.

(They would have decided that in the phone booth they meet in every Saturday, as an Ares FC fan might put it.)

Confronted with the lack of a useable *and* appropriate plural of Heracles, a Heracles fan a few years ago hit on the pattern of ἀετιδεύς "young eagle", and started people using Ηρακλειδείς. Ηρακλειδείς is in a third declension just as dead in Modern Greek, but at least somewhat more familiar via Puristic.

• (As also noted in comments, the colloquial singular of that word is not Ηρακλειδεύς, but Ηρακλειδής. Because the third declension in -ευς is not *that* familiar.)
  
• (E-fufutos [as he Englishes himself] says ἀετιδεύς is "familiar to all those who learned about 19th Century France via Puristic writers." Who was the French Eaglet?)

The Heracleses of the Crown in the coat of arms have always been Ἡρακλεῖς. The politician being interviewed racked his brain for a plural of Heracles—which as we saw, is awkward in Modern Greek. He remembered Heracles FC, made the association between ἐρωτιδεῖς "little cupids" and the little heraldic club-bearers, and blurted out Ηρακλειδείς. Some commenters to the thread admitted that they have done the same.

So, was this a gaffe? There's a disagreement in the commentary to the post.

Opinion 1 (Nikos Sarantakos, Nikos "Nickel" Ligris): Yes, it's a malapropism: an attempt to coin a la-de-da Classical plural that ends up stumbling on an unattested word that violates Classical norms, and has nothing to do with Modern Greek at any rate.

Opinion 2 ("Boukanieros", me, Tasos "TAK" Kaplanis): It's a new word, and it's adorable. The analogy with cupids is clear in this particular context, and the Classical norm of it not being attached to proper names is not relevant here.

Opinion 1: What's so "adorable" about a bastard learnèd form?

Opinion 2: There's been a lot worse in the Athens press than Ηρακλειδείς. The Heracles FC context makes it attested, at any rate.

Opinion 1: The bastard form Ηρακλειδείς is indeed now attested for the fans (my spellchecker does not underline it!) Can we at least leave alone the established word for the coat of arms?

Opinion 2: But they're wee little Heracleses on the coat of arms! [You'll see the vernacular diminutive, Ηρακλάκια, more than once in the thread]

Opinion 1: There's this notion that as soon as any fool launches some half-baked variant form online, we've got to annotate it and put it into our dictionaries, instead of "correcting" it. (There's those PC scare-quotes again.)

Opinion 2: Yup. [My Anglophone readers are nodding along heartily, but note that the social histories of English and Greek are very different, and distaste for prescriptivism in English does not have the same purchase in Greece.]

The thread is ongoing, although I think people are agreeing to disagree by now. (The thread is now being derailed to talking about the Orwellian names of the new government's ministries.) I don't remember this much disagreement in a thread about linguistic gaffes recently, and I think it is because Opinion 1 and Opinion 2 are analysing the form differently.

Opinion 1 considers it a mistaken stab at a plural of Heracles that coins a new word by mistake. Opinion 2 considers it a serendipitous coining of a new word, that can in some contexts stand in as a plural of Heracles.

Opinion 1 considers the coinage illegitimate, as pseudo-archaic Greek in a time when pseudo-archaic Greek is no longer welcome. Opinion 2 shrugs.

Nikos will defend Opinion 1 more cogently than I have done, I suspect, because there is context to notions of correctness in Modern Greek that I'm not fully presenting here... ...Read more

Deictic force of Hellenistic demonstratives

Quick note: Ἐν Ἐφέσῳ notices from the linguistics literature that the meaning of demonstratives in Modern Greek depends on their position: αυτό το μπουτάκι "that-one the pork-joint" is more physical deixis ("that pork joint which I'm pointing at"), whereas το μπουτάκι αυτό "the pork-joint that-one" is more discourse deixis ("that pork joint which I mentioned before").

He considers this may shed light on the use of demonstratives in New Testament Greek—and commenter Carl Conrad notes this is already known of Classical Greek, complete with Smyth reference.

Nastratios in Pagdatia

A thread last month at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog, about insulting commentary on a candidate MP from the Muslim minority, got derailed in comments (the way good comment threads do) into a discussion of whether there was any point teaching Ancient Greek in high school in Greece. The reason why Ancient Greek is taught in high school has to do with moral panic, rather than any concern over actually learning the language. That is why the age at which it is taught has become such a football; and the way Ancient Greek is taught is universally condemned.

Indeed, most commenters thought teaching Ancient Greek language at the expense of Ancient Greek literature *as literature* was unacceptable, and teaching Ancient literature in translation, as has occasionally happened, is much preferable. Some commenters conceded the usefulness of Ancient Greek in teaching grammar, but grudgingly. And I'll stay with this exchange:

Ηλεφούφουτος: ... Instruction should not give so much emphasis on reproducing grammatical forms (e.g. what is the 3rd person imperfect of ὑφίημι, or conjugate the verb in the second aorist middle optative.) All that, and syntactic parsing word for word, are fine brain exercises, but that's now how you'll learn Ancient Greek.

Μαρία: Who gives a f*ck about reduplication. But for students to recognise that this is a verb, an adjective, at least the parts of speech: that much is necessary. So they must be taught grammar, and you can't do that with little songs and little poems. Have you forgotten this isn't a living language?

I'm not contributing to that derailment—although I agreed there it was absurd that the students weren't being asked questions about the literary values of Antigone. In fact, the recommendations Ηλεφούφουτος was citing included "don't teach Ancient Greek through Antigone, you'll ruin Antigone for the kids." But I'm doing my own derailment, with the notion of little songs and little poems in learning Ancient Greek—that is, of teaching Ancient Greek in the engaging way schoolchildren learn foreign languages.

There is a textbook that does that: Paula Saffire & Catherine Freis. 1999. Ancient Greek Alive. 3rd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Ancient Greek Alive has students act out skits, it has them doing question and answers with the teacher in Ancient Greek, and it has little stories in the target language, rather than starting with Real Text. In other words, it does what you normally do nowadays when you teach a foreign language. It would never ever be used in Greece, not only because of the profound malaise of Greek education, but because the relation of Greeks to their antiquity has always been too po-faced. It's the same reason, as I've posted in The Other Place, why a Greek will never affectionately parody their national anthem the way the Dutch do; and why a pastiche like Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog will not lead to a Ἱστολογίζει Θουκυδίδης blog or a Λουκιανοῦ Διαδικτυακτοὶ Διάλογοι blog. At least not by a Greek.

(I beg someone to prove me wrong.)

I was reminded of Ancient Greek Alive because the earliest little texts it puts to the student are nothing to do with Ancient Greece. They are translations of tales of Nasrudin. Nasrudin is a comic figure from the Sufi tradition, who has made it into the folklore of many Muslim countries and their neighbours. His humour is somewhat subversive, and delightfully absurdist.

One of the neighbouring peoples Nasrudin's japes have gone across to are the Modern Greeks. He survives more in Cyprus than in Greece, but his humour has remained proverbial, in "the argument over the blanket" if nothing else—which has become a journalistic cliché. Nikos Pilavios' Greek Fairy Tale blog (I vaguely remember watching his TV show when I was a kid) has 36 Nasrudin tales, and an article about his own discovery of Nasrudin. Not all the tales are authentic, but authenticity doesn't mean that much with fairy tales. The journalistic cliché instance of a Nasrudin story, however, has been contributed there by a commenter:

Ενα βράδυ ο Ναστραντίν Χότζας κοιμόταν με την γυναίκα του. Ξαφνικά ξύπνησε από τις φωνές δύο ανθρώπων που καβγάδιζαν κάτω από το παράθυρό του. Σηκώθηκε, τυλίχτηκε στο πάπλωμα και κατέβηκε να δει τι συμβαίνει. Μόλις αυτοί τον είδαν, παράτησαν τον καβγά, άρπαξαν το πάπλωμα και έγιναν καπνός. Οταν η γυναίκα του τον ρώτησε γιατί καβγάδιζαν, της απάντησε: «Ο καβγάς ήταν για το πάπλωμα».
One evening Nastrandin Hodja was sleeping with his wife. Suddenly he woke to the shouting of two men arguing beneath his window. He got up, wrapped himself in his blanket, and went downstairs to see what was happening. As soon as they saw him, they quit arguing, grabbed the blanket and disappeared. When his wife asked him why they were arguing, he answered: "the argument was over the blanket".

Have you noticed what's happened to the name Nasrudin? It starts in Arabic as نصرالدين naṣr ad-dīn, "Victory of the Faith", which is a Muslim proper name. In Turkish, it's Nasreddin Hoca, Teacher Nasreddin. Greek now respectfully transliterates him as Νασρεντίν <Nasrentin>; but spoken Greek had no patience for /sr/ clusters, so traditionally he has been called Ναστραντίν Χότζας, <Nastrantín Chótzas>, with an epenthesis breaking up the /sr/.

I was reminded of Nastrantin, not because of the thread over at Sarantakos', but because I came up against the name in a different context. I've been going through the Prosopographisches Lexikon der Paläologenzeit, the Who's Who of Late Byzantium; and I've found that George Pachymeres mentioned a Nasreddin Mahmud, son of Muzaffer ed-din Yavlak Arslan, who died in the battle of Bapheus in 1302. Because written Greek had no patience for /sr/ clusters either, he is rendered as <Nastrátios>, with the same epenthesis:

Ἁλῆς γὰρ Ἀμούριος σὺν ἀδελφῷ Ναστρατίῳ τῷ παρὰ Ῥωμαίοις ἐπὶ χρόνοις ὁμηρεύσαντι, τοὺς περὶ τὴν Καστάμονα Πέρσας προσεταιρισάμενος, Ῥωμαίους κακῶς ἐποίει.
For Amurios Hales ["Amur" Ali Bey], with his brother Nastratios who had been a hostage with the Romans for years, joined the Persians [Turks] around Kastamon [Kastamonu], and did ill to the Romans. (p. 327 Bekker)

Hold on to that Hellenisation as <Nastratios>, we'll come back to it. It gets worse in the Palaeologan Prosopography, btw. Ducas mentions a Χατζιαβάτης, Haci Aivat. Not the same person as the Hacivat of Turkish shadow puppetry, but certainly the same Hellenisation in its Greek counterpart.

What possessed Paula Saffire to insert a Sufi jokester into an Ancient Greek textbook? You can read all about it at her website. The notion of a Turkish jokester turning up in an Ancient Greek textbook is, I think you can safely surmise, a notion some Greeks are likely to have issues with: one more reason you won't see Ancient Greek Alive taken up in Greece. More's the pity.

So far, I've cited Nastrantin in Modern Greek, and a different Nastratios in Byzantine Greek, but I haven't shown you how Saffire & Freis Greek Nasruddin in the textbook. Here's his first appearance, p. 28:

ἄνθρωπός τις βούλεται πέμπειν ἐπιστολὴν ταῖς ἀδελφαῖς ταῖς ἐν τῇ Βάγδαδ. ἀλλὰ οὐκ ἐπίσταται γράφειν τὰ γράμματα. αἰτεῖ οὖν Νασρέδδινον τὸν Σοφὸν γράφειν τὴν ἐπιστολήν. ὁ δὲ Νασρέδδινος λέγει αὐτῷ· «ὦ φίλε, οὐκ ἐθέλω γράφειν τὴν ἐπιστολήν. οὐ γάρ ἐστί μοι σχολὴ πορεύεσθαι εἰς τὴν Βάγδαδ.»

ὁ δὲ ἄνθρωπος λέγει «ἀλλὰ οὐκ αἰτῶ σε πορεύεσθαι εἰς τὴν Βάγδαδ. αἰτῶ σε μόνον ἐπιστολὴν γράφειν ταῖς ἀδελφαῖς μου.»

«οἶδα» ἀποκρίνεται ὁ Σοφὸς· «ἀλλὰ ἡ γραφή μου κακή ἐστι καὶ ἀνάγκη ἂν εἴη μοι πορεύεσθαι εἰς τὴν Βάγδαδ καὶ ἀναγινώσκειν αὐταῖς τὴν ἐπιστολήν.»

A man wants to send a letter to his sisters in Baghdad. But he does not know how to write the letters. So he asks Nasreddinos the Sage to write the letter. But Nasreddinos says to him: "Friend, I do not want to write the letter. I don't have enough time to go to Baghdad.

The man says, "but I'm not asking you to go to Baghdad. I'm only asking you write a letter to my sisters."

"I know," the Sage answers. "But my handwriting is bad, and I would have to go to Baghdad myself and read the letter out to them."

You may have noticed some things wrong. No, they have not taught the aorist yet, so everything is in the present tense; that's understandable, though it makes the story sound Pontic. (No, not Pontic as in the butt of Greek jokes, but as in the dialect that fails to make any aspect distinctions in the subjunctive.) I'm also not sure that's how you'd use οἶδα. But no, there's something wrong with the transliteration.

Not that they failed to use <Nastratios>: it would hardly be fair to ask that of them—although the fact that they, like contemporary Greeks, have patience for /sr/ clusters puts them at odds with what a Greek writer would actually have done.

But what sticks out, as many a Greek will tell you, is Βάγδαδ <Bágdad>. Greeks do not call Baghdad Bagdad /ˈvaɣðað/. They call it Βαγδάτη, <Bagdátē> /vaɣˈðati/. And they will become righteously indignant, as indeed I did when I bought the book. We met Iraqis centuries before the Beef-Eaters—and Theophanes Confessor called them Hērakîtai, Ἡρακῖται. Where do Saffire & Freis get off, ignoring what Greeks call Bagdad, and coming up with their own name? Don't we matter? Don't the Byzantines, who dealt with Bagdad, matter?

The sentiment has a certain sense behind it; to call Russians Ῥοῦσσοι instead of Ῥῶσσοι, as they do elsewhere (moving on to an anecdote about Napoleon) does seem a little disrespectful of Constantine Porphyrogenitus.

But I've already written a post on how Modern Greek Hellenisations are more antiquarian than Byzantine Hellenisations were. So how did those Byzantines actually call the city?

• Theophanes Confessor (ix AD): Bágda
  
• Apomasar (ix AD): Bagdân
  
• Leo Choerosphactes (x AD): Bagdá
  
• Constantine Porphyrogenitus (x AD): Bagdád
  
• Theophanes Continued (x AD): Bagdá, Bagdád
  
• Anna Comnena (xii AD): Bagdâ
  
• John Scylitzes (xii AD): Bagdá
  
• John Zonaras (xii AD): Bagdâ
  
• Digenes Acrites (xiv AD): Bagdâ
  
• Laonicus Chalcocondyles (xv AD): Pagdatíē, Pagdátin
  
• Vernacular Astrological texts, Delatte: Codices Athenienses (? AD): Bagdádai, Pagdáti

The accentuation Βάγδαδ has never been correct: Saffire & Freis have carried across the Germanic stress position of English /ˈbæɡdæd/, whereas all but the first Greek transliteration reflect the stress of the Arabic بغداد‎ /baɣˈdaːd/.

But it turns out there is nothing Byzantine about the modern feminine form Βαγδάτη. The Byzantine forms are either variants of the feminine Βαγδά, the neuter Παγδάτι, or the quite indeclinable Βαγδάδ, with the hesitation between <b> /v/ and <p> /p/ typical of Late Byzantium. (Chalcocondyles' Homeric rendering of "Bagdadia", Παγδατίη, is the kind of affectation we'd expect of him.) I couldn't find out from my quick-and-obvious search when Βαγδάτη was first used, but it doesn't seem to be have been used by those who met Iraqis centuries before the Beef-Eaters.

