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.

...Read more