Rumi & Walad: Cantabrigensian Contribution

I forwarded my posts on Rumi and Sultan Walad to Petros Karatsareas, who is in fact doing his doctoral work on Cappadocian morphology in Cambridge, and who had written me to ask what I thought of those texts a couple of months back. (I'd been intended to put them online for a while, but kept putting it off; in fact Petros is the indirect reason why I'm blogging on Greek linguistics now. Don't blame him if I stop again.) I was wondering what Petros would make of my analysis of the texts. I haven't succeeded in getting him to post directly in comments :-) , but I'm pasting our exchange here with permission. (And if he wants to comment further, he's welcome to.)

I generally agree with you that the language in Rumi and Walad's poems is very underwhelming. It does not appear to be of any (identifiable) Greek dialect and the list of alleged Cappadocianisms is very poor, in my opinion. Of course, the texts are from a very early period and one would (rationally, I think) expect Cappadocian and the other Asia Minor Greek varieties to start to diverge at that period at the earliest and then even more intensively after the fall of every kind of Greek power centre in the region, be it the Byzantine Empire (or the pathetic sod of what was left of it) or the Trabzon Empire.

Gregoire's list of Cappadocianisms is a joke: θέκνω is as good as it gets. But I indeed find it hard to believe Rumi picked up a Constantinopolitan Standard Greek that was distinct from what was spoken in Iconium. The use of σκήνωμα means that there was (inevitable) learned influence even here, but what they are presenting is not learned Greek.

Yet, I find some things to be potential indications of dialectal speech such as the στο σον το χείλο and the ση prepositional phrase (from σε + τη) in the 'ση εστία μου'. However, why does this Pontic στ > σ change appear only there but not in στο σον το χείλο which would have to be σο σον το χείλο or, to be more pedantic, σο σον σο χείλο?

Dunno if I'd trust that instance of ση, for that reason. I don't want to generate a new edition, but the Persian script is just tydhs as astya mw; and given Walad's allergy to articles (a foreignerism, I suspect), I'd just render this as τι είδες εις εστία μου.

I'm also thinking the lexical peculiarities (e.g. πορπατώ), how sure can we be of them? I haven't looked into the history of the word in the various dialects and periods, but for some reason I feel less keen to accept such examples as evidence of dialectal features in the text. Of course, the Arabic script poses many problems and I think I personally would stick to the uncontroversial ones which are somewhat interesting.

The Arabic script is extremely problematic, and the scribes had no idea what was going on; what'd be interesting to work out is, whether scribal errors can be explained by soundalikes as well as lookalike letters (i.e. internal dictation). Recall also that B & M had to basically make a new edition of Walad, seeking out a couple of manuscripts made the most sense; but this is still haphazard stuff. So no, I wouldn't trust πορπατώ... except that the Rababname has vowel pointing, and here reads straightforwardly p^owrp^aty. Hm. This'd at least be worth checking whether πορπατώ turns up this far east....

An interesting example is the accusative plural άλλους in the verse το πωρικό το πικρό δος το άλλους. It is very suspicious and reminiscent of the Cypriot Greek genitive/accusative syncretism in the plural of the masculines (CG το φαΐν τους σιύλλους instead of το φαΐ των σκύλων or something like that). I have also found some similar examples in my Cappadocian texts. Can you see a pattern emerging there? That, of course, is if and only if the Arabic spelling uncontroversially reads άλλους and not something else.

The reading is dsta āls. (The first a is an alif, which can stand in for other vowels.) It's not the expected ālws, but I dount that helps: άλλας or άλλες leave us with the same problem in the feminine plural accusative, and άλλης should itself be ālys—or rather, is no more plausible a reading of āls than is άλλους. We're mid-verse, so we can't use rhyme to emend. Was I naive in thinking this is just the indirect object accusative, transferred to άλλους? (I.e. without needing to appeal to the genitive-accusative merger, but purely as an indirect object.) Would this be possible in Pontic? Gotta say, didn't blink about this one at all...