Attempts to write Ancient Greek in Modern times, à la Neo-Latin, don't have a convenient name, through which the Ancient Greek Wikipedia can be banned by the Wikipedia Language Committee (grumble stick-up-their-arses grumble as-if-anyone-uses-Low-Saxon-as-a-primary-language-of-communication grumble grumble). We can't call them Neo-Greek, Neohellenic is what Modern Greek is called. Neo-Classical goes to Stravinsky—or Puristic. Neo-Attic is too specific, it leaves out the Astronautilia. Neo-Ancient?

Whatever it's called, Neo-Ancient Greek when it happens is indebted to Puristic: the Ancient Greek Harry Potter doffs its hat to 19th century dictionaries (and shies away once Demotic turns up in the lexica). The Neo-Ancient Greek Asterix doesn't doff its hat, admittedly. Then again, the Neo-Ancient Greek Asterix doesn't have to: it was translated in Greece (ingeniously), and Puristic seeps in there through the soil.

(The linked post notes that Asterikios in Ancient Greek didn't work well with Grade 7 students, who still struggled with the language—but that it did work when accompanied by the Modern Greek text in parallel. While we're on the subject: two interviews with the translator of Asterix into Ancient Greek, Fanis Kakridis: #1, #2.)

Saffire & Freis did not doff their hat to Puristic either, in telling tales of Napoleon or Nasrudin—even through they drafted the textbook on a beach in Crete. (Maybe Puristic doesn't seep through sand.) So their Russians are Ῥοῦσσοι instead of Ῥῶσσοι, because of English Russian, and their Nasrudin is Νασρέδδινος because of Turkish Nasreddin, not Modern Ναστραντίν. (It would have been unreasonable, I admit, to demand of them Mediaeval Ναστράτιος.)

In not writing Βαγδάτη, though, it wasn't the Byzantines they didn't doff their hat to, it was Puristic, and by extension Modern Greek. But of course, when Harry Potter uses Puristic words, it isn't because of love of Coray and Papadiamantis. It's because that's where he's going to get a word for train more compatible with Ancient Greek than the contemporary τρένο. Saffire & Freis had no such compulsion with Modern names.

The failure to epenthesise <Nasréddinos>, I'd still say, is a lack of sensitivity to Ancient Greek as a spoken language, which is ironic given how oral their textbook is. But the extremely unpleasant truth is, an American textbook of Ancient Greek owes Modern Greek speakers even less than it does to Constantine Porphyrogenitus. It doesn't owe them Βαγδάτη just as it doesn't owe them iotacism.

Still, if it owes the Hērakîtai anything, it's not Βάγδαδ. Like Constantine Porphyrogenitus said: it's Βαγδάδ.

P.S. Saffire has made the mistake of saying on her website: "Surely these are the only Sufi stories in ancient Greek!"

Them's fighting words:

ἀφικόντος γείτονος ἐπὶ τῆς πύλης Ναστρατίου τοῦ ἱερέως, ἐξέρχεται ὁ ἱερεύς ὑπαντῆσαι αὐτόν.
«δός μοι, ἱερεῦ, τὸν σὸν ὄνον σήμερον», αἰτεῖ ὁ γείτων. «ἔχω γὰρ ἀγαθά φορτία τινα μετακομῆσαι εἰς τὴν ἄλλην πόλιν.»
ὁ μὲν Ναστράτιος οὐ βούλεται δοῦναι τὸ κτῆνος οὕτῳ τούτῳ· ἵνα δὲ μὴ ἄξεστος φανῇ, ἀποκρίνεται·
«σύγγνωθι, ἀλλ’ ἤδη δέδωκα τὸν ὄνον ἑτέρῳ.»
αἴφνης ἀκούεται ὁ ὄνος ὀπίσω τοῦ τείχους τῆς αὐλῆς ὀγκώμενος.
«ἐψεύσθσης μήν μοι ἱερεῦ!» φωνεῖ γείτων. «ἤν, ὀπίσω τοῦ τείχους!»
«ποῦ δαὶ τοῦτά φῃς;» ἀποκρίνεται ὁ ἱερεύς βριμώμενος. «τίνα δὴ μᾶλλον πιστεύσεις, ὄνον ἢ τὸν σὸν ἱερέα;»

A neighbour comes to the gate of Mulla Nasrudin's yard. The Mulla goes out to meet him outside.
"Would you mind, Mulla," the neighbour asks, "lending me your donkey today? I have some goods to transport to the next town."
The Mulla doesn't feel inclined to lend out the animal to that particular man, however; so, not to seem rude, he answers:
"I'm sorry, but I've already lent him to somebody else."
Suddenly the donkey can be heard braying loudly behind the wall of the yard.
"You lied to me, Mulla!" the neighbour exclaims. "There it is behind that wall!"
"What do you mean?" the Mulla replies indignantly. "Whom would you rather believe, a donkey or your Mulla?" (via Wikipedia)

I welcome chastisement of my Neo-Ancient Greek in comments. Well, chastisement within reason...

[EDIT: I got better than chastisement from William Annis; I got an improvement. In iambics after Babrius. I'd pardon his violation of Porson's Law, but my command of Ancient Greek is so lacking—let alone metrics—that I cannot but reverently cede the floor to him:]

γείτων τις αὐλῆς ἦλθε Ναστρατίου πύλην,
ὁ δ’ ἐκτὸς ἦλθεν ἀσπάσασθαι γείτονα.
“βούλοι’ ἂν, ἱερεῦ,” δεόμενος ἔφη γείτων,
“τῇδ’ ἡμέρᾳ μοι τὸν ὄνον ἐνδοῦναι τὸν σόν;
εἰς γὰρ πόλιν πρόσοικον ἐμπολὰς οἴσω.”
ἀλλ’ οὔτ’ ὄνον βουλόμενος ἐνδοῦναι κείνῳ,
οὔτ’ εἰκέναι γ’ ἄγροικος, ἠμείφθη λέγων,
“σύγγνοιαν ἴσχ’, ὦ γεῖτον, ἄλλῳ γὰρ πόρον.”
τείχους δ’ ὄπισθ’ ἔκλαγξεν ὄνος εὐθὺς μέγα.
“ἔψευδες ἄρα μοι,” φὰς ἐβόησεν γείτων,
“ὧδε γὰρ ὄνος πάρεστι!” ἱερεὺς δ’ ἤχθετο·
“πῶς οὖν λέγεις,” ἔλεξε, “τίνι δῆτα πείθου;” ...Read more

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 to the phenomenon was Emmanuel Roidis in 1885, as recorded in his Parerga, a collection of his recent newspaper articles (Roidis, Emmanuel. 1885. Πάρεργα. Ed. Stamatopoulos, Dimitrios I. Athens: Ανδρέας Κορομηλάς. p. xvii). I'm grateful to Tasos Kaplanis who corrected the Common Wisdom of the West in a comment last post, and who scanned in the page in question (from a newer edition). As he notes, Psichari used the term in French the following year in his voluminous Essais de grammaire historique néo-grecque, citing Roidis. And that popularised the concept in the West.

The popularisation took some time though. The next early mention Ferguson cites, in his 1959 paper defining diglossia, was William Marçais in 1930, and the usage he cites from Psichari was in 1928. That's why the Common Wisdom of the West assumed Psichari coined the term: it's the earliest reference in Ferguson 1959. Psichari was certainly involved in generalising the term beyond Greek, as this paper trail shows. And Pernot, who readers of this blog know I'm a fan of, was involved as well.

Long quote, but there is a long-standing misapprehension to correct, and a Westerner has corrected the Common Wisdom of the West before.

It would seen that the oldest attestation of diglossia, or rather "diglossie", with the linguistic connotations it currently carries, is to be found in "Essais de grammaire historique néo-grecque" published in 1885 by the French hellenist J. Psichari. Psichari used this term to describe the Greek linguistic situation characterized by the coexistence of katharévousa and démotiki (Prudent, 1981). It also seems that Psichari was the first to extend the use of the term diglossie to refer to the coexistence of two varieties of Arabic, the "spoken" and the "written" ones, and this in an article written in 1928 (id.)

(Naccach, Albert F.H. On Some Implications of the Tadmuraean Aramaic/Arabic Diglossia. Proceedings of the International Conference "Palmyra and the Silk Road", Palmyra, April 1992. p.2.)

Merci infiniment, French government, for putting Prudent's paper online. This tells most of the story you need to know, though not the initial bit with Roidis:

If we are to believe Jardel & Valdman (1979), the term diglossia should be attributed to the Greek Hellenist Jean Psichari, who had popularised it in an article in Mercure de France in 1928. Tracking that reference (laconically mentioned by Ferguson in 1959), we go back to 1885, the date when the same Psichari published his Essais de grammaire historique néo-grecque, in which he says that he has taken the word diglossia from a certain Mr Roidis, who had published an article in the newspaper Acropolis a few months before. In dealing with the question of the evolution of Modern Greek, and the difficulty of reconstructing certain stages of the language, Psichari mentions twice (in 633 pages!) the "strange diglossia Greece is suffering from" [étrange diglossie dont souffre la Grèce].

It was left to Psichari's student Hubert Pernot to give the first consistent definition of the term. In his Grammarire grecque moderne of 1897, he dedicates his entire introduction to explaining the sociolinguistic situation prevalent in the country of Homer. Reprising the political and linguistic history of Greece, Pernot explains how this "strange diglossia" came about: on the one hand a "scholastic, scholarly or purist" language (Katharevousa), a primarily written language, but also spoken in official ceremonies and "some very infequent pedants". On the other hand the current or vulgar Greek (Demotic or Romaic), which is not taught at all, but is the only language in true use.

Twenty years later, Pernot refined his argument in the preface of his Grammaire du grec (langue officielle), which he authored with Camille Polack (1918):

"Diglossia", or the duality of languages, is the main hurdle not only for foreigners learning Modern Greek, but also for Greeks, from their primary education.

[Goes on about children having to learn "a double lexical and grammatical system, doubtless related, but clearly distinct, and few of whose elements are interchangeable." Pernot acknowledged debt to Psichari]

Psichari's article in the 1928 Mercure de France went to a different audience than Pernot's preface and introduction. [...] Finally, because he extended diglossia to other Mediterranean domains, fixing its Asiatic origin and speculating on the future of such linguistic duality.

[...] Diglossia does not consist solely of using a double vocabulary [...] Diglossia relates to the entire grammatical system. There are two ways of declining, two ways of conjugating, two ways of pronouncing; in a word, there are two languages, the spoken and the written, like one would say of Vulgar and Literary Arabic.

[Psichari's racism, "it's all the Asiatics' fault"]

Beyond the antagonism of systems and groups which he describes humorously [NN: Yup, that's Psichari alright], our innovator is concerned to relativise the declarations of traditional philology ("Descartes' French is gibberish compared to Old French. You could say the same about 1928 French compared to 1830 French", p. 78), in order to explain the notion of transitional language states and constant change. He also touches on the thorny problem of "mixed languages", which he integrates like Dauzat into the ordinary dynamics of language change. Finally we note a solid reflection on the literary problem of diglossia, with reference to Italian, Provençal, French and other societies.

[Then William Marçais uses the word "diglossia" in 1930 about Arabic, with no mention of Roidis, Psichari or Pernot, and with no italics or scare quotes]

(Prudent, L.-F., 1981. Diglossie et interlecte. Languages, vol. 61, pp. 13-38. Here pp. 15-16)

So, Roidis, then Psichari in passing, then Pernot more formally, then Psichari explicitly to a general audience and including Arabic, then Marçais applying it to Arabic, then Ferguson.

There are some catches in giving priority to Roidis though. First, Roidis was not the first to coin the word διγλωσσία "two-tongued-ness" at all; that honour belongs (as far as I can tell) to the Didache, a 1st Century Christian text (also cited in the Epistle of Barnabas). Not that the Didache is talking about diglossia or bilingualism. It's speaking about talking in forked tongues; the BDAG definition of the word is "doubleness of speech that conceals true intentions by deceitful words, duplicity, insincerity":

Οὐκ ἔσῃ διγνώμων οὐδὲ δίγλωσσος· παγὶς γὰρ θανάτου ἡ διγλωσσία.
You shall not be double-minded nor double-tongued [diglossos], for to be double-tongued [diglossia] is a snare of death. (Didache 2:4)

(If the diglossia wars were still raging in Greece, someone could have taken this up as a motto...)

Trapp's Byzantine dictonary also records it as used by the Abbot Isaias (no, I don't know either), and in the Opuscula of Eustathius of Thessalonica (as διγλωττία), in the same meaning.

So as often happened in 19th Century Greek, a term that was coined some time in Hellenistic Greek was re-coined later on, which a somewhat different meaning. Like καπνιστήριο "smoke place", which meant a steam bath a couple of millennia before it meant a smoking room. (And of course that doesn't prove as much continuity of the Greek language as some would claim, which is why the bold etymologist does not say "καπνιστήριο, From Hellenistic καπνιστήριον" but "καπνιστήριο, Calque of French salon de fumer; cf. Hellenistic καπνιστήριον.") The Didache was first published in 1883, so Roidis may have come across it and reused the term.

But he needn't have. In Modern Greek, διγλωσσία "two-language-ness" is the obvious way of saying "bilingualism", so the word would have been easily reinvented to mean that. That's "bilingualism", as in the state of an individual using two languages, rather than a society stratifying them. Diglossias require bilingualism to work, but they're not the same thing. (As you can imagine, this ambiguity has led to some confusion in Greek linguistics, and occasional differentiation between "personal διγλωσσία" and "societal διγλωσσία".)

Now, Roidis is describing diglossia alright, as you'll see; but his first use of the term διγλωσσία still arguably means "bilingualism", as what individuals do rather than what a society does. It's a diglossia-conditioned bilingualism, to be sure, but it's not the way we now use "diglossia". Roidis' second use of the term on the same page *does* refer to what a society does; but he's arguing that Demotic was not yielding to Puristic, and remained a separate language. The way that has happened is diglossia, and what he has just described is diglossia; but the term in that context means just "bilinguality, the existence of two discrete languages." In fact, that's how Pernot defined diglossia as well.

I suspect that in leaving the word untranslated as diglossie, Psichari was helping along its reinterpretation from an individual to a societal phenomenon: it was not mere bilingualisme. In fact, that nuance was presumably why he left it untranslated. The concept is there in Roidis, but the reanalysis to an explicitly social phenomenon is probably Psichari's ("the strange diglossia of Greece", not "of Greeks"), and more so his student Pernot's.

Judge for yourselves though. Roidis has as mordant a tongue as Psichari did—though he was still writing in Puristic, as everyone had to in Athens in 1885, so the tenor is different. (There's a simple reason Psichari was bold enough to write prose in Demotic, as has long been noted: he did not live in Greece.)

Some people regurgitate ad nauseam the notion that the spoken language is "progressing along with" the written language—that is, it is being archaised; and they bring up as evidence parliamentarians, public prosecutors, lawyers and preachers who speak in monologue. These people would be much more convincing, if they were kind enough to inform us what language those orators speak when they make merry with friends, when they endure the pains of surgery, when they scold a child breaking a glass, when they farewell an expiring relative, when they are trod on the street by a careless pedestrian, when they kneel before a woman or when they babble in a dream. This is not at all a matter of one language for the common people and another language for scholars. This is [diglossia] bilingualism in the same people, who have a living language through which they express all their sentiments and passions—but who are condemned to use another language in writing or speechifying, a language in which it is quite impossible to express any sentiment and any passion.

Whatever viewpoint one examines the issue under, one always ends up with [diglossia] bilinguality. Those unwilling to admit that the written language is different from the spoken must nonetheless accept the split into a language of monologue and a language of dialogue, a language of emotion and a language of passionlessness [ataraxia], each having its own lexicon and a rather different grammar. According to Shakespeare it is evidence of strong emotion if one forgets to put on his tie and breeches; but to judge the psychological state of the modern-day Greek, a more certain indication is whether they use or omit reduplication.

