Tsakonian documentary

Thanks to my friend George Baloglou, I'm passing on this news item from in.gr, on a new documentary on Tsakonian. Translations mine.

See also the documentary website.

Documentary description from the 13th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival site:

Α γρούσσα νάμου / Massimo Pizzocaro, Elisavet Laloudaki

In the Eastern Peloponnese, in a remote region under the shadow of Mt Parnon, live the Tsakonians, a special tribe of "stubborn" Greeks. For the past three thousand years they have been speaking an ancient dialect, now the unique instance of a Doric language. They did not abandon it even after Koine had prevailed—the first superregional dialect that Modern Greek originates from. But what has withstood centuries has withered in the last four or five decades. The roads have opened up, tourism has arrived, the locals have left as immigrants or mariners, compulsory schooling has forced its students to forget their ancient language. And then the hour of truth arrives: when you lose your language, you lose an entire world. The case of the Tsakonians is not unique. According to UN statistics, almost half the languages of the planet are facing the same threat of extinction and oblivion. This is a movie on loss of identity—on what it means to know that your language will not be spoken a hundred years from now...

Directed by: Massimo Pizzocaro, Elisavet Laloudaki
Script: Elisavet Laloudaki
Cinematography: Massimo Pizzocaro
Editing: Massimo Pizzocaro
Sound: Massimo Pizzocaro
Produced by: Elisavet Laloudaki
Production: HappyAnt TV
Format: HD Colour
Country of Production: Greece
Duration: 52′
Year of Production: 2011
Worldwide Distribution: HappyAnt TV, Elisavet Laloudaki, eli@happyant.tv

Programme:
Introduced by Stavros Tornes Stavros Tornes Theatre: Sat 12 March 2011, 13:00
Introduced by Tonia Marketaki Tonia Marketaki Theatre: Tue 15 March 2011, 15:00
[EDITED]

And the news release on in.gr:

(9 Mar 2011, 16:29)
In the 13th Documentary Festival:

The Tsakonian dialect is at the center of a documentary to be shown in Thessalonica.

Eleni and Evdokia, two generations of women who speak the Tsakonian dialect. In the region of Cynuria, the locals use Tsakonian for their everyday communication. Photo: Athens News Agency.

THESSALONICA.—The visitors of Leonidio in Arcadia are welcomed by a sign saying Καούρ εκάματε, which in the Tsakonian dialect means "Welcome". The directors Elisavet Laloudaki and Massimo Pizzocaro have attempted to record the Tsakonian dialect in the villages of Cynuria, in their documentary titled Α Γρούσσα Νάμου "Our Language", to be shown in the 13th Documentary Festival of Thessalonica.

In the region of Cynuria, under the shadow of Mt Parnon and facing the Myrtoan Sea, the locals use in their daily communication Tsakonian, the only surviving descendant of the Doric dialect.

The Tsakonian dialect is used in the villages of Melana, Tyros, Sapounakeika, Vaskina, Prastos, Sitena, Kastanitsa, and the capital of the South Cynuria Municipality, Leonidio.

There are three different variants of the dialect: the idiom of south Cynuria (Tyros, Melana, etc.), the idiom of Kastanitsa and Sitena, and the idiom of the Propontis. The latter is no longer spoken by anybody.

Today the speakers of the dialect are estimated to be 2000 to 4000.

The directors of the documentary use their camera to follow the inhabitants of Cynuria, old and young, using the Tsakonian dialect in their daily activities.

"We went into homes and cafés and heard moving stories. We realised that the language is dying, but unfortunately it is not dying on its own. Together with the language, an entire way of life is vanishing," director Elisavet Laloudaki told the Athens News Agency.

"Our aim was to try to convey the relaxed atmosphere prevalent in the region; to make a movie on a language that is disappearing, but which would be light and alive, like a cool breeze."

Through their individual stories, the locals recount their relationship with Tsakonian, their memories of the former, more widespread use of the dialect, and their efforts to transmit their knowledge to their children.

As the documentary directors observe in their description, "Tsakonians belong to the old world. Their contacts with strangers, their opening up to tourism, immigration, modern life has only minimally altered the structures and rules of their closed society. In fact, it's not that they are seeking to be isolated; they are just displaying an obstinate refusal to accept these developments."

"Their persisting with the Ancient Doric language when the whole world around them, even non-Greeks, were adopting Koine is only one aspect—perhaps the most extreme—of their reluctance to change. In this sternly delimited environment, boundaries are very important, almost sacred. In Tsakonia, a stranger does not easily go into a home—and that's final."