In general, it seems to me that Rumi and Walad's poems present with more problems to the historian of Greek than solutions. :-S

We haven't got much further on this: it's hard to tell whether άλλους is an indirect object genitive, that has merged with the accusative morphlogically in the plural (as happens in Cypriot, and as Belléli thought was happening in the Torah); or whether Cappadocian is already using the accusative for indirect objects (as I'd assumed, and as the Proto-Bulgarian inscriptions were doing four centuries before). You'd need more texts to find out, and you won't get more texts from Cappadocia. (You will get the odd church deed from the Pontus, but there will be very little vernacular there—I doubt there'd be enough to cast light on this issue.) ...Read more

Rumi and Sultan Walad, linguistic notes

The Greek of Rumi and Walad, like the Greek of the Proto-Bulgarian inscrptions, the Judaeo-Greek scripture translations, and the Latin-Greek phrasebooks, should be a more accurate reflection of the spoken language of the time than what we have in Greek script, inevitably influenced by diglossia. In fact, given where it was written, Rumi and Walad should preserve the earliest attestation of Cappadocian Greek.

Well they're hardly preserving Cretan Greek, are they. And once Sophocleanisms like δοκάση are expunged from the redaction, the text does not look noticeably learnèd in the flavour of its Greek. It doesn't look like the Cappadocian that Dawkins recorded in 1910 either, but that shouldn't come as a surprise: the prodigious language mixing that moved Dawkins to say "the flesh is Greek, but the soul is Turkish" was centuries in the making, and Cappadocia would only recently have been cut off from contact with the rest of the Greek-speaking world. So their Greek looks like what Early Modern Greek from elsewhere looks like. In fact, the main value of these texts linguistically is to confirm that Cappadocian hadn't really diverged yet from the rest of Greek. Grégoire did go through Dawkins when offering his suggestions on the text, and drew up a list of Cappadocianisms from the texts which is not overwhelming.

• δικιέσαι (Dedes δοικάσαι) "manage";
• the ancient possessive (what ancient possessive? Is he referring to the archaic placement of clitics?);
• θέκνω for θέτω and Meyer and Dedes' θέτνω (the mss vary between the two);
• τζακώνω meaning "smash" and not "ambush" (as Meyer already correctly guessed);
• θύρα (but that's an archaism, so counts for less).

The other caution (which also applies to at least the Judaeo-Greek translations) is that you're not getting normal Greek. For the Judaeo-Greek, it's because the translations were word-to-word from the Hebrew, so they tell you very little about Greek syntax. For Rumi and Walad, the Greek is clearly second-language Greek. (Fourth-language, in fact.) Dedes says we can't be sure about the level of Rumi's Greek, since there's so little of it, but Walad's may have even been perfect, as he was born and bred in Anatolia. That's not the impression I got: Wikipedia reports Turkish scholars saying Walad's Turkish was halting, and his Greek is too. It's probably not fair to point out the absence of definite articles; at least some of that will be because of the absence of vowel pointing, and some more is awkwardness brought on from rhyme. (Btw, Rumi is probably the first poem to consciously rhyme in Greek; Sachlikis was over a century later.)

But Walad clearly uses way too many full pronouns, in phrases like ηύρα κείνον τον εγύρευγα εγώ "I found the one I was looking for", or Εσύ φιλείς εμένα για τη ζωή <τού>τη "you kiss me for this life". And the first verse of the Rababname excerpt, Με τους άγιους πώς δοικάσαι λάλησε, is forced even by the standards of Greek verse.

εγώ το θέλω έγινεν, κανείς να μη το είπην does look odd enough to resemble Modern Cappadocian; but in between the fourth-language Greek and the poetic licenses of the syntax, I won't read much into it.

If Rumi wrote Καλή μέρα λιγερέ, πώς <εί>στεν, καλά 'στεν;, then we'd have the first instance in Greek of a politeness plural (by five centuries), and an early attestation of πώς είσαι "how are you?" as a salutation. (That'd be news, because it ain't a salutation in Standard Modern Greek, and Pontic has the same salutation as the Standard: τι κάνεις/ντο φτεάς "what are you doing?"—yes, that's Wikipedia orthography for φτα̈ς). Both the plural You and "How are you" are unlikely, so I wouldn't count them as evidence.

I derided Mertzios' emendation to καλή μέρα, λιγυρή, πού 'στην, καλώς την "Good day, slender girl, where had you been? Welcome"—but at least that reading had not required a politeness plural. The original reading is, کالیمیرا لییری پو ستن کالا ستن kalymyra lyyry pw stn kala stn. In these texts waw can transcribe /o/ (کالویروس kalwyrws καλόγερος) and yeh can transcribe /e/ (اِرتمِی aⁱrtⁱmy ήρτε με); so we could still read λυγερέ, πώς 'στεν, and καλά 'στεν. But Burguière & Mantran's πώς 'στεν as an elision is implausible, so there's problems with this passage anyway. There is an είσταιν infinitive, used for example in Mediaeval Cypriot; but how does the infinitive fit here? I'm tempted to go with a modified Mertzios—πού 'σταιν; καλώς τον "where to be? welcome", if only it made grammatical sense...