Οἱ κατακόρως ἀναμασσῶντες ὄτι συμπροοδεύει, ἤτοι ἐξαρχαΐζεται, μετὰ τῆς γραπτῆς, καὶ ἡ λαλουμένη, καὶ ὡς παράδειγμα φέροντες βουλευτάς, εἰσαγγελεῖς, δικηγόρους καὶ ἱεροκύρηκας μονολογοῦντας, ἤθελον εἶναι πολὺ πειστικώτεροι, ἂν ηὐδόκουν νὰ πληροφορήσωσιν ἡμᾶς τίνα οἱ ρήτορες οὗτοι λαλοῦσι γλῶσσαν συνευθυμοῦντες μετὰ φίλων, ὑπομένοντες τοὺς πόνους χειρουργικῆς ἐγχειρήσεως, ἐπιπλήττοντες παῖδα θραύσαντα ποτήριον, ἀποχαιρετῶντες ἐκπνέοντα συγγενῆ, πατοῦμενοι καθ’ ὁδὸν ὑπὸ ἀπροσέκτου διαβάτου, γονατίζοντες ἐνώπιον γυναικὸς ἢ παραληροῦντες ἐν νείρῳ. Οὐδόλως ἐνταῦθα πρόκειται περὶ γλώσσης τοῦ λαοῦ καὶ γλώσσης τῶν λογίων, ἀλλᾶ περὶ διγλωσσίας τῶν αὐτῶν ἀνθρώπων, τῶν ἐχόντων γλώσσαν ζωντανήν, δι’ ἧς ἐκφράζουσι πάντα αὐτῶν τὰ αἰσθήματα καὶ τὰ πάθη, καὶ καταδικαζομένων νὰ μεταχειρίζωνται γράφοντες ἢ ἀγορεύοντες ἄλλην τινά, δι’ ἧς εἶναι ἀπολύτως ἀδύνατος ἡ ἔκφρασις παντὸς αἰσθήματος καὶ παντὸς πάθους.

Ὑφ’ οἱανδήποτε καὶ ἂν ἐξετάσῃ τις τὸ ζήτημα ἔποψιν, πάντοτε εἰς τὴν διγλωσσίαν καταντᾷ. Οἱ μὴ θέλοντες νὰ ὁμολογήσωσιν ὅτι ἄλλη εἶναι ἡ γραφομένη καὶ ἄλλη ἡ ὁμιλουμένη, πρέπει ἐξ ἅπαντος νὰ παραδεχθῶσι τὴν διχοτόμησιν εἰς γλῶσσαν μονολόγου και γλῶσσαν διαλόγου, εἰς γλῶσσαν συγκινήσεως καὶ γλῶσσαν ἀταραξίας, ἐχούσας ἰδιαίτερον ἑκάστη λεξικὸν καὶ ἔτι μᾶλλον διαφέρουσαν γραμματικήν. Κατὰ τὸν Σαιξπεῖρον τεκμήριον σφοδρᾶς συγκινήσεως εἶναι τὸ νὰ λησμονῇ τις ἐνδυόμενος τὸν λαιμοδέτην αὐτοῦ καὶ τὰς περικνημίδας· πρὸς ἐκτίμησιν ὅμως τῆς ψυχικῆς καταστάσεως τοῦ σήμερον Ἕλληνος φαίνεται πολὺ ἀσφαλέστερον γνώρισμα ἡ χρῆσις ἢ παράλειψις τοῦ ἀναδιπλασιασμοῦ.

(Some nice syntax there: "Under whichever _i may examine _j someone the issue _j viewpoint _i", "if they had good will that they should inform us which _i the orators _j these _j do speak language _i". Well, old hat if you're a Classicist, but that's the point: we don't speak in Classical syntax. Or German syntax, which Puristic was as indebted to.)

So, assembled wisdom of the internets and loyal readership: how shall we fix the Wikipedia citation for "diglossia"? Who coined the word diglossia as we now understand it—Roidis, Psichari, Pernot, or Ferguson?

Who coined the linguistics term „diglossia„? » ProProfs Polls

...Read more

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 the situation where different spheres of social interaction in a community use forms of language which are not merely different registers, with some tweaking, but different linguistic systems completely. There is a High language form, used in writing, formal contexts, literature, education, officialdom, the media; and there is a Low language form, used in speaking, the home, the marketplace. If it's written down at all, it's as a transcription, or deviance: it's not a norm, or something to emulate. Usually the two variants are linguistically related; but they're not closely related enough to be merely different registers, as they are in English. They're at least dialects apart.

That describes a lot of linguistic situations in the world. Classical Arabic vs. Colloquial Arabics. High German vs. Swiss German. Most creoles, with the colonial language at one end (the acrolect), and the creole at the other (the basilect). Because the high and low variants are usually linguistically related, there can be a spectrum of variation, rather than two well-defined extremes, and people can play with how high or low they are being.

But the thing about diglossia is, it is a stable arrangement, in which people know which form to use where; where using the wrong form is nonsensical, it's ludicrous. There's been a parallel in Greek for the past hundred years, but it hasn't been Puristic vs. Demotic. It's been Standard Greek vs. Cypriot. Giving a lecture in Cypriot, or a speech, or having a news article in Cypriot, is unthinkable, it's nonsense (though the speaker might pop in a dialect word for colouring). But that does not mean Cypriots think their dialect is bad and not worth speaking, even if they occasional say it is. If you speak standard Greek to many a Cypriot, you may be excused as a Greece Greek, a "penpusher" (καλαμαράς, because none but a penpusher would speak standard Greek). If you're not a penpusher by birth, then you're a penpusher by affectation, and this engenders hostility. Not everywhere and and all times in Cyprus, but still often enough that the dialect is quite healthy.

Greece in the 20th century was not like that, and it's hard for contemporary Greeks to appreciate that Greece in the 19th century *was* like that. In the 19th century, the High language was Puristic: it may have been incoherent, it may have been artificial, it may have been unworkable, but noone in 1860 Athens disputed that it was the appropriate language for literature, education, officialdom, or the media. Likewise, there was a Low language, which were the various dialects of the vernacular. It appears that a vernacular Koine was already coalescing around Peloponnesian (and under significant Puristic influence) in Athens, but it was neither stabilised yet, nor was anyone trying to stabilise it. In fact, Chatzidakis, who ran Greek linguistics for decades, was denying there was anything like a Demotic Koine several decades after there clearly was.

Something switched by 1920: by 1920, almost all serious literature was being written in the vernacular, educationalists were starting to advocate at least beginning schooling in the vernacular, there was an attempt to translate the Gospels into the vernacular (which met with riots by university students, and a few deaths), as well as Aeschylus (more riots, this time toppling a government, and closing the National Theatre for the next thirty years). Officialdom did not adopt the vernacular until 1976; and even then, the vernacular they adopted was not the vernacular the early advocates had hoped for. But even by the 1950s, Puristic was a frequent target of derision; and derision is not part of the deal with the High language form in a diglossia. The whole point of a diglossia is that the High variant is... High.

Nor is politicisation part of the deal with diglossia. By the 1950s, with the aftermath of the Greek Civil War, you could tell someone's political orientation by how they declined nouns in -ις, -εως. (Some of you may have seen this in Browning's Mediaeval and Modern Greek, and thought it was an exaggeration. It was not.) The 1980s still saw an echo of this, with the Socialists in government using folksy morphology in their just-as-wooden political language; and the Communists had long turned the vernacular meter up to eleven.

The Marxist historian Kordatos is the only instance I've seen in print of the future particle θαν, which could be transitional between θενα and θα. It could also be analogy with any number of particles with nu movable (/n/ as liaison), and that's an analogy joined by ναν for να. As usual in such cases, it's probably both.

So diglossia in the 20th century had degenerated into a conflict, the Greek Language Question, in which the primacy of Puristic was disputed along party lines. Situations where society is linguistically stratified are not always clean. Italy's Language Question involves such subtle shading between dialect and standard, a linguist has decided to call it there dilalia, and Norway's situation is more split on region than it is on ideology, and hardly at all on social register. But that just means 20th century Greece is a spectacularly bad example of diglossia, and it doesn't tell you how diglossia is meant to work, like contemporary Egypt or Haiti does. Or Cyprus.

It also makes it difficult for contemporaries to picture the world before 1920—especially before 1875—when Greek diglossia was a lot closer to what is happening in Egypt and Cyprus now. It's hard for us now to believe, as Peter Mackridge wrote in a paper once, that the Communists in the 1910s dismissed the advocacy of the vernacular (Demoticism) as a bourgeois distraction, while Head Demoticist Psichari was a royalist.

I think it was: Mackridge, P. 1990. Katharevousa (c.1800–1974): An Obituary for an Official Language. In Sarafis, M. & Martin, E. (eds), Background to Contemporary Greece. London: Merlin Press. 25–51.

It's just as hard for us to believe that in the 1840s, Puristic was a tool of modernisation, and was a means to integrate Greece into Western Europe. Well, the Western Europe thing is easy to see; it's the modernisation though millenium-old datives and infinitives that's hard to get. It's hard to believe that people portrayed the vernacular, not merely as uncouth, but as the language of Ottoman servility. Which is why Psichari, in his 1888 manifesto My Voyage (about his first field-trip to Greece) made a point of citing Sapphic Odes in Puristic in honour of Sultan Abdul Hamid. [Link to First Edition, before he whitewashed out all the Constantinopolitan dialect.]

Psichari would have you believe that the switch in the status of Greek diglossia, with conflict over the legitimacy of Puristic, was his doing; and the standard histories of Greek language and literature will tell you the same. Psichari—who after all coined the term "diglossia"—made an extremely influential critique of Puristic, it's true, and his critique of the incoherence and arbitrariness of Puristic has stood the test of time (with the added benefit of being hilarious.)

Yet the undermining of Puristic did not start in 1888. What started undermining it was that the Ionian islands, which were British until 1864, never got on board with Puristic. As a result, Demotic literature from the Ionian islands enjoyed prestige—not least Solomos', already revered as the national poet, though some critics did grumble at his folksiness. The first chip in the Athenian edifice of Puristic literature was when the the Academy of Athens allowed the Ionian Islander Valaoritis, in the 1870s, to recite his vernacular verses on Greek National Day.

The authors who wrote Demotic in the 1890s and 1900s grouped around Psichari and respected him—and they inevitably disappointed him, as their language compromised with Puristic in a way he never accepted. But they did not come out of nowhre, he did not conjure them into being himself.

Psichari was a better linguist than an author, and a better historical linguist than a sociolinguist. He approached Demotic with Neogrammarian rigour, proclaiming Ausnahmlosigkeit as "Language admits no compromises!"

OK, I'll unpack that. Historical linguistics before 1880 couldn't explain all the sound changes of Germanic, and went with a mellow, hippy, "shit happens" attitude to exceptions. In 1875, the last seemingly inexplicable sound change of Germanic was explained; and the Neogrammarians, the Young Grammarians (Junggramatiker) who followed proclaimed it as an article of faith that There Is No Such Thing As Exceptions (Ausnahmlosigkeit): if you can't work out why a change has happened, you're not looking hard enough.

Psichari being a man of his time, and not yet pathologically hating the Germans for killing his son in World War I, he embraced that belief in Ausnahmlosigkeit, and applied it to his Demotic activism. Historical Linguistics worked with normal, predictable language change. Compromise with Puristic would give rise to linguistically odd hybrids, which the Unlettered Folk were clearly having trouble coping with. So compromise was linguistic nonsense.

And if you have a sufficiently narrow view of language, it is nonsense. And "nonsense" is precisely how a typologist has to regard Standard Modern Greek, which has made precisely the kinds of compromise that Psichari dismissed. The phonology of Standard Modern Greek, with its influx of spelling pronunciations from Ancient Greek, is loony tunes: /anðrono/? /asθma/? /efθrafsto/?

The tug of war in -ις -εως between an archaic and a modern declension is similarly absurd, and has all the characteristics of committee design: first archaic singular and plural, then both archaic and modern singular but archaic plural, now modern singular and archaic plural. People laughed at Psichari for having a modern plural in πρότασες "sentences" instead of προτάσεις, switching the third declension to the first—like every other vestige of the third declension has done in the vernacular. But writers in the 17th century vernacular did the same, because they had noone to tell them to compromise with Puristic. And those who laugh forget that ράχες, the Standard Modern Greek for "backs", also started life in the third declension.

So the plural of an Ancient -ις -εως in Standard Modern Greek is not dictated by the normal laws of language change. It is dictated by snobbery: the elite have "sentences", the hoi polloi have "backs". That's absurd.

But it's also part of how language rolls, because Psichari's was much too narrow a view of how language works. Language is also a vehicle for social attitudes, and those social attitudes reflect back on the form of the language. In purely linguistic terms, if Ancient ῥάχεις could become vernacular ράχες, there's no earthly reason why Ancient προτάσεις shouldn't become vernacular πρότασες; and Psichari concluded as much at a time when people were advocating you should still say both ῥάχεις and προτάσεις. But for whatever reason, the burghers of Athens decided that was a bridge too far even in their Demotic: ράχες is fine, πρότασες is extremist. Because a real language, spoken in real social contexts, does admit compromise: Puristic could not just be wished away in a puff of smoke. (Just as, for that matter, there aren't any pure languages, and the Neogrammarians' contemporaries knew the family tree of languages was a distortion.)

And Puristic has worked its influence on a Modern Greek's linguistic intuition so thoroughly, they can no longer see the absurdities Puristic has imposed on their language. Which makes me dispute Motorcycle Boy's conclusion from a few posts ago: people *can* speak an artificial language, and not realise it. In some way, after all, any codified literary language is artificial.

The influence of Puristic is pervasive enough to illustrate in the following anecdote. To set the context: the Greek Army was an institution well placed to roll out Puristic to the populace: you had a captive audience, that you barked orders to, that they had to obey. It was the one place where you could convince people that the word for "fire" is not φωτιά "lightness" (or λαμπρόν "bright" in Cyprus, or στιά "hearth" in the Ionian islands), but the Ancient πῦρ.

Psichari of course had a field day with this: the sergeant could bark "fttpt" or "herring", and the soldier will still shoot; that doesn't mean you've rewired his brain to call "fire" anything but φωτιά (or λαμπρόν or στιά).

As it turns out, my brain has been rewired. Not quite in the way Psichari said, but close.

When King Otto arrived in Greece in 1833, an honour guard of veterans was set up to fire off a 21 gun salute. When the appointed time came, the designated officer walked up, and proudly shouted, in the only form of Greek worthy of the occasion:

OFFICER #1: ... Ignis! [Πῦρ!]

VETERANS: ....

OFFICER #1: ... Ignis! [Πῦρ!]

VETERANS: ....

OFFICER #1: ... Ignis? [Πῦρ;]

VETERANS: ... (Who the hell's this Innis guy he keeps calling out for?) (Nay, nay, you see, he's addressing his Majesty in his native Barvarian.)

OFFICER #2 (BILINGUAL IN ANCIENT AND MODERN GREEK): [from the crowd] ... *FIRE*, damn your hides! [Φωτιά, πανάθεμά σας!]

VETERANS: ... Oh! *bang bang bang* (See, told you! That's Sgt Innis right there.)

When I read this, I thought to myself (in Greek): what does setting things on fire (φωτιά) have to do with shooting guns (πυρά)?

Then I translated both words into English.

Then I was sore amused.

There's a simple metaphor in many a language between setting things on fire and shooting guns. Hence, gunfire, and fire!. Saying fire! in Ancient Greek at the barracks did not succeed in reviving the ancient Greek word for setting things on fire.