Though the environment is as they describe, the directors themselves managed to gain entry more readily, since Elisavet Laloudaki is originally from there.

"So at least in our case, the camera was not an intruder. Homes were open, talk was free, space was unconfined. Our demands were minimal: we asked them not to talk about the language, but to talk in the language—that is, to allow us to show their world," the two directors add.

The 13th Festival begins on March 11 and continues until the 20th. The in.gr site is a media sponsor for the event.
—Newsroom of the Lamprakis Press Group, Athens News Agency/Macedonian News Agency
...Read more

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

Tom Recht had a simple question in comments the other day, which admits of an almost simple answer. There is a catch, in that there is no clear phonological reason for what has happened, and I offer an unconvincing guess at it.

Tom Recht's question:

I'm curious about the word κατσούλι, which is intriguingly similar to the Hebrew for 'cat', [xatul]. Of course they're both presumably related to cat, Byzantine κάττα/κάττος, Latin catta/cattus, etc. (ultimate origin unknown), but none of those has the -ul- part that you see in κατσούλι and xatul. Any idea where the Greek word comes from?

Anonymous delivered, in his response:

The "oul" in greek is part of the suffix -ouli.

The part that needs explanation, I think, is rather how kati gave katsi. Did a tsitakistic(sic) dialect give it to the standard?

This all makes sense, but let me unpack it a bit more slowly.

Ancient Greece was not familiar with cats; Greeks kept weasels (γαλῆ) as pets, and you'll occasionally see pedants calling cats γαλῆ, but the real exposure to cats was in the Roman era. There was a Classical word for cat, αἴλουρος, which Puristic has preserved: felines are αιλουροειδή, "aeluroids". But that's the name for an exotic animal from Egypt; once people routinely interacted with cats, they used the Roman name for cats, cattus.

(I could be completely wrong about this, but I'll keep going.)

In LSJ, cattus is reported as κάττα and κάττος, both from Scholia. This is a fairly common occurrence in LSJ: the scholia on Ancient text explain the old words using contemporary, mediaeval words. LSJ is strip-mining the scholia for snippets of antiquity, and adds these glosses to its coverage artificially, although properly they're out of its scope.

In Standard Modern Greek, the word was reborrowed from Italian gatto, as γάτα. In Greek, unlike Italian, cats are by default feminine, and the masculine γάτος is explicitly a tomcat. That's Standard Greek; but Greek dialect preserved the earlier, Latin form: the Cretan for "cat" is κάτης. Hence the Renaissance poem Ο Kάτης και ο Μποντικός, "The cat and the mouse", which has just come out in a new edition. (You can get an earlier edition online via Tassos Kaplanis' Cretan Lit class wiki.)

Now, once Greek has borrowed a foreign stem, it can play around with its inflections and derivational morphology. From γάτα "cat" (Standard Greek), you get:

• γάτος "male cat"
  
• γατί "neuter cat; (implicit) diminutive of cat"
  
• γατάκι "neuter diminutive of cat, kitten"
  
• γατούλα "different, feminine diminutive of cat, she-kitten"
  
• γατίλα "cat smell"

A "kitten" in the sex-kitten sense is thus going to be γατούλα, as memorably and annoying chanteused about by the Greek, infantilised equivalent of Brigitte Bardot (God help me), Aliki Vouyouklaki (0:29):

Νιάου νιάου βρε γατούλα / με τη ροζ μυτούλα / γατούλα μου μικρή—τσα τσα τσα
Νιάου. Σ' έχουνε μη στάξει / κι είναι από μετάξι / η γούνα σου η γκρι
"Meow meow, kitten, with your little pink nose, my little kitten. Cha cha cha.
Meow. They treat you with kid gloves, and your grey coat is made of silk."

Um, yeah. A younger, more innocent Greece. Glad that's over.

Modern Greek doesn't happen to have the normal neuter diminutive γατ-ούλι, just its feminine counterpart γατ-ούλα. As it turns out Cretan does has the equivalent neuter equivalent, and has had it at least since the Renaissance. The hyperlinks are the online abridged Kriaras dictionary; the citations are from the dead tree full version:

• κάτα "cat" (fem): Mass of the Beardless Man, Meursius' Dictionary
  
• κάτης "cat" (masc): Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds (mainland, ca. 1364); Oracles of Leo the Wise; Teseide; Cat and Mouse
  
• κατσί "neuter cat; (implicit) diminutive of cat": To an Old Man Not To Marry, Chronicle of Morea
  
• κατσούλι "neuter diminutive of cat, kitten": Marco Antonio Foscolo: Fortunato (Crete, 1655)
  
• κατσίπαρδον "cat–pard, cheetah" (Italian gattopardo): Oracles of Leo the Wise
  
• κατσουλόπαρδος "cat–pard, cheetah": Erotokritos

So κατσούλι is derived from κατσί, and κατσί in turn is derived from κάτης.