Oh, and if any wags are thinking of reading pw stn as πούστην, (a) shut up, and (b) that'd be pwshtn. And (c) shut up.

"Huh?" says everyone non-Greek reading this far. πούστης (from Persian pusht "arse".) Derogatory. Passive homosexual.

Note also:

• the archaic preposition αχ for εκ (which earlier translators mistook for "ah!"),
• όγιον as an archaic form of σαν (Ancient οἷον),
• more surprisingly the survival of τις,
• the clear use of να as a future marker (as was the norm before 1400),
• που fully developed not just as a relativiser, but an indefinite pronoun,
• Dedes' proposed ση for στη, as in Pontic,
• common redundant nu after subjunctives—hybridising them with infinitives, at least in Dedes' reading (να με βρην, να έρθην)

Surprisingly early instances of the analogical /n/ in ναν, first verse of Gazal 885 (نادفیلو nadfylw ναν το φιλώ)—if we accept that [na do filo] could already reflect underlying /nan to filo/.

Accusative indirect objects, of course; always striking to see them with nouns and not just pronouns, as in το πωρικό το πικρό δώσ' το άλλους.

That's all that comes to mind right now. Comments as always welcome. ...Read more

Rumi and Sultan Walad, literary notes

I'll get into linguistic observations separately, but some literary notes here, including comments on the restoration of the text, and on its cultural particularities.

• The use of the Greek theological term σκήνωμα "hut, tabernacle" for the mortal body is noticeable, and establishes that Walad had been talking about Christianity with the local Greeks, and didn't just speak market Greek.
  
• Dunno anything about Sufiism, but the language of the poems strikes me as homoerotic. I'm seeing a lot of denunciations of any such interpretation online, and I'm not particularly interested in getting into an argument on it. I will note though that this has affected the editing of the poem. In particular, the adjective λυγερός "slender" is commonly used in ballads and romances to praise the physique of women—it ends up a mere conventional reference. Seeing that kind of physical praise in the masculine gender gave me a start. It also gave Mertzios a start, which is why he emended καλή μέρα, λιγυρέ! πώς (εί)στε; καλά 'στε; "Good day, slender (man)! How are you? Are you well?" to καλή μέρα, λιγυρή, πού 'στην, καλώς την "Good day, slender (girl), where had you been? Welcome." Since the very next verse addresses τσελεμπή çelebi, "gentleman", the emendation's pretty pointless. And the reading αγά, πού 'σαι "where are you, agha" (probably severely anachronistic—would the Seljuks have had aghas at all?) looks pretty silly, once Dedes gives the much more straightforward (male–to–make) αγαπώ σε "I love you".
  
• The history of how the text was reconstructed is a lot of fun, and I tried to capture that by putting the different redactions side to side. It's like sense slowly emerges out von Hammer's morass, emendation by emendation. (Or sense dissolves away, if you read it the other way.) This may have made the page unreadable, for which my half-hearted apologies.

• Mertzios' emendations are sometimes brilliant, sometimes dumb. Making up "Bisna" as a Seljuk province in Gazal 81 (and hoping it might be Turkish for Bithynia) was pretty lame. And the emendation of ταφή "burial" to θανή "death" in the Rababnama is the wrong aesthetic: Mertzios wants to avoid two lines rhyming with the same word, but Persian poetry does that all the time. On the other hand, the turnout of pussy and dick in the same Gazal—ok, ok, that's prurient ("très licentieux", Mertzios admits), but it leads to a marvellous reading by Dedes. And there's no way Gazal 885 would have had παντοδαπά "from all places": much too learned for this text.
  
• The earliest editions are much too inclined to read Classical words into the text in general (when they're not referring to Saint Augustin). δοκάση "to wait" proposed for the Rababnama is Sophocles, it has no place here.
  
• Dedes is at times more reluctant to intervene with the vocalisation than I'd have been. Gazal 81's η ψιλή μου "my thin one" for ﺁبسیلیمو âbsylymw will make any Greek-speaker think η ψωλή μου "my dick", and that's what Mertzios had suggested. I'd have dropped the extra yeh. Gazal 504 κείτην may reflect the manuscript's کیتن kytn, but it's not Greek; and by spelling it like that instead of κοίτην "bed", Dedes is admitting what is obvious from context: this must be κείνην "her", which would read کینن kynn (one dot's difference from kytn) or کینین kynyn.
  