But it did succeed in destroying the metaphoric link: the Ancient Greek word for "fire" is the only word now used for "fire" in a military context—that is, gunfire. The Modern Greek word for "fire" is the only word now used for "fire" in any other context. And modern speakers do a double-take, to realise that gunfire has something to do with burning.

Not what people in 1833 had in mind... ...Read more

Maronite Arabic in Cyprus

Cyprus, though quirks of history, has been more sanguine about linguistic diversity than Greece has been. I remember my Cypriot father's shrugged "yeah, there were some Armenians too, and a village of Maronites", vs my Cretan mother's astonished retelling of her first encounter with her sister's new (Arvanite) in-laws: "And all of a sudden... they started speaking another language!"

I'd like to think (though I have no reason to) that this sanguine attitude is helped by how far the local variants in Cyprus have diverged from the metropoles, precisely because Cyprus is so far away. You'd be hard to put to say that the basilect of Cypriot Greek is mutually intelligible with Standard Greek. Cypriot Turkish (or as some would have it, Gibrizlija) has also travelled far from Standard Turkish, and there is apparent typological convergence between the two. The Classicists here will know that Cyprus was a late holdout for the pre-Hellenic Eteocypriot, and for the most archaic dialect of Greek around after that.

H/t Language Hat, for his note of Bulbul Lameem Souag @ Jabal al-Lughat's posting on the Maronite Arabic spoken in Cyprus (see also Wikipedia). With a link to a teacher's site to help preserve the language (with a level of Government support that, through reasons of quirks of history, is unthinkable in Greece.)

The cute thing about the posting is the remark by Bulbul that (not unlike Greek and, I suspect, Turkish) this Cypriot variant is the most deviant form of Arabic he has ever heard:

My scale (1-10, lowest to highest intelligibility): if Levantine Arabic is 10 and Moroccan Arabic is 8, Chadic is 6, Nigerian is 5. Cypriot Arabic is 2. It's pretty difficult to even read, perhaps on par with the basilect of some English-based creoles.

He goes on to note that "Consequently, Borg postulates a sort-of Syrian-Anatolian koine as the direct ancestor of CMA. ... Contrary to popular opinion, CMA doesn't really show any particular affinity with Lebanese dialects of Arabic, but shows evidence of Aramaic adstratum or even substratum."

I'm afraid I can't say much intelligent about this, but I pass it on. There must be something in the water in that island...

Kozani: a stab at etymology

Language Hat asks in comments to the previous post about the Wikipedia etymologies of Kozani:

According to prevailing opinion, the name comes from the village of Epirus Kósdiani, the origin of settlers of Kozani in 1392. The settlement was first named Kózdiani, which then, it was changed into Kóziani, and in the end into Kozáni.[2]

The name "Kozani" probably may also derive from the South Slavic kožani < koža 'skin (goatskin)'.[3] The name of the city in South Slavic languages is Кожани (Kožani).

Am I wrong in thinking the Slavic etymology makes much more sense than the first one, with its strained reshapings? (We won't even get into what "probably may also" is supposed to mean.)

As often happens in Wikipedia, it's two opinions barely reconciled together on the same page. Now, Googling is no surrogate for actually knowing Slavonic (or Albanian), but let's see how I can help. (Damn you, Language Hat, I was supposed to be doing my taxes!)

The "Hellenic" etymology is sourced from the website of the city of Kozani, which as you'd expect wouldn't be eager to point to the parallel with that language. (Kozani prefecture turns out to be the furthest spread south of Slavonic in Modern times, with Greek and Slavonic villages mixed.)

[Non-Greeks will notice that I speak vaguely of Slavonic, when we all know *which* Slavonic language I'm talking about. But I'm not feeling like getting into needless argy-bargy with those of my readers who don't want to call it "Macedonian"; and since I'm talking about 1400 and not 1950, I may just get away with it...]

The thing is, Kozdiani may not look like Кожани, but it doesn't look particularly Hellenic either. Is there any way Kozdiani could originate from the same Slavonic form as Kožani? Although given it's Epirus (Northern Epirus, as it turns out), and given the names of the other villages cited below, Albanian is more promising as an etymology.

This is what the Kozani city website has to say:

In 1392 colonists from Premeti, Bithikukio, and Kozdiani of Epirus {Përmet and Vithkuq, Albania}, fled chased away by Muslim Albanians to the region north of Selitsa {Selitsa, now Eratyra, Greece}, which is to this day called Old Kozdiani, and subsequently migrated eastwards, encountering the Christian settlement of Kalyvia. {The quite Hellenically named "Huts"; I've found one near Konitsa, on the Greek side of the border.}

The inhabitants of Kalyvia did not reject them, but they obliged them to build their houses further east. The new inhabitants called the region Tzamouria {i.e. Çamëria), preserving the name of their old region.

Nowadays the region is called Tzambra. {[dzamurˈja] > [dzamˈrja] by high unstressed vowel deletion > [dzamˈbra] > [ˈdzambra]}. They called the rocky hill over Tzambra Skrika or Skirka (Sk'rka), which means a rocky elevation.

Though there are different opinions of where the city name came from, the dominant opinion is that these colonists from Epirus called the new settlement Kósdiani, which then became Kóziani, and later scholars [i.e. in Puristic Greek] transformed it to Kozáni.

A few years later families from Servia {town in Greece} and Drepano move to Kosdiani, augmenting it.

From another site: "People speculate that the name Kozani is due to either the place of origin of its first inhabitants, Kosdiani or Kostiani in Epirus, or their main occupation of tanning: "coza" in Epirot means goatskin." Tellingly, coza is given in Latin script, which you'd be unlikely to do if "Epirot" here meant "the Greek dialect of Epirus".

The account derives from a 1924 history of Kozani, cited at this blog:

The name of the folklore group (Kóziani), stressed on the antepenult, shows a hardy genuineness, like the hulls of Sk'rka (Slavic: rocky protuberance; Albanian: hill). And given the opportunity: the definitive interpretation of the name of the city is stilll under research. I'm opening up the History of Kozani by P. Lioufis, Athens 1924.

• The first inhabitants of the region one day saw ... a she-goat running through the trees, and called the village Kózani or Kóziani; for kóza means a she-goat, and kózia a skin in "Bulgarian".
  
• Above the town of Selitsa (Eratyra) there is a region in its mountains called Kóziani, or rather Old Kóziani, where those pursued from Northern Epirus first settled, from the villages there of Kosdiani and Bithikukion. (The latter exists to this day.) Then they came to the region of Paliospita where the Kasmirtzidis Society have their establishment, as do many other settlers in the area, genuine or not.
  
• The Turks called the town Kózana, from Koz ("walnut", or Kákhta in pure Kozani dialect) and Ana "mother", for the multitude of walnuts there.

And here's a map of Përmet, Vithkuq, Kalyvia, Selitsa (now Eratyra, near Askion), Kozani, and Servia:

View Kozani in a larger map
At least one site says that the original Kozdiani was destroyed, which is consistent with Lioufis' wording

So what do we make of all this?

• The Turkish is a folk etymology, and nothing wrong with that.
  
• Kozáni may be named for Kózdiani, but it's quite possible that both are named for the Slavonic for "goat"; Lioufis certainly assumed so.
  
• Kózdiani is in Northern Epirus, i.e. modern Southern Albania; Albanian and Slavonic are both possibilities for etymology, and Albanian and Slavonic would both have been trading words anyway (as appears to be the case with "Sk'rka")
  
• Tzamouria i.e. Çamëria is the name of Southern Albania, although we don't know from this whether we actually have a record of the area around Kozani being called that at the time—which would confirm migration from Southern Albania—or whether this was Lioufis' etymology of modern Tzambra. All of the Tzamouriá > Tzámbra etymology is plausible, except for the stress shift.
  
• I'd like to know more about Lioufis's sources, because the Greek Wikipedia article then adds that the first written reference to Kozani is in a firman of 1528.
  
• I think 1392 is a little early for religious conflict in the Western Balkans—the reference is to τουρκαλβανοί, Muslim Albanians not τούρκοι. But I could be wrong. *shrug*
  
• "The inhabitants to Kalyvia did not reject them, but" they kicked them out anyway.
  
• I'm not at all convinced that the stress shift of Kóziani to Kozáni is a learnèd thing. Sure Kóziani violates ancient accentutation (because Κόζιανη looks like being stressed four syllables from the end—until you realise it's [ko.zja.ni], but Ancient Greek did not have ι as [j]). But I'd have expected a learned form to go with Kozíanon, rather than preserve the feminine gender. And as Don Hat correctly noted, phonologically the shift from Kósdiani to Kozáni does seem a little forced.
  
• So the derivation of Kozáni from Kósdiani has problems. But as it turns out, both Kozáni and Kósdiani seem to have a Slavonic origin anyway, so it's a distinction that doesn't matter.

So, that's what googling tells me. If anyone actually knows any Albanian, Macedonian [there, I said it], or Greek dialect and can contribute, you'll be doing the world a favour. Particularly if they can explain the accentuation of Kozáni. ...Read more

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 its Englished version), on a research project about high school students' use of SMS spellings in their written work. It's a phenomenon happening throughout the Western World, as the mode of literacy is changing. No shortage of instances in English: here's a random instance from Zambia. And throughout the world, people make their woebegone conclusions about how it signals the End of Western Civilisation.

But in Greece, mobile phones were late to take up Greek characters; and SMS and Chat are still often the domain of ad hoc transliteration of Greek into ASCII, Greeklish—which had previously flourished in the 1990s, as Greek script was hard to get online at all. So SMS Greek intruding into schoolchildren's assignments is even more ideologically loaded in Greece than elsewhere. And the attendant rhetoric on the End of Western Civilisation is even more unbalanced.

The Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' blog had noticed the rhetoric too; and derided it in a post called Τα γκρίκλις φταίνε (και) για την Άλωση!: "Greeklish is to blame for the Fall of Constantinople, too!" (The link is the Byzantine manuscript use of abbreviations, not a million miles away from SMS.) In the ever-informative discussion threads that Team Fortier manage there, someone linked to a discussion board where one of the original researchers had posted. And who'da thunk it: the researchers did not say the things the Athens press said they did. Journalists distorting scholarly research: you heard it here first, folks.

Because Nikos Sarantakos had covered the topic, and because SMS spelling panic is a commonplace thing in the world, I begged off posting. But in far-off Ulaan Bataar, a motorcyclist also noticed the rhetoric around the research project...

... so a week later, Nikos put a miscellanea posting up, including this:

Χάρηκα επίσης το άρθρο “Γλωσσοκόπανοι” στο ιστολόγιο Λευκός Θόρυβος και, γιατί να το κρύψω, το ζήλεψα λιγάκι.
I also enjoyed the posting "Linguashmucks" at the blog White Noise; and why hide it, I was somewhat envious of it.

Me too. Enough that I thought I should share in English. The posting is hilarious, and apposite in its righteous fury.

I'm inclined to quibble with some of its points, and I hope we can have a discussion through it here; but I don't want to detract from any of its awesomeness. Except for the dig at Esperanto, but that's something that's worth talking through too: Esperanto is not dead, but how does it live?

And the answer is not denaskismo, the notion that Esperanto is only a real language if it has native speakers. That's offensive to the overwhelming majority of Esperantists who aren't; in fact, the link randomly googled above is the first instance I've found of a native speaker of Esperanto who's stuck around—most of them (George Soros is only the most famous) want nothing to do with Esperanto.

And we could also bring up, as imposed dead languages "from above", Classical Arabic and Hebrew; but it's not clear how imposed they are, and how dead they are. The more interesting thing to consider, I think, is, could Puristic Greek have ever succeeded in displacing Demotic completely, or in maintaining its diglossia like Classical Arabic has—and if not, what was its fatal flaw? I have my suspicions, but I think they can wait for a future post. For now, I defer to the gentleman on the bike from Mongolia...

[I'll try not to annotate, but the reference to "Kostopoulos' publications" are contemporary "lifestyle" magazines (starting with recently revived Klik), who wear their fashionableness on their sleeve by frequent codeswitching to English. The Fat Man is the current prime minister.]

I was reading this someplace the other day: there was a survey done, apparently, by the Department for Kindergarten Teachers of the University of Western Macedonia, on High School students in Kozani. It showed that many of them write in Greeklish even in their school assignments. Comments on the results followed closely by various concerned citizens, worried about the extinction of Greek spelling and the consequences for the Greek language. I had a good laugh; that happens to me every time the results of some research undergo analysis by the clueless.

Now, if you don't get the joke, pull up a seat, and let me remind you of a thing or two about the Immortal Greek Tongue. Who knows, we might have a laugh together.

So, we here in this country of stones have been cursed, to have had some utter loafers live here before us. These loafers didn't know what else to do with their time, so they sat around and came up with philosophies. And any number of related sciences, too. As if it wasn't bad enough that they came up with those philosophies, the bastards went and left behind some written texts—just so they could torment their descendants with them. These written texts were later taken up by Civilised Humanity, to their great admiration. (Insert exclamation point here.) Of course, Civilised Humanity then burnt most of those texts, in case they fell into the hands of unsuspecting serfs and gave them any curious notions. The ancient texts that weren't burned were copied by pious monks, with the appropriate level of care to ensure there were no deviations from Christian morality. (And if there were any, then so much the worse for the deviations.) This bunch of stuff more or less passed on to Modern Greece as "Ancient Greek Literature". And they turned our brains to chicken wire with it in High School, because it was compulsory to teach it to us from the original. (Original my ass.)

At any rate, There's two things you should keep from this story:

1. The pathological relationship of Greek citizens with the Ancient texts: texts they flipped off in school, and flip out on in middle age.
   
2. The hysterical idealisation of the Ancient Greek language, because many of its words are used in modern Western science.

As the years went by, the Ancients died: wise they may have been, but they were not immortal. Then some Roman overlords came over to this country of stones, and the locals rushed to suck up to them. So much so, they even declared the Romans to be Continuators of Hellenic Antiquity, and they worship the Two-Headed Eagle to his day, considering it to be "Greek heritage"! Don't talk to me about the European Union and all that crap: the Greeks had already worked that all out from the time of the Byzantine Empire! Lord have mercy, that's how far ahead we were as a people!

As you know, then came the Turks, who we civilised as we do, even though we were their subjects. We would have accepted them too as Continuators of Ancient Greece (like we did the Byzantines), if the Europeans hadn't poked their noses in, and set us straight. (Acting out of pure altruism, and motivated by their admiration for Ancient Greece. Of course.)

In a word, the spoken language of Greek territory has been through a myriad changes, like any living language in the world has. And when the Greek State was established, it ended up looking like a mutant puppy with two heads. Why so? Because, presumably in an attempt to efface the cultural and ethnic diversity of the Greek citizenry of the time, some people decided that "we don't give a shit what you speak among yourselves, but the language of the country shall be ONE, and DIFFERENT." A language also known as Puristic. In which some foreign-trained intellectuals (also known as "scissor-arses") created a language which had NOT PREVIOUSLY EXISTED. And they imposed it. In school, in church, in public discourse and the public domain, as a language to impress on people and to oppress them with. Something even worse than Papa Stalin: he might have forbidden local languages, but at least he was replacing them with a LIVING language.

We know that dead languages are maintained exclusively in museum exhibits, and we know that languages created "from above" have never been alive (see the failed experiment of Esperanto). That's why Puristic disappeared, leaving behind it some pensioner teachers, some uneducated politicians who keep using phrases like εις την παράταξή μας "in our side of politics" (the correct grammar is εις την παράταξίν μας), and some journalists with a bogus sense of decorum, admiring themselves for saying κατά παρέκκλιση "as a deviation". You know what I'm talking about.

But it remains true that Modern Greece has never acquired a uniform language. Nor did it get uniform spelling, syntax, or anything of the sort. We transitioned from "wooden" Puristic to "Demotic Enhanced", then we ended up with "Plain Demotic", but we're still trying to work out if you spell "train" as τρένο or τραίνο.

And while:

• Greek teachers presume to do a linguist's job, imposing arbitrary grammatical rules;
  
• authors write however the mood takes them, either using local dialect, or following the vernacular of their suburb, or even inventing a language of their own;
  
• the State communicates in a farrago of Demoticising Puristic;
  
• the Church stays faithful to Old School Puristic—

the citizens of the country speak their own language. Which makes sense, right?

Language (any language) is, first and foremost, an instrument used to achieve communication (so the sender of a message understands the same thing as its receiver). At the next level, language is a semotic object of study, and its analysis a scientific undertaking. Why do we use the second person plural when we're trying to be polite? Why do we use the word εξουσία [lit. "being out, being allowed"] where English power, or αυθεντία [lit. "being-in-oneself"] to describe what others call authority? And many other interesting questions like that, ranging from the classification of the vowels in a word, to accentuation, intonation, and so on.

Now, set aside the scientific side of the issue, and let's look at the practical side. The practical side tells us that people choose to use the most descriptive, and lexically most economical utterance, to make themselves understood in daily life. When daily life is transfigured into artistic creation, what is lexically most economical is displaced by what is poetically apposite. So the two following cases are equally possible:

Case A:

Jimbo: Chief, gi's a number eight, would ya?
Chief: Yer arms fallen awf, 'ave they?
Jimbo: Aw, carn boss, I'm arse-deep in the chassis here!

Case B:

Jim, the wastrel, emerged from beneath the disentrailed car soaking with sweat.
"Could you give me a French key number eight?" he begged the workshop boss.
The Boss scratched himself languidly, turned another page in the sports section, and did not even deign to look at his tortured employee.
"You can good and fetch it yourself: I'm not your servant!" he spat.
Jim, the wastrel, sighed, feeling the full weight of the car pressing on him. It would be no use to remind the Boss of the awkwardness of his position: no Boss has ever understood the awkward position of their employee. He choked back his sobs and started to extricate himself from the car.

You can see from the foregoing the linguistic richness of an artistic work (or the linguistic onanism of the author, according to their talent), in contrast with the plain usage of language (strictly utilitarian usage, to put it like Soti Triantaphyllou), when it is used for primal communication.

But the trick is, that primal communication is what evolves language. The need for quick communication, as precise as is feasible, creates new words, expressions, and so on. And to achieve that, it grabs whatever it can find. I repeat: a living language grabs whatever it can find.

The first "percussive drill for home use" is imported into the country. People choose to call it /blakendeker/, because of its brand name. They do the same with "vehicles with a four-wheeled drive", calling them /dzip/.

The first "personal electronic computer" comes in, and people decide to substitute that mile-long phrase with the initialism established in English, /pisi/. They do the same with /dividi/.

On other occasions, people hellenise French words, creatine /kuzina/, or they transform English infinitives, creating words like /parkaro/, /kularo/, etc.

That's what people do. Throughout the world, at all times. They reconfigure, they deconstruct, they transform language at their convenience. FOR their convenience.

And that's what the kids in the survey are doing, making an asset of the absence of Greek characters on their mobile phones and in their /tsat rum/ (or should I say "chambers of internet communication"?) They are creating new circumstances for communication: it's as simple as that.

Does that put Greek teachers out? Well we never liked Greek teachers.

Does that annoy Hellenomaniacs? Well we never had much time for necrophiliacs.

Does that infuriate intellectuals? Well we never saw them eager to get off the throne of their language fetish.

Because museum rooms may be beautiful but they are not liveable, especially for living organisms—like language.

Two notes in closing.

1. The meaning of the direction the language is taking, which I've already noted, is yet to be analysed. But not by me: I'm simply observing the "new" language, though I am not taking any part in its formation.

2. The use of foreign words or expressions in our vernacular (as I've described it) is different from the La-de-da pretentious wannabe elitism, which has clustered around the publications of the neurotic jumped-up peasant Kostopoulos, and dictates that Greek words should be replaced with their English equivalents. (There was a similar phenomenon in the '50s and '60s with French words.) I can accept (if grudgingly) the dominance of English-language culture, which dictates that "I worship thee!" gets replaced with /respek/, and "we'll talk" with /sii ja/. But I feel nauseous at crap like what I heard the other day, during The Fat Man's interview at the Thessalonica International Fair: the Prime Minister is looking around to find the journalist, Tony Boy tells him "on your right side, Sir", and the idiot journalist takes it upon himself to enlighten The Fat Man in turn, with the startling sentence: "over here, Sir, on the right /korner/." I don't feel nauseous because I'm obsessed with the Greek language, but because I loathe puffballs who picture themselves as Mr Halifax, Lord Intendant of Buckingham.

Here endeth the lesson.

...Read more

A mutant optative in Galen

I feel guilty, on occasion, that I blog about soft linguistics here—language and identity, spelling conventions, linguistic geography—at the expense of hard linguistics: phonology, morphology, even *shudder* syntax. It's easy to post about diglossia, because it's fun social stuff that everyone has an opinion about; it's much harder to get worked up about optatives.

Because I'm about to have a lot of fun with Motorcycle Boy's nickel summary of Greek diglossia, I'm going to post now on a mutant optative (or subjunctive) in Galen. It's my serving of brussels sprouts, as it were.

Those of you that were following The Other Blog three years ago (I know, I know) would have caught sight of my posting there on φαῖο: I unearthed an athematic middle optative of φημί in the new edition of Moschus. Because the grammars documented the old edition of Moschus, and because my command of anything athematic or optative is shaky, I spent an hour trying to work out what it was.

... OK, for the non-classicists among you, once again, slowly. Verbs in Greek are formed by attaching endings to a stem. Normally, a vowel comes between the stem and the ending; it's called a thematic vowel, and is either /o/ or /e/, depending on the person. There is an archaic class of verbs which has no thematic vowels, so they're called athematic. As is usual with irregular verbs, these are high frequency verbs—φημί "say", ἵστημι "stand", τίθημι "put", δίδωμι "give"; so people had learned them by rote, and they stuck around when other verbs got their added vowels.

We're going to look at subjunctives and optatives, and there's two further things to know about those moods. The subjunctive thematic vowels are long, /ɔː/ and /ɛː/, and *all* subjunctives are thematic, whatever their indicatives are. Which is just as well, because that way the subjunctives and indicatives are still distinguishable. So

	Indicative	Subjunctive
Thematic:	lú-o-mai "I am loosened"	lú-ɔː-mai "I may be loosened"
Athematic:	títʰe-mai "I am put"	*titʰé-ɔː-mai > tithʰɔ̂ː-mai "I may be placed"

If the subjunctive didn't get a thematic vowel, the subjunctive of títʰe-mai would still be títʰe-mai.

The second thing to know is that, over and above any thematic vowels (or the absence of them), the optative mood gets an extra /i/ or /iɛː/ added in. And while the present subjunctive uses the same endings as the present indicative (the "primary" inflections), the present optative uses the "secondary" inflections, which are in common with the imperfect. So the present imperfect of "loosen" is e-lu-ó-mɛːn, with a thematic /o/, and the optative present is lu-o-í-mɛːn, with both a thematic /o/ and an optative /i/.

Oh, and a third thing: proto-Greek /s/ between vowels did not stick around for long, and nor did most instances of two vowels next to each other.

To illustrate all this, this is how the middle voice (and passive voice) subjunctive and optative present are formed, with a thematic verb, and an athematic verb.

Subjunctive		Optative
*lu-ɔː-mai	lúɔːmai	*lu-o-i-mɛːn	lúoimɛːn
*lu-ɛː-sai	lúɛːi	*lu-o-i-so	lúoio
*lu-ɛː-tai	lúɛːtai	*lu-o-i-to	lúoito
*lu-ɛː-stʰon	lúɛːstʰon	*lu-o-i-stʰon	lúoistʰon
*lu-ɛː-stʰon	lúɛːstʰon	*lu-o-i-stʰɛːn	lúoistʰɛːn
*lu-ɔː-metʰa	luɔ́ːmetʰa	*lu-o-i-metʰa	luoímetʰa
*lu-ɛː-stʰe	lúɛːstʰe	*lu-o-i-stʰe	lúoistʰe
*lu-ɔː-ntai	lúɔːntai	*lu-o-i-nto	lúointo

Subjunctive		Optative
*titʰe-ɔː-mai	titʰɔ̂ːmai	*titʰe-i-mɛːn	titʰeímɛːn
*titʰe-ɛː-sai	titʰɛ̂ːi	*titʰe-i-so	titʰeîo
*titʰe-ɛː-tai	titʰɛ̂ːtai	*titʰe-i-to	titʰeîto
*titʰe-ɛː-stʰon	titʰɛ̂ːstʰon	*titʰe-i-stʰon	titʰeîstʰon
*titʰe-ɛː-stʰon	titʰɛ̂ːstʰon	*titʰe-i-stʰɛːn	titʰeístʰɛːn
*titʰe-ɔː-metʰa	titʰɔ̂ːmetʰa	*titʰe-i-metʰa	titʰeímetʰa
*titʰe-ɛː-stʰe	titʰɛ̂ːstʰe	*titʰe-i-stʰe	titʰeîstʰe
*titʰe-ɔː-ntai	titʰɔ̂ːntai	*titʰe-i-nto	titʰeînto

There's one more annoyance, which is that athematic optatives from the 3rd sg down also turn up thematic: titʰeîto but also titʰoîto, titʰeímetʰa but also titʰeímetʰa. But we'll ignore that, mercifully.

Now, if we put the athematic φημί into the same machine and crank the handle, we get:

Subjunctive		Optative
*pʰa-ɔː-mai	pʰɔ̂ːmai	*pʰa-i-mɛːn	pʰaímɛːn
*pʰa-ɛː-sai	pʰɛ̂ːi	*pʰa-i-so	pʰaîo
*pʰa-ɛː-tai	pʰɛ̂ːtai	*pʰa-i-to	pʰaîto
*pʰa-ɛː-stʰon	pʰɛ̂ːstʰon	*pʰa-i-stʰon	pʰaîstʰon
*pʰa-ɛː-stʰon	pʰɛ̂ːstʰon	*pʰa-i-stʰɛːn	pʰaístʰɛːn
*pʰa-ɔː-metʰa	pʰɔ̂ːmetʰa	*pʰa-i-metʰa	pʰaímetʰa
*pʰa-ɛː-stʰe	pʰɛ̂ːstʰe	*pʰa-i-stʰe	pʰaîstʰe
*pʰa-ɔː-ntai	pʰɔ̂ːntai	*pʰa-i-nto	pʰaînto

And pʰaîo up there—φαῖο—was the form I failed to recognised in Moschus.

The thing about φημί is, Greek dialect used φημί in the middle voice, but Attic only used it in the active. So you have few instances of φημί in the middle: a fair few perfect participles (including one in Plato), a few middle aorists, and Homer has an middle imperative φάο and φάσθω and a middle infinitive φάσθαι. But we have no known instances of the middle present subjunctive of φημί; and until the new edition of Moschus, we had none recorded for the middle present optative ether. So out of that whole table I just gave, only the boldfaced form has ever turned up in literature.

(Grammarians knew how the rules worked, so they did make up pʰɔ̂ːmai: Heraclides of Miletus (Milesius) fr. 54 Cohn, Theodosius of Alexandria Canones isagogici de flexione verborum p. 97 Hilgard—although the latter intended it as an aorist. I have no evidence they made up an optative to match.)

We fast forward a few centuries to Galen. Galen is a medical writer who has a *lot* of text attributed to him. Partly because he was that prolific: "It has been reported that Galen employed 20 scribes to write down his words ", Wikipedia notes, to which a Wikipedia editor has inevitably added "^{Citation needed}". Partly because his stuff was useful, so copyists kept it around. Partly because he was a default medical author, for others' writings to be attributed to.

Galen's prose is supposed to be a workmanlike Koine, nothing too fancy. (The German word for it is Fachprosa, "specialist prose"—meaning scientific, as opposed to literary.) That said, he occasionally wanted to liven things up. And his misstep on one occasion that he did, gives us our second attested instance of a mediopassive optative of φημί.

Our instance comes from Galen's commentary to Hippocrates' Treatise on Joints. The Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médicine, Paris V, have magnificently put online the old editions of Galen. Of course people have been reediting individual works of Galen since the 1820s Kühn edition, and must be furious people still refer back to what is a pretty crappy edition, even by 1820s standards. But I'll refer to it anyway, given that it's also the edition the TLG has, and it's where I found this optative.

You can view the passage as published by Kühn; here it is again, with my rendering:

Ἀγαθοὺς πυροὺς τοὺς ἀρίστους δηλονότι λέγει. ταύτην γὰρ οἱ παλαιοὶ τὴν προσηγορίαν ἐπιφέρειν εἰθισμένοι κατὰ παντὸς τοῦ πρώτου ὄντος ἐν τῷ οἰκείῳ γένει. λέγουσι δὲ καὶ νῦν ἅπαντες οἱ περὶ τὴν σιτοποιίαν ἀρίστους εἶναι πυροὺς τοὺς πυκνοὺς τὴν οὐσίαν. οἱ γὰρ χαῦνοι πολὺ τὸ πιτυρῶδες ἔχουσι καὶ τὸ σταῖς αὐτῶν οὐ γίγνεται γλίσχρον, ὡς καὶ μυῶν. ὅλκιμον δὲ ὠνόμασε τὸ γλίσχρον ἀπὸ τοῦ συμβεβηκότος, ἐπειδὴ τεινόντων ἡμῶν αὐτὸ πρὸς τἀναντία μέρη, συνεχὲς μὲν οὐ διασπώμενον τοῦ μὴ γλίσχρου φθάνοντος διασπᾶσθαι κατὰ τὰς τοιαύτας ἐνεργείας. εἰ δὲ διασπᾶται, πῶς ἄν τις ἕπεσθαι φαίηται τεινούσαις χερσὶ αὐτό; εἰ δ᾽ οὐχ ἕπεται, πῶς ἂν ὅλκιμον ἔτι λεχθείη;
By "good wheat", Hippocrates obviously means the best quality. The old-timers used to apply that description to anything which was the first of its kind. And nowadays everyone dealing with bread-making call "best quality" wheat whose substance is dense. Spongy wheat is very crusty, and its dough does not become sticky, like rats' [?!] dough does. And Hippocrates calls sticky dough "ductile", because of what happens when we pull it in opposite directions: it is continuous and does not break apart, while dough that is not sticky ends up breaking apart under that action. If it does break apart, how could one say that it follows along, when their hands stretch it? And if it does not follow along, then how could it still be said to be ductile?

As often happens with ancient commentaries, there is a fair ladling of the bleeding obvious in there. But what detains us is the verbs for "say" Galen uses at the end. The final λεχθείη is an aorist passive optative: "it would be said", here meaning "it would be called". Galen wants to use a different verb from λέγω in the preceding sentence, so he uses φημί, that old irregular verb, which by then would have been fast dying out.

For some reason, Galen wants to use a middle or passive optative, not an active. It's hard to tell which of the two he intends, although that does not affect the form he uses, since passives and middles usually coincide (outside the aorist and future). If he's going for the passive, which he does in the next sentence, then he means "how could it be said that it follows along, with hands pullng"—and with a nominative "someone" (τις) stuck mid-sentence doing nothing. If he's going for the middle, the "someone" finds employment again: "how could someone say that it follows along, with hands pulling"; but then Galen has revived a quite antick middle of φημί.