• The emendation of Gazal 81 by Dedes, after little hints from Mertzios, is brilliant, especially given how the previous editors had no idea what to make of it. Three elemental human urges—food, warmth, sex—gently chided by Walad, and contrasted with the spiritual urge to have a clean soul. The problem is, the emendation πείνασα εγώ θέλω φαγί "I'm hungry, I want food" corrects فنی fny to فغی fghy, and in so doing breaks the assonance: /ˈroðini ˈfeni faˈɣi ɣoˈni muˈni ˈluni/. I'm sure Dedes is right about πείνασα /pinasa/ "I have grown hungry" for بینسا bynsa, but if ghayn ﻐ and nun ﻨ have been confused, as Dedes suggests, they'd have to be confused by Walad himself. Do I have an alternative for fny? φαγίν or φαΐν [faˈʝin, faˈin] for "food" isn't quite the right assonance as fny, and has the yeh in the wrong place—it's fyn. Maybe Walad really did just confuse this one.
  
• The poets ignore accent in their rhymes, which makes them sound like they don't really rhyme in Greek. (That's why I dismissed it as assonance just then.) But the Rababnama has the Cole-Porteresque (and typically Persian) χείλη εκεί ~ χίλιοι εκεί "lips there ~ thousands there".
  
• Dedes reports that the image of a drop becoming the sea, representing Man dissolving into God, is a commonplace of Persian poetry, since Saadi.
  
• The smashed glass of Rumi is, again copying from Dedes, a recurring motive of Persian poetry, particularly the legendary Cup of Jamshid, used as a crystal ball. (So why smash it? Is this some "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" thing?)
  
• Dedes doesn't know whether Rumi's Arabic is quoting the Koran or just imitating it: "O people, we came to you meaning to be sacrificed for your love. Since we have seen you our desires have become clear". Assembled Wisdom Of The Interwebs? The only hits for یا قوم اتیناکم are to Rumi online, so it presumably is indeed an imitation.
  
• The image I liked the best? "I see the sea, and others see mud." Note the Early Modern Greek false friend: πηλός in the contemporary language only means "clay". I don't know what "You give no joy: give the wind" alludes to, so I may be more impressed by it than I should be.
  

...Read more

Rumi and Sultan Walad, Konya, mid-1200s

I've just put online the various transcriptions available of the Greek verses written by Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273) (yeah, *that* Rumi), and Rumi's son, Sultan Walad (1226-1312). I'm going to comment on the editions and the linguistics in the next couple of postings.

Rumi and Walad wrote bits of Turkish and Greek among their Persian poems, as part of their ecumenical outlook. There is a reason Rumi was called "the Roman" after all. (See rant on "the Roman" below.) As a result, the macaronic poems are caught between two traditions, Turco-Persian and Greek, so they get treated poorly in both sides. There are several online queries by people reading Persian, asking what the hell the Greek means. Standard editions of the poems do apparently include translations of the Greek (and if anyone has access to them, please send them in so I can add them). But given how problematic the texts are—second language Greek, from the Middle Ages, mostly written without vowels, copied by scribes who didn't know Greek—I can't imagine those readings are unproblematic. On the other hand, the editions of the verses in Greek needed someone conversant with both mediaeval Greek and Persian literary convention; until the latest edition, we really didn't have both. (I don't know anything about Persian literature apart from a month of trying to learn Persian, one read-through of the Shahnameh, and some Rubaiyat via Esperanto—and all that 15 years ago; but I think I can catch some misconstruals already.)

But first, shout-outs to the people who actually edited these texts, and took the brunt of their difficulty. Or rather, the three of those people that I know something about.

• Joseph von Hammer was one of the Original Gangsta orientalists, one of the guys Edward Said was supposed to have groused about but didn't (because he didn't really talk about German academia. Where, you know, Orientalism as an academic discipline actually happened first). Von Hammer published as much of Evliya Çelebi as there has been in a Western language for quite some time; I made use of his translation in the Quadrupeds, to make sense of some of the Quadrupeds' references to wild cats via Çelebi's descriptions of the Ottoman fur trader guilds. (Çelebi also transcribed the first words of Tsakonian we know of, but not in Hammer's selection. His travel diaries are ginormous.) With the Rababname, Von Hammer was clearly not really trying, and his oddball spellings of Greek show that. But even so, I don't know what the hell he was thinking by inserting the reading "Sant Augustin"...
  