Whatever he's done, he cannot use an aorist for the optative: there has never been an aorist passive of φημί (outside the fertile imagination of grammarians: Theodosius of Alexandria loc.cit. p. 88 ἐφάθην, Etymologicum Magnum p. 496 Kallierges ἐφάθην ἐφάθημεν ἐφάθησαν), and the aorist middle is Homeric territory, and not the style he's going for. So he has to use a present optative.

We know from the table above that the verb he should use is pʰaîto, φαῖτο. But that's not what Galen comes up with. Instead, Galen does this:

• Optative passive of φημί. OK, the optative active is pʰaíɛːn, pʰaíɛːs, pʰaíɛː...
  
• [Correct: pʰa-iɛː-n, pʰa-iɛː-n, pʰa-iɛː-Ø]
  
• So my stem is phai-, to which I add...
  
• um... how does the optative passive go?
  
• ... ɛːtai?

So Galen starts with an optative, and ends with the subjunctive suffix. Instead of optative pʰaîto or subjunctive pʰɛ̂ːtai, he has ended up with a mooshed-up pʰaíɛːtai.

Why? Well, several things:

• He's in uncharted grammatical waters: remember, outside that one instance in Moschus, noone has ever seen a middle optative of φημί, and the copyists of Moschus didn't believe it either—which is why the 19th century grammarians didn't notice it.
• When people are in uncharted grammatical waters, they lurch for familiar forms. And already the subjunctive was more familiar than the optative.
  
• The active optative, which Galen knew well enough, has an extra /ɛː/ in it for its optative marker: pʰa-iɛː, not pʰa-i. So being in unchartered waters, he probably thought the passive should have an /ɛː/ in its suffix as well. After all, a native speaker would not know about the proto-Greek games with active optative /iɛː/ vs. middle optative /i/: they'd just know that there's an optative ending -iɛː to imitate.
  
• And the correct pʰaîto doesn't give him an /ɛː/, but the subjunctive ending -ɛːtai does.
  
• So the passive counterpart of -ɛː, um, must be -ɛːtai. Which is of course nonsense, because -tai is never optative, it's only subjunctive: if he really wanted to keep his eta, he should have used -ɛːto, and come up with pʰaíɛːto.
  
• But Galen was not reconstructing the optative morpheme by morpheme from proto-Greek, like we are doing here. He's lurching about using familiar suffixes. He *can't* take titʰe-ɛː-tai and titʰe-i-to apart, and realise that the /i/ belongs there but the /tai/ doesn't. He just knows about morphemes as fusional blocks, ɛːtai and oito, and he sort of knows that pʰai is an optative stem.
  
• And he comes up with what Motorcycle Boy, were he a pedantic grammarian, might call "a mutant puppy with two heads".

Thanks to errors in Google Books OCR, btw, φαίηται shows up a lot more online than it's supposed to, as a misrecognition of φαίνεται "it appears". It also turns up in a second online copy of Galen, whose provenance I will not vouch for...
...Read more

Lascaris Cananus: Updated

Well, I now have both the Lundström and the Blomqvist editions of Lascaris Cananus next to me, so I can update my preceding post on him.

Thanks to your intrepid correspondent, the 1902 edition, Lundström, Vilhelm (ed.) 1902. Laskaris Kananos. Reseanteckningar från de nordiska länderna. Upsala; Leipzig: Lundequist (Smärre Byzantinska skrifter; 1)—is now online at archive.org.

The 2002 edition—Jerker Blomqvist 2002. The Geography of the Baltic in Greek Eyes. In Amdem, Bettina et al. (eds), Noctes Atticae: 34 articles on Graeco-Roman antiquity and its Nachleben. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. 36-51—is on Google Books, which skips a couple of pages:


The text appears in a scrapbook kept by Gemistos Plethon on the geography of the north. The early Scandinavian scholars took Kananos at face value, flattered that a Greek bothered to talk about their countries, and pardoned his occasional exaggerations—no, the day in Bergen is not a month long, Bergen ain't Finmark; and yes, they had money in Bergen by 1439.

A hundred years on, people are more sceptical; or at least, Blomqvist is. He finds that Cananus manages to simultaneously place Norway at the western extreme of the Baltic Sea, and East of Lithuania. He concludes Cananus did not go to Scandinavia; instead, he pieced together his account from contemporary mariners—presumably Italian, given the flavour of the place names; and Ptolemy. Mediterranean sailors had been monopolised out of the Baltic by the Hansa, so their information on the Baltic was sketchy—they all thought the Baltic was sausage-shaped. But their knowledge was still better than Ptolemy, who had first called it the Wenedic sea—and who thought Scandinavia was some island vaguely around Poland.

Cananus *may* have gone to Iceland, although Lundström notes his description of Iceland is a lot like that of mediaeval Englishmen:

Cananus: And I saw men strong and sturdy; and their food was fish, and their bread was fish, and their drink was water.
Eulogium Hist. IV 105: Whence the whole island lives in common off fish, the hunt, and meat for the most part. ... That people is quite thick-set, robust, and quite pale, dedicated to fishing and the hunt.
Ranulph. Higden. Polychr. I. 31: Iceland ... has a people that is taciturn, truthful, covered in furs, and given over to fishing.

The date of 1438–1439 comes from how Cananus describes the administration of Livonia: the central administration of the Teutonic Knights had briefly taken over the running of Riga. Blomqvist is not sure Cananus knew the difference between "under the control of the Duke of the Grand Master of the white robes and black cross", and "under the control of the Duke, of the Grand Master of the white robes and black cross"—i.e. whether the Duke is the Grand Master, or the Grand Master's deputy.

The bit in Cananus that Greeks as opposed to Scandinavians care about is the association of Lübeck with the Zygiotai. Since we can now second guess Cananus, I go back to Jakob's remark that 1400 is a bit late for Lübeck to be Slavic speaking, and I'll also note that there's a country missing in Cananus' list: it wasn't on the Baltic back then, but we can no longer trust Cananus realised that. Lübeck is supposed to be the capital of Sthavonia (which is how the manuscript spells it), and noone disagrees that he means Sthlavonia, "Slavic Country". I think Cananus thought Lübeck was in Poland.

To finish with Cananus' geographical missteps, this is a map of Europe in 1400 according to Christos Nüssli's exceedingly cool Euratlas Historical Map of Europe:

Wikipedia's article on the Hansa has this map of our region—which is Hansa territory—from the same time:

The next map, courtesy of my Mad Graphix Skillz, is not a rigorous reconstruction of Cananus' Europe at all; and I certainly wasn't checking with the more correct Nüssli. But it will serve to prove the point that Cananus wasn't talking about quite the same Baltic that Nüssli is:


Back to language stuff. The text has snippets of the vernacular: ἔφτασα (spelled in the ms. εὔτασα), for Ancient ἔφθασα "I arrived", ὑπάρχουν for ὑπάρχουσι "there exist", ἑξῆντα for ἑξήκοντα "sixty". Messy spelling, although that's pretty usual whenever there are snippets of the vernacular. Lundström argues that Lascaris Cananus must be the historian John Cananus, because the historian excused himself for his crap Greek. But everyone those days excused themselves for their crap Greek, so it proves little.

OK, revised translation, based on Blomqvist's edition, and revised table of place names.

I, arriving much land of Europe (sic), and I have "walked" around its whole coast, from the Hyperborean Ocean. Here there is a very large gulf, called in Classical Greek Wenedic; its perimeter is 4000 miles, and its diameter from the northernmost cape of the so-called Cape of Norway, down to its corner in the district of Prussia, is 2000 Italian miles, which have 1000 fathoms per mile; in our [measurement], with 750 fathoms in the mile, it is 2250 miles. And it is surrounded, from its east and west side, [by six districts?]

"Wenedic" is Ptolemy. 2000 Roman miles is 2960 km. 2250 Greek miles is 2993.6 km. "By six districts" is Lambros' emendation; Lundström also suggests "these districts", or even "three districts on either side".

And first of all, going from the east, and in its northernmost parts is the district of Norway, which also has a presiding city called Bergen Vågen. In that city engraved [currency] is not in circulation, neither gold nor silver nor copper nor iron. They exchange with merchandise, both buyers and sellers. Moreover in that city the day is a month long; from the 24th of the month of June until the 25th of July, the whole is daytime, and there is no night at all.

The German and Russian translators were thrown by ἀλλὰ ζοῦν "but they live", and assumed it was instead a participle, referring to living merchandise—"barter in livestock". But Lundström already knew this was an indicative, and Blomqvist emends it to ἀλλάζουν "they exchange".

This is where Norway gets to be East of Sweden and Estonia, and Lundström hopes that Cananus meant to write "West" instead.

After that district is the district of Sweden, which also has a presiding city Stockholm. In that city they mint engraved [currency] which is adulterated silver. These two districts are ruled by the king of Denmark.

Under the Kalmar Union.

After Sweden comes the district of Livonia. And this district has a presiding city which is called Riga, and the town of Revel. These [cities] are ruled by the archbishop, in both secular and spiritual [matters]. And the district is ruled by the Duke [of] the Grand Master of the white clothes and the black cross.

καὶ χώρα Ῥήβουλε "and the town of Revel" had been misread as καὶ ἑτέρα Ῥήβουλε "and another one [called] Revel".

The white clothes and black cross, as linked last time, are the uniform of the Teutonic Knights.

After that district and in the corner of the gulf is the district of Prussia. And it has a presiding city called Danzig.

After that is the district of Slavonia, which has a presiding city called Lübeck. From this district come the Zygiotai in the Peloponnese, since there are many villages there, which speak the language of the Zygiotai.

The manuscript has <Sthabunía>, and Lundström momentarily wonders whether this is meant to be <Esthonia>; but Livonia already includes Estonia.

After that district is the district of Denmark, which has a city called Copenhagen. That [city] is also the kingdom [seat] of the king of Denmark.

These are the six districts around the gulf.

I also arrived at the island of the Fish-Eaters, which is commonly called Iceland; but according to the wise Ptolemy, it seems to me, it is Thule. There I found the a day six months long, from the beginning of spring until the turn of autumn. For I passed from England₁ to that island, and the sailing was 1000 miles; and I [erred] there for 24 days, and I saw men strong and sturdy; and their food was fish, and their bread was fish, and their drink was water.

ἐπλημέλησα "err" is a scribal error, and Blomqvist is reluctant to emended it as ἐπλήρωσα "I fulfilled, I spent".

Then I turned back to England₂.

And the mileage from the aforementioned city of Bergen Vågen to Sluis in south Flanders in a straight line is 3500 miles; and from Sluis to the Sacred Promontory in Portugal is 2164 miles. Namely, all together 5664 miles, without setting into harbours.

Both Lundström and Blomqvist think that 2064 in the manuscript is an error for 2164, because the text has ἑ- ξιντα, which could involve an eye skipping over ἑκατὸν ἑξῆντα.

And the revised place names:

English	Manuscript	Blomqvist	Modern	Notes
Europe	Eurō´pē		Eurō´pē
Baltic	Uenedikôs	Uenedikós		Ptolemy: Venedic
Norway	Norbegías, Norbégias		Norbēgía	Both genitives are consistent with a nominative <Norbégia> whose accentuation is Italian
Prussia	Pursía		Prōsía	Modern form *may* be analogy from Rōsía for Russia
Bergen	Mpérgen		Mpérngen	Modern Greek has gone full /ˈ(m)ber(n)ɡen/ rather than just /ˈmberɣen/
Vågen	Bágen			Modern Greek has gone full /ˈ(m)ber(n)ɡen/ rather than just /ˈmberɣen/
Sweden	Suē´tzia		Suēdía	Latin Suecia, Italian Svezia; again, recessive accentuation consistent with Italian
Stockholm	Stokólmō		Stokchólmē	Italian Stocolma. Modern form preserves /k.h/, and makes it declinable.
Denmark	Dateía		Danía	Vasiljev speculates this is via Slavic, and may indicate Cananus went to Denmark via Novgorod. But Datia shows up elsewhere, e.g. a 1459 Italian map.
Livonia	Libanía		Libanía	Inphlántē in Chalcocondyles, via Polish Inflanty. Livonia included modern Latvia and Estonia. Lundström had emended it to <Libonía>.
Riga	Rē´ga		Ríga
Revel	Rēbúlē			Now Tallinn; Revel was the name of the city since the Danish conquest of 1219. Latvian Rehwele, and Lundström thinks Kananos heard /w/ as /v/.
Danzig	Tántzēk		Ntántsich	At the time, German -ig was not yet [iç].
Slavonia	Sthabunía	Sthlabunía?	(Cf. Slobenía "Slovenia")	Assuming Sthabunía is an error for Sthlabunía, this uses the characteristically Byzantine epenthesis of /θ/ in /s.l/ (with which I derailed a comment thread at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' blog)
Lübeck	Lúpēk		Lúmpek	Middle German Lubek, Lubeke, Mediaeval Latin Lupeca, Lubicca. Again Modern Greek embraces /(m)b/ in transliteration, Byzantine doesn't.
Copenhagen	Kupanábē		Kopenchágē	Danish København: Lundström quotes the original Köben(de)haffn, and attributes <Kupanábē> to a Nordic Köbanhavn, with <-e(n)> for vocalic /n/. Modern Greek and English from Low German (those Hansa people).
Iceland	Islántē		Islandía	Modern Greek here has affixed the suffix -ia; ditto Greenland Groilandía, Holland Ollandía. However more recent -lands have been left as -landē (now with a delta, natch): Tailándē, Kuinslándē.
England1	Ēnglēnía		Anglía	The English are Inglínoi in Chalcocondyles, but <ē> and <i> are both /i/. Googling hints that Inglini was in use in Latin as well.
England2	Englitéra		Anglía	Italian Inghilterra
Sluis	Klúzai		Slóis	Klózioi in Chalcocondyles, French l'Ecluse from Latin exclusa "gateway"
Flanders	Philantría		Phlamandía, Phlándra	The first Modern form is modelled on French Flamand "Fleming", the second of French Flandre "Flanders". Phlamandia seems to be locally modelled on the ethnic Phlamandos, and the only parallel I can find googling is Polish Flamandia. Lundström had emended < Philantría> to <Philantría> <Phlantría>, which is naughty.
Portugal	Pórte Gále		Portogalía	<Portugallía> in Chalcocondyles.

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Lerna: Epilogue

Καλοσωρίζω κάπως καθυστερημένα τους αναγνώστες του Βήματος που ενδεχομένως να βρέθηκαν σ' αυτό το ιστολόγιο, και τους καλώ να εντρυφήσουν όσο τους βαστά στα νερά της Λέρνας...

I never did close off the Lerna series of posts, on the count of lemmata of Greek and the urban legends that have grown around its misinterpretations. Part of the problem with closing it off is, I already wrote my epilogue half-way through the series, at IIId, before I started counting—and pointing out the futility of counting, with a stinging anecdote from Richard Feynman about the Modern Greek relation with their forebears. From the Big Picture view, I don't have much to add to what I said then:

Lerna is a hoax, and Lerna is an annoyance, and Lerna is an embarrassment; but it will not die, because more than anything else, Lerna is a symptom. It's a symptom of what Feynman found. And the way to singe the head of the Hydra is to get over that nagging sense of not measuring up to the Hellenes.

Those following the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog (or as I choose to call them, Team Fortier), will know that the debate about How Many Words Of Greek has continued in the letters page of the Athenian press, in Eleftherotipia and Vima. The course of the debate, with its sleights of hand, has been tracked by Team Fortier's Stazybo Horn. The newspaper Vima has just published a group letter from Team Fortier. ("A team of existing or non-existing individuals, whose scientific knowledge of Greek is impossible to confirm, has lately been attempting to dispute that the Greek language is the richest in the world." The syntax of the original is considerably more tortuous.) The letter includes my signature and links back to this blog, so I'm acknowledging the debate here.