• Gustav Meyer's was the first halfway decent reading of the text. Meyer is a figure you notice on the margins of Modern Greek historical linguistics: he studied under Psichari, edited and commentaried Simon Portius' Grammar of Greek (downloadable), and did pioneering work in Greek etymology (including being the first to point out several Balkan loanwords). He was also the first to recognise Albanian as an independent branch of Indo-European. Despite the confusion I've nourished for the past decade, he is not the same person as Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke.
  
• And for the last, an anecdote. (I do this quite a bit, I know. I'll blog about that one day, too.)
  

It was the winter of 1995 into 1996. I was in Greece for my doctoral research, which consisted of three months at the offices of the Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek in the Academy of Athens, home to every stray cat in Agios Sostis. (They've moved since. The dictionary, I mean; dunno about the cats.) I was there typing out every single index card on που on file, because I wasn't allowed to photocopy them. I then spent another two months in Salonica, photocopying the entire Early Modern Greek holdings of the university library. And I made contact in Salonica with George Baloglou (no stranger to the comments thread here), with whom I'd already started working on translating the Quadrupeds. The latest editor of the Quadrupeds, Vasiliki Tsiouni(-Fatsi), was in Athens, we were told; so before leaving Athens, I rang her up to make contact, and talk about what we were doing. When I called her, and she enquired what I'd been up to, I told her about being at the Academy.

Funny thing that, because Tsiouni also worked at the Academy. In the Folklore Section. In the Agios Sostis offices. ONE FLOOR UP THE STAIRS from where I'd spent the last three months.

That was the first coincidink. The second coincidink was when George and I paid her a visit late February, at her place nudged up against Lycabettus Hill. Tsiouni's cousin was in town visiting when we came over; a somewhat melancholy intellectual, who was now living in a village in Boeotia. It turned out he had tutored in Modern Greek at Melbourne University in the late '80s, but we'd never overlapped, because I'd never had much to do with the Modern Greek department at Melbourne Uni, and I was never really going to get the chance to. (That was as a result of underlying trends I've sketched in a very depressing paper elsewhere.)

Oh, that's not the coincidink. The melancholy intellectual left a calling card with us fellow intellectual when he left. The coincidink is, the melancholy intellectual was Dimitris Dedes, and the calling card was his recent edition of Rumi and Walad. Because I'd been assembling my mediaeval vernacular corpus for some time, I immediately knew what I'd just been handed.

Part of my concern with putting this online was, the journal looked quite local to Greece, and probably didn't have much of a print run; it wouldn't be anywhere near as accessible (particularly to Persianists or, dare I say, Orientalists) as the older editions in Byzantinische Zeitschrift or Byzantion, big Western journals. I certainly wouldn't have found it had I not come to Greece. And this edition deserved exposure: Dedes clearly knew something about Persian literature, and his reconstructions were in several instances better informed than his predecessors'.

---

Oh, and here comes the rant. Every year or so, the BYZANS-L Byzantine Studies mailing list gets derailed from its placid inactivity by a flamewar between, erm, "interested outsiders" who take issue with Byzantinists' non-construction of ethnic identities, and the few Byzantinists who can be bothered flaming back. (Most just hide and wait for it to pass.) I got involved in this year's round, more fool I: I ended up with private email plastered on the mailing list and everything. (Oh, and Anna K? Linguolabial trill right back atcha.)

One of the sillier detours of the flamewar was when Rumi got dragged in. Not only should Byzantium be referred to as Eastern Roman, and how dare you hegemoniacal Westerners claim Romanity for yourselves, just because Rome is actually in Western Europe (Ooh, I can see the flames now. I reserve the right to doink comments, people; it's my blog). But "Rumi" should also be translated as "Roman"; and when one of the academics pointed out that it is more useful to translate Perso-Arabic "Rumi" into English in a variety of ways, including just plain "Anatolian", he got yelled at for subterfuge.

Well I'm sorry, but unless Mevlana wore a toga and went to the Colosseum, had a rosary and ate fish on Fridays, or used fijo instead of figlio in his Italian, then I dare say it's not particularly useful to translate Rumi as "the Roman" without scare quotes and a lot of background explanation. We know why a 13th century Persian would call Rumi "the Roman" (because—background explanation—he lived in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, which was land that used to belong to the [Eastern] Roman Empire, and where Romeic, now Modern Greek, was still widely spoken). But to insist that Rumi should be translated as "Roman", when "Roman" doesn't mean anything like what the target audience understands by "Roman"... well, you're not doing translation into English any more; you're doing something else.

Right. Philology coming up. ...Read more