[EDIT: Oops, that's monstrously unclear. "A team of existing or non-existing individuals" is what Team Fortier has been called in the pages of Eleftherotypia by its implacable foe, Theodore Andreakos.]

Not that there is much to acknowledge. Those who would claim that Greek has a gazillion bajillion words know not what words are, what a logical argument is, and how little an inflated word count pissing match proves. Their passion and love for the Hellenic tongue did make me almost feel a remote sympathy for them—especially once I started looking at them through an outsider's lens, rather than up close, as an anthropologist rather than a fellow Greek. And when Stazybo Horn commented here that he wishes he could see their heads explode as they read my posts, I didn't gloat in response, because I kind of felt pity at a Hellenism that has to resort to such flimsy grounds to assert itself.

My pity didn't last long; what with the threats and accusations of unGreek behaviour, and the suite of non-linguists telling linguists their business, and the digging up of dirt on anti-Lernaeans (and on pro-Lernaeans, to be fair), and the parading of phantom 120-volume dictionaries of Greek. My pity certainly does not extend to missives like this (which launched the debate across from Eleftherotipia to Vima):

2009-08-19. From Theodore Andreakos: With this letter, I wish the inform my friends, the readers of Vima, that there exists a Team which proclaims that it admires the Greek language, while it does everything to mock it and put it down internationally, with all the misinformation they have long been spreading against it in print and the electronic media. The head of this team appears to be an N. Sarantakos, who goes by the title of author and translator, residing, so he writes, in Luxembourg, and maintaining a website. He and his team claim, in particular, (1) that English is supposedly the richest language in the world...

And what though Sarantakos has been online (maintaining a website) for close to twenty years, has published extensively works on language, on bridge, and fiction, and has been hiding in pretty plain sight as an EU translator, we clearly need sleuths of the calibre of Theodore Andreakos, Educ. Insp. (Ret'd), Hon. Prof. Tech Coll., to ferret out Team Fortier's deep dark purpose. Whatever that may be. To which I can only say, (a) *I*'m Spartacus, and (b) what do I have to do to get in the employ of the Bilderberg Group? They've just convened in Athens and all...

Theodore Andreakos, Educ. Insp. (Ret'd), Hon. Prof. Tech Coll., won't be convinced by anything anyone from Team Spartacus Fortier has to say; there's plenty of evidence of that in the newspaper correspondence. And it was not for him that I wrote. I wrote for Dokiskaki, who demanded of the scholars, "it would be good for what's correct to exist somewhere as an easy read; else the sensible will end up mad." And because I had some facts to contribute to the debate, and it was meet that I did.

I note with disappointment though, that noone from the linguistics establishment in Greece has weighed in. (Foivos Panagiotidis did, but he's a prof in U Cyprus.) It's your field that's being taken for a ride in hobbyhorses.... ...Read more

Islántē: Island Of The Fish-Eaters

[EDIT: This post has been updated]

The quiz I set last post gave me an excuse to Google Σαμῶται, and in the process to find that Lascaris Cananus is online—after a fashion. So this post is about him.

Lascaris Cananus wrote a page about his visit to Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland in the 15th century; the date seems to be 1438–1439. I knew about this text for a very long time, because it features in histories of the Greek language. It features in histories of the Greek language because it includes a single throwaway line, indicating that Slavonic was still spoken in the Southern Peloponnese in the 15th century, by the Zygiotai (who lived on the Zygos, the "yoke", of Mt Taygetus).

Beyond that, Cananus answers the question I posed my friend Tania last week, home from Iceland: "what is the Icelandic native cuisine?" Most people call the place Islantē, Cananus reports; to him, it's The Island Of The Fish-Eaters.

Lascaris Cananus may or may not be the same as John Cananus, who wrote an account of the Ottoman Siege of Constantinople of 1422. The Swedish Wikipedia article is about Lascaris but mentions John as possibly the same person; the English Wikipedia article was about John, and as of today mentions Lascaris as possibly the same person. Wikipedia links the two articles, and I won't prevent it. Still, the author of this page is likely a merchant and not a scholar.

(The Catalan Wikipedia article is about John, and doesn't mention Lascaris. The Greek Wikipedia doesn't have anything on any Cananus, and I wish I was surprised :-( )

The text has shown up in scholarly attention as follows:

• First published by Spyridon Lampros, the voluminous if not always painstaking Byzantinist, in 1881 (Παρνασσός 5:705 ff.)
  
• Monograph in Swedish in 1902: Lundström, Vilhelm (ed.) (1902) Laskaris Kananos. Reseanteckningar från de nordiska länderna. Utgifna och kommenterade av Vilh. Lundström. Upsala; Leipzig: Lundequist (Smärre Byzantinska skrifter; 1).
  
• An article in Russian, 1914: А. А. Васильев. Ласкарь Канан, византийский путешественник XV века по Северной Европе и в Исландию. Харьков, 1914. pp. 3-8. [Отдельные оттиски из Сборника Харьковского Историко-Филологического Общества в честь проф. В. П. Бузескула].
  
• Georg Jakob. Arabische Berichte von Gesandten an germanische Furstenhofe aus dem 9. und 10. Jahrhundert. Berlin 1927, pp. 46-47.
  
• A mention in Mikhail Bibikov, 2004: Byzantine sources for the history of Balticum and Scandinavia. In Ivo Volt and Janika Päll (eds), Byzantino-Nordica 2004. Tartu: Tartu University Press. pp. 12-28.

Jakob's monograph is about Arab travellers in Germany, which sounds even more interesting than Byzantines in Iceland; but this is still a blog on Greek linguistics.

I have ordered the Swedish monograph (2 pp of Greek, 44 pp of Swedish); but to my delight, both the Russian and the German article (translated into Russian) have been put online by Russians, which inspires much gratitude. I'm finding a lot of Byzantine material gets put online by my fellow inheritors of Byzantine heritage.

And because both the Russian and the German articles contain translations of Cananus, I'm going to triangulate and put one up into English. I admit it's unscrupulous to entertain the translation chain Greek > German > Russian > Babelfish English; but if I wanted to be scrupulous, I wouldn't be blogging.

I'll note that Jakob thinks 1439 is a bit too late for Slavic to be spoken around Lübeck, and thinks the reference is to a Sorbian factoria (trading colony) in Lübeck, under the Hansa, just as Danzig was a Prussian trading colony. (And Prussian back then did not mean German.) I don't know where Sorbian was spoken in 1439 (it's pretty inland now), but Cananus clearly had the impression there was contiguous Slavic speaking territory around Lübeck; and if it wasn't Lübeck, it was somewhere close enough to allow the confusion. Of course, we have no way of knowing whether Cananus actually set foot in Lübeck.

Jakob also wonders whether Cananus is talking about the Roma, who had recently arrived in both the Peloponnese and Lübeck; but we have evidence of the presence of Slavs in the Peloponnese from other sources. So the conflation with the Roma would be unmotivated. (I'm amused that Babelfish translates Циганы as "Roma" and not "Gypsies", but fair enough, I suppose.)

So, here's the Babelfish triangulation:

I have visited many countries in Europe, traveled all of its coast in the Hyperborean Sea. There is a large bay, called in Greek Uenedikos ("Venedic", the Baltic Sea). Its circumference is 4000 miles and its diameter from the northern tip of the so-called Cape of Norway (Νορβεγία) to the farthest corner of the land of Prussia (Πουρσία) is 2000 Italian miles, where a mile is 1000 yards [сажень, клафтер]. In our reckoning, a mile is 750 yards, so it is 2250 miles. From east and west, it covers [...]

First of all, starting from the east, the most northern part of the country around the Gulf is Norway, which has a capital that is called Bergen Vågen (Μπέργεν Βάγεν). [Vågen is a bay in the centre of Bergen.] In this city there are no hammered coins in circulation, either gold, silver, copper, or iron: buyers and seller exchange livestock. Furthermore, in this city day lasts a month, from June 24 until July 25 is continuous daytime, and there is no night at all.

After this country is the country of Sweden (Σουητζία), which has the capital of Stockholm (Στοκολμώ). In this city silver coins are minted. Both countries are governed by the King of Denmark (Δατία).

After Sweden comes the country of Livonia (Λιβονία). This country has a major city called Riga (Ρήγα) and another called Revel (Ρηβούλη, now Tallinn). These (cities) are controlled by bishops in both secular and ecclesiastical matters. The country is controlled by the Prince Grand Master of the white robes and black cross.

After this country in the inner corner of the bay is the country of Prussia. It has a capital called Danzig (Τάντζηκ).

After this is the country of Slavonia (Σθλαβουνία), which has a capital called Lubeck (Λούπηκ). From this country the Zygiotai (Ζυγιῶται) in the Peloponnese have originated, because there is a large number of small towns [in Slavonia], where they speak the dialect of the Zygiotai.

Next to that country is the country of Denmark, which has a city called Copenhagen (Κουπανάβη). It serves as the residence of the King of Denmark.

These are the six countries that lie around the bay.

I have also been to the islands of the Fish-Eaters (Ἰχθυοφάγοι), which are usually called Iceland (Ἰσλάντη), but for the wise Ptolemy, I believe, this was Thule. There I found the day lasted six months from the beginning of spring until the autumn solstice. I went to the islands from England (Ἠγγληνία). It is a voyage of 1000 miles, and I was there for 24 days. And I saw a strong and sturdy people; their food was fish, and their bread was fish, and their drink was water. Then I returned back to England (Ἐγγλιτέρα).

The distance in miles in a straight line from the aforementioned city of Bergen-Vågen to Sluis (Κλούτζη), in the south of Flanders, is 3500 miles, and from the Sluis to the Holy Cape [Promontorium Sacrum, Cape St. Vincent] in Portugal is 2064 [2164?] Miles, which is a total of 5664 miles [yes, I know that doesn't add up], if you don't count going into the harbours.

And since I was talking about different transliterations between Byzantine and Modern Greek, here is a comparison:

English	Cananus	Modern	Notes
Norway	Norbegía	Norbēgía	Short e, long e, what's the difference? (Well, /norveˈɣia/ vs. /norviˈɣia/ for starters...)
Prussia	Pursía	Prōsía	Modern form *may* be analogy from Rōsía for Russia
Bergen	Mpérgen	Mpérngen	Modern Greek has gone full /ˈ(m)ber(n)ɡen/ rather than just /ˈmberɣen/
Sweden	Suētzía	Suēdía	Latin Suecia
Stockholm	Stokolmō	Stokchólmē	Modern form preserves /k.h/, and makes it declinable
Denmark	Datía	Danía	Vasiljev speculates this is via Slavic, and may indicate Cananus went to Denmark via Novgorod. But Datia shows up elsewhere, e.g. a 1459 Italian map.
Livonia	Libonía	Libonía	Inphlántē in Chalcocondyles, via Polish Inflanty. Livonia included modern Latvia and Estonia
Riga	Rē´ga	Ríga
Revel	Rēbúlē		Now Tallinn; Revel was the name of the city since the Danish conquest of 1219
Danzig	Tántzēk	Ntántsich	At the time, German -ig was not yet [iç].
Slavonia	Sthlabunía	(Cf. Slobenía "Slovenia")	Uses the characteristically Byzantine epenthesis of /θ/ (with which I derailed a comment thread at the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' blog)
Lübeck	Lúpēk	Lúmpek	Again Modern Greek embraces /(m)b/ in transliteration, Byzantine doesn't.
Copenhagen	Kupanábē	Kopenchágē	Danish København. Modern Greek and English from Low German (those Hansa people).
Iceland	Islántē	Islandía	Modern Greek here has affixed the suffix -ia; ditto Greenland Groilandía, Holland Ollandía. However more recent -lands have been left as -landē (now with a delta, natch): Tailándē, Kuinslándē.
England	Ēnglēnía	Anglía	The English are Inglínoi in Chalcocondyles, but <ē> and <i> are both /i/. Googling hints that Inglini was in use in Latin as well.
England	Englitéra	Anglía	Italian Inghilterra
Sluis	Klútzē	Slóis	Klúzioi in Chalcocondyles, French l'Ecluse from Latin exclusa "gateway"

...Read more

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 that I knew of, I ended up entering unrecognised place names by hand, prioritising the most frequent ones first. I haven't exhausted them and doubt I ever will, but I have a threshold of frequency above which all place names are accounted for.

And because I did not already have a gazetteer digitised, this meant I noticed what places Byzantines talked about more, and what they talked about less. Which brought to life for me something I could have told you already, but was startling to see anyway. The outside world for Byzantines—and I start counting after Justinian—was the Caliphate, Bulgaria, occasionally Italy, Russia once or twice. Western Europe? They didn't even notice it was there.

Which is startling to a Modern Greek, because we've successfully reoriented ourselves westwards. Nowadays I'm sure more Grecophones have heard of Charlemagne than Harun al-Rashid. At the time, I'm sure Grecophones had it the the other way round. In fact, as I've noted elsewhere, Theophanes the Confessor only knew of Charlemagne as Karolos, Pepin's son—although by the time he was writing his chronicle, Charlemagne was already Holy Roman Emperor.

(That's Grecophones, btw, not Greeks. There's a reason John Tzetzes had a funny surname...)

Byzantine sources do become aware of the West outside Italy, but only at the very end of the Empire's allotted time, when the Caliphate has become their Ottoman suzerain, and the West is where they're soliciting a crusade from. That's when Byzantines notice that there is such a thing as western theology, and translate Augustin (Prochorus Cydones) and Boethius (George Pachymeres, Manuel Holobolus, Maximus Planudes, Prochorus Cydones).

Even at the end, Byzantine historians are exasperatingly antiquarian, use Roman terms whenever they can, and don't seem that tuned in to the subtleties of the distinctions between the Beef-Eaters. The Catalans, who ran chunks of Greece for a couple of generations? Tarraconians. The Hundred Years' War? A war between the Celts and the Gauls. Straight out of Julius Caesar. And yes, *I* know the Gauls were Celts, and the English were no longer Brythonic. I'm not convinced the historian in question did.

Just like the Serbs were written down as Triballians, and the Bulgarians as Mysians, and the Turks, occasionally, as Persians. Just like the Mongols were written down as Tocharians—reviving some obscure Central Asian tribe name which at least had a Classical pedigree. (Oh, the people we now call Tocharians? Probably weren't the same obscure Central Asian tribe. We did the same classicising revival.)

Just like John Cananus, around 1400, went on a trip to Lübeck, which at the time still spoke Sorbian (or whatever else it was called), and proclaimed "this must be where our Ezerites have come from"—because in 1400 a Slavonic language was still spoken in the Southern Peloponnese too. And John Cananus completely missed half a continent's worth of Slavonic spoken between northern Germany and southern Greece.

So it's startling when a bona fide contemporary Western place name does turn up in this corpus. Unsurprisingly, they're more cities than peoples, since cities were harder to do a Roman-era vagueout on. In the former bits of the Byzantine empire that were already being run by the West, it was much easier to notice the West; and the vernacular Greek chronicles of the 14th and 15th century use the Western terms more forthrightly.

Which brings up another surprise to Modern Greek speakers. Learnèd Modern Greek used to Hellenise Western place names, and they'd do so by pretending the transliterations were still pronounced as they would have been in antiquity. Or rather, given the denial about phonetic change among Greeks, they used the spelling correspondences between Latin and Classical Greek, and put their hands on their ears.

So Dublin is written Δουβλίνο(ν), which is pronounced /ðuvˈlino/ but written in historical orthography as <Dublinon>. Nuremberg is written Νυρεμβέργη, which is pronounced /niremˈverɣi/ but written <Nyrembergē>. Brussels is written Βρυξέλλες, pronounced /vriˈkseles/ but written <Bryxelles>. Since <y> was IPA /y/ and French u, that is an exact transliteration of French Bruxelles.

(The < > are used in linguistics to notate graphemes, units of writing, just as / / are used to notate phonemes, units of sound. If the former is less familiar to you than the latter, it's because the bias of linguistics over the past century has been to pretend orthography isn't worth studying.)

The surprise in Byzantine names is that both the learnèd and the vernacular sources transliterate names differently from how they're now done. On the one hand, the vernacular sources don't bother rerouting names via Ancient Greek, and write the names as they heard them. Austria is now Αυστρία /afˈstria/ <Austria>; but it's first recorded in vernacular garb (the same garb it had in the 18th century vernacular), as Ἀουστρία /auˈstria/. Bavaria is now Βαυαρία /vavaˈria/ <Bauaria>, but it is first attested in, of all places, the War of Troy, as Βαουβέρη /vauˈveri/. (Admittedly, that's not that close to /bajern/, and was probably just a written form to the translator.) Hungary was called Ματζαρία /madzaˈria/ "Magyary"; Budapest is now Βουδαπέστη /vuðaˈpesti/ <Budapestē>, but Buda back then was Μπούντουνη, Πιτούνιν, Μπούδα: /ˈmbunduni/, /piˈtunin/, /ˈmpuða/. The Germans were Αλαμάνοι /alaˈmani/, when they weren't Νέμτσοι and Νεμίτζοι /ˈnemtsi, neˈmitsi/.

Some of those vernacular names died later than others. We now call the French Gauls (Γάλλοι), just like the Byzantines did; but people still recognise the old name Φραντσέζοι /franˈtsezi/. The learnèd/colloquial doublet Άγγλοι/Εγγλέζοι /ˈanɡli, enˈɡlezi/ survives for the English, though the older /inˈɡlini/ does not, and nor do the eleven spelling variants of /enɡliˈtera/ for "England". (You've worked out by now what the title of this post means, yes?) Tunis is now Τύνιδα /ˈtiniða/, Demotic for Τύνις, -ιδος <Tynis>. But, from either a song lyric or the angry retort to "oh?", Greeks still know about Τούνεζη και Μπαρμπαριά /ˈtunezi ke barbarˈja/, "Tunis and the Barbary coast".

You won't be wrong, btw, in gathering that the Greek vernacular knowledge of Western Europe was filtered through Italian.

(And the angry retort? The Greek for "oh? is that right?" is "/ba/?" The echoic retort is Μπα-ρμπαριά και Τούνεζη!)

On the learnèd side, one surprise is that even though the 19th century clerks and the 14th century clerks had mostly the same approach to Hellenising place names, they didn't always compare notes. That's probably the 19th century guys' fault, what with the ESP deficit in late Byzantium.

So Flanders now is Φλαμανδία <Flamandia>, via French; in Anna Comnena, it's Φλάντρα <Flantra>. Normans now are Νορμανδοί <Normandoi>; to Anna they were Νορμάνοι <Normanoi>. Provence is now Προβηγκία /provinˈɡia/ <Provinkia>, but Atticist as Anna was, she was happy enough to leave it as Πρεβέντζα /preˈvendza/. So the 19th century hellenisations we now know were not handed down to us like family heirlooms: they look old enough to have been, but they're not.

The other surprise is what learnèd transliterations do with voiced stops. By the time we're talking, Greek didn't have voiced stops: it had voiced fricatives which used to be voiced stops; it had voiceless stops; and it had prenasalised voiced stops. So, δ τ ντ /ð t nd/ <d t nt>. What then did you do when you had to transliterate a name with a /d/ in it?

The "La-La-La We Speak Classical Greek" school of thought was, if a delta was good enough for Decimus and Diocletian (Δέκιμος, Διοκλητιανός), then it was good enough for modern names with /d/ in them. That's why Charles Darwin is still Κάρολος Δαρβίνος /ˈkarolos ðarˈvinos/ <Karolos Darbinos>, and not Τσαρλς Ντάργουιν /tsarls ˈndarɣuin/. The vernacular OTOH figured that /nd/ was as close as you'd get to /d/—and dialects were already starting to simplify /nd/ to [d] anyway. So the Danube, which was at first Δάνουβις /dánubis/ (and the Istros before that), turns up in the vernacular as Ντούναβης /ˈ(n)dunavis/, after its South Slavic name Дунав. (The contemporary form is in between: Δούναβης /ˈðunavis/ <Dunabēs>.)

There was a third path though. You could hesitate between /ð/ and /nd/, and go with /t/ instead, the voiceless stop. We see this already in Anna Comnena with her rendering of Dagobert: Τακουπέρτος, /takuˈpertos/—although Bohemund to her was still Βαϊμοῦντος, /vaiˈmundos/ <Baimuntos>. You also see it with Bohemians. When the Greeks first noticed Bohemians. it was because they noticed Jan Hus, as part of their negotiations with the Catholics; and the Bohemians got to be Βοέμιοι /voˈemii/ <Boemii>, with the classicising beta. But they also got to me Ποέμιοι and Πωέμιοι /poˈemii/, with a /p/ close enough to a /b/.

A few Greeks among you are reminded of Cypriot at this point. Greece transliterates video as βίντεο /ˈvindeo/ <binteo>; Cyprus uniformly transliterates as βίτεο /ˈviteo/ <biteo>, just like Takupertos. Cyprus has its own rationale for that: its choices are not /ð (n)d t/, but δ ντ τ ττ /ð nd t tʰ/. If Turkish tel "wire", Standard Greek τέλι, is ττέλιν /tʰelin/ in Cypriot, that means ττ is for foreign /t/, and τ without an /n/ in front of it is for foreign /d/. Greece Greeks think that amusing, because Greece Greeks have no conception of a pluricentric language.

The Modern clerks did not compare notes with the Byzantine theologians on Bohemians, and the mainstream word is now Βοημοί /voiˈmi/ <Boēmoi>, with a long e. The bouzouki players noticed Bohemians too—via La Bohème; and Μποέμισσα /boˈemisa/, "Bohemian woman, tramp", is a recurrent and quite vernacular figure in rebetiko songs.

One of the first people to notice Bohemians was Laonicus Chalcocondyles, one of the historians of the Fall of Constantinople. In fact, Chalcocondyles' text is an explosion of hitherto unnoticed Westerners. It's like, just as the door closes on the Roman Empire, a window opens to the West. Poland's in there, and Portugal too—though as Polania and Portugallia, not the modern Polonia and Portogalia. Avignon's there, and so is Austria without an /f/.

But Chalcocondyles is still a hardcore antiquarian: it does indeed take "a pen of brass" (χαλκοῦν κονδύλιον) to flip around your given name like that, and transmogrify "Nicholas". His Englishmen are still Angli, and his Catalans are still Tarraconians, and his Danube is still the Istros. And his antiquarianism is enough to make hard work of knowing where he's talking about.

And so I conclude with a little quiz for those of my readers patient enough to have persevered thus far. These are some European place names and peoples in Chalcocondyles. (And I'm counting the Caucasus as European.) Your challenge is to decipher them. It is possible to cheat (there's a reason I know the answers); I invite you not to.

Hopefully you'll nut these out entertainingly in the comments, and I'll come back with the right answers in a week. Some of these are easy; some... are impossible. There are places in here I'd never heard of. Good luck, you can curse me in a week's time. I never said I was not a sadist, did I...

(Nikos Sarantakos, I owe you big time for that puzzle you posed me on the Elbe, so I'm expecting a good showing from you! >:-)

(Language Hat, sorry to have just destroyed your evening... ;-) )

Regions

• 1. Ἰνφλάντη Inphlántē
  
• 2. Καχέτιον Kachétion
  
• 3. Κεντία Kentía
  
• 4. Μάρκη Márkē
  
• 5. Δοβροτίκης Dobrotíkēs

Cities

• 6. Βριξία or Πρηξία Brixía/Prēxía
  
• 7. Γαΐτια Gaï´tia
  
• 8. Γαντύνη Gantýnē
  
• 9. Βρούγιοι Broúgioi
  
• 10. Κλιτίη Klitíē
  
• 11. Κλόζιοι Klózioi
  
• 12. Νορόβεργον Noróbergon
  
• 13. Ἀμπύργον Ampýrgon
  
• 14. Σιβίνιον Sibínion
  
• 15. Σιβίληνα Sibílēna
  
• 16. Ταρβίζιον Tarbízion
  
• 17. Καλέση Kalésē
  
• 18. Βαζιλείη Bazileíē
  
• 19. Βωκερίνη Bōkerínē
  
• 20. Κιόζη Kiózē
  
• 21. Νίτια Nítia

Peoples

• 22. Σαμῶται Samōtai
  
• 23. Σαχαταῖοι Sachataîoi
  
• 24. Τζαρκάσοι Tzarkásoi
  
• 25. Κέχιοι Kéchioi

...Read more

Your Fractal Analysis of Esperanto does not add up

This is a blog on the Greek language. That is why it is called Hēllēnisteúkontos, "From the guy who has been a scholar of Greek". But I arrogate the right to post here about other linguistics stuff that I find of interest. I have a below-the-fold arrangement, so you can bypass it easily.

This post is on misuses of numerical methods in linguistics, as applied to Esperanto.

I am no longer in any honest sense an Esperantist, or a Lojbanist, or a Klingonist. (Or, more self-consciously, mi ne plu estas esperantisto, .i mi ca ba'o lobypli, 'ej tlhIngan Hol vIlo' 'e' vimevpu'.) Not out of malice, indeed with a good deal of regret, but that's where life has taken me.

But I mention my learnings from those languages on occasion, and in The Other Place, I just drew an analogy between the language politics of Esperanto cultural functions and Acadian cultural functions. Someone found the posting by googling "Esperanto", and that made be follow some links, that led to some links...

... that led to mention of a recent couple of articles using computational methods to compare the linguistic profiles an English and an Esperanto text, and come up with the conclusion that English and Esperanto were different. And then to make the extra conclusion that natural and artificial languages are different. Here's the articles: #1, #2.

I am grateful that the slices of the Esperanto blogosphere I sighted mocked this study: sample 1, sample 2. And I'm going to go to town on this here, because it deserves mockery.

Gillet and Ausloos, you are idiots. Maybe not in Computer Science, but on my turf, you have committed grand folly. You have taken two data points, English and Esperanto; you have compared the profile of their word lengths and word frequencies, and have decreed they're different. Fine, they're different. That says less than nothing about a comparison between artificial and natural languages! In God's name, put up a study with Inuit, Turkish, and Chinese on the one hand, and Esperanto, Klingon, and Lojban on the other, and *then* you might have something relevant to say.

English and Esperanto word lengths and word frequencies are different. Oh come on.

See, this is the problem with computer scientists doing linguistics as if linguistics never existed. Just load some texts into a Multifractal Analysatron 2000, churn some gears, and that will tells us something interesting about language. Well no it won't, not if you're asking the wrong question, and have no framework to make sense of the answer. It's not that we can't learn anything new from the Multifractal Analysatron; but without building on what we already know, you're guaranteeing that what you do build will fall over. It was computer science people that came up with "Garbage In Garbage Out" after all.

I was in the library yesterday, for the sake of melancholy nostalgia, and to see what I could get on French-Canadian linguistics. I walked by Diachronica, and leafed through it to see what was new in historical linguistics. April McMahon, who wrote a wonderful textbook on language change 15 years ago, has just co-authored a new book on... numerical methods in historical linguistics. My heart sunk. It shouldn't have, because April McMahon has earned my trust.

As the review said, one of the things McMahon points out in the book is, there is a regrettable tendency in numerical approaches to linguistics to just put the raw data into the Analysatrons, and see what happens. And she said, in a more measured and thoughtful way than I just did, that this is nonsense: a linguist still needs to make sense of the input, identify what correlations are worth pursuing, and filter out what methodologically needs filtering out.

I mean, word lengths and word frequencies? Even Plato had a more sophisticated understanding of language structure than that; and that's not saying much.

There are some more details I'll rattle off, with regard to word length in particular. Triggered by the fact that in their preliminary studies, the authors were surprised to find more similarity with German and Spanish, and least similarity with French and English.

If you're surprised to find affinities between German and Esperanto, you know nothing of the history of Esperanto. And with just word length as your tool, and a comparable amount of inflectional morphology, I don't know how meaningful the affinity they discovered is anyway.

But in particular, Esperanto is agglutinating, so it likes its words longer than an isolating language like Chinese or English (I think it's fair by now to call English isolating). And Esperanto as a literary language was substantially influenced by German, because its most influential authors worked in the shadow of Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian empire, and German was a default model to them. (I'm thinking Ludovik Zamenhof and Kazimierz Bein in the first generation—Litvak Jew so culturally Russian, but with access to German; and Polish, respectively; and Julio Baghy and Kalman Kalocsay in the second—both Hungarians.)

The love of compounding is a way of dealing with the requirement to keep vocabulary minimal in an artificial language; but the choice of compounding rather than more analytical expressions is informed by German, not by interlinguistics. Not to mention the suite of compounds overtly calqued from German (verŝajna for wahrscheinlich "apparent", for instance).

The second paper made the mistake of profiling sentence length, and that was even more boneheaded. Sentence structure in a literate language is decidedly influenced by cultural contact: all of Europe has the mark of Latin subordination on it. And again, Esperanto sentence structure did not happen in a vacuum: Esperantists emulated the examples of their teachers and writers, and the teachers and writers patterned after natural language models. Which again were substantially German.

When we talk about the "spirit" of a language, we're normally not primarily talking about morphology and syntax. We're talking about semantic maps, and discourse structures, and idioms. It's not that intangible, it's just somewhat harder to formalise than morphology and syntax. Inasmuch as the spirit of Esperanto has kindred out there, however tenuous, that kindred is German. But profiling word lengths and word frequencies is not going to tell you much about morphology and syntax. And it will tell you little more about discourse structures.

At any rate, why *would* Esperanto be so different to natural languages? Some regularisation in its inflectional morphology, sure; but isolating languages are even more regular, by not having any inflectional morphology at all. Agglutinativity, sure; but Turkish and Lakhota were agglutinative before Esperanto was. Ludovik Zamenhof was not Mark Okrand, easter-egging his language with violations of linguistic unievrsals.

The only quirk I can think of worth noting is Esperantists turning affixes into independent words. That quirk is artificial in origin: Zamenhof was supposed to say, in modern terms, that all morphemes of Esperanto are meaningful, and ended up saying that all morphemes of Esperanto are independent words. This has stuck: the diminutive suffix -et- is also the word for "tiny", the object nominaliser -aĵ- is also the word for "thing", the collective suffix -ar- is also the word for "grouping". The trend has been taken far with successive generations of Esperantists, but was started by Zamenhof himself.

Yet even this is not alien to natural language. In fact, in its guise as degrammaticalisation, it was a favourite bone of contention between Lyle Campbell and Elizabeth Closs Traugott in the '90s.

(Grammaticalisation theory claims that grammatical affixes come from particles and particles come from full words. So the suffix -like used to be the noun lich "body". Degrammaticalisation is when the reverse happens; the canonical examples are from Estonian, but it also happens in English with up the ante: a particle—a preposition—turning into a verb. Is it an occasional exception under special circumstances? Or is it frequent enough to undermine the core premiss of grammaticalisation? Actually, that's an ideological question, and it's hard to resolve it one way or the other. Don't know if anyone's claimed victory.)

At any rate. Garbage On Garbage Out. Let that too be a lesson to... well, somebody. ...Read more

Change of e-mail adress

A special kind of blindness made me ignore the impending death of the optushome.com.au domain over the past five years. The plug has finally been pulled on it (and I've just found out about it); those of you who have been mailing me @ optushome.com.au, please change immediately to optusnet.com.au

[EDIT: it's been a stressful time. That's optusnet.com.au]