The problem here is that the neuter κατσί has changed /kat-is/ to /kats-i/, for no obvious linguistic reason. Anonymous, in delivering, wondered whether this was Tsitacism (τσιτακισμός). Tsitacism is the onomatopoeic word for the process in a large number of Greek dialects, of affricating what was the palatal stop [c], to [tʃ] or [ts]. This affrication is pretty common across languages, since [c] is a very unstable sound to pronounce: lots of contact area between the roof of the tongue and the palate, easy to let some air through when trying to pronounce a plosive.

We see that kind of affrication all the time with renderings of Latin /ki, ke/ and /ti/, which must at once time have ended up pronounced as [ce, ci]:

• citatio [kitatio] > [citacjo] > Italian [tʃitatsione], German [tsitat], French [sitasjɔ̃], Spanish [θitaθjon], English [saɪtɛɪʃən]

The way to account for all these vaguely palatal modern pronunciations of what used to be /k/ and /t/ is that they were palatal stops as [c] (because of the following front vowel), and the two [c]'s then broke down, at different times in different languages, into various permutations of [tʃ, ts, s, ʃ, θ].

And Tsitacism would explain the τσ in κατσούλι as being from κατσί, because κατσί has a front vowel and κατσούλι doesn't. (Kriaras' etymology accordingly reads: "From the noun κατσί and the ending -ούλι, or less likely from Latin catulus".)

But Tsitacism doesn't explain κατσί, because in almost all dialects of Greece, the only phoneme to undergo that affrication is /k/: Κυριακή "Sunday" /kirjaki/ [cirjaci] ends up in dialect as [tʃirjatʃi] or [tsirjatsi], but Τρίτη [triti] does not end up as *[tritʃi] or *[tritsi].

There are three exceptions where /t/ does palatalise, and they don't account for κατσί in Crete. The two Hellenic exceptions are Lesbos and Tsakonia. Tsakonian is spectacular with its palatalisations: it palatalises not only /k/ and /t/ before front vowels, but also /p/. In fact, historical /k/ ends up pronounced further front than /p, t/: πίνω /pino/ > κίνου [cinu] "to drink", τιμώ [timo] > κιμού [cimu] "to honour", κήπος [cipos] > τχήπο [tɕipo] "garden". (Or, using a Tsakonian transcription other than the one I've invented, τζήπο [tsʰipo].)

The non-Hellenic exception is Aromanian, which is still a language of Greece: it likewise palatalises /t/ to [c]. The Aromanian specialist Nikos Katsanis has in fact claimed Tsakonian and Aromanian palatalise /t/ for the same reason.

• Katsanis, N. [Κατσάνης, Ν.] 1989. Κουτσοβλάχικα και Τσακώνικα (Arumanian and Tsakonian). Ελληνική Διαλεκτολογία 1: 41-54

No, not because there is a Romance substrate to Tsakonian; but because Tsakonian and Aromanian are both far enough removed from written Greek, that they would not have been subject to its conservative influence, making them pronounce <τ> as written.

But κατσί is unlikely to have wandered to the Morea from Lesbos, Tsakonian, or the mountain pastures of Thessaly. So affrication can't be the explanation.

Kriaras' dictionary has these references for κατσί:

• Triantaphyllides, Manolis. Collected Works I 358.
  
• Pernot, Humbert. Études linguistiques III 423.

Both are foundational works. Pernot's work is supposed to be his grammar of the dialect of Chios; it ended up being his historical grammar of Modern Greek.

• Pernot, H. 1907. Études de Linguistique Néo-Hellénique I: Phonétique des parlers de Chio. Fontenay-sous-Bois.
  
• Pernot, H. 1946. Études de Linguistique Néo-Hellénique II: Morphologie des parlers de Chio. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
  
• Pernot, H. 1946. Études de Linguistique Néo-Hellénique III: Textes et Lexicologie des parlers de Chio. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

Triantaphyllides vol. I, pp. 305–490 is his PhD thesis Die Lehnwörter der mittelgriechischen Vulgärliteratur, 1909, Trübner: Strassburg.

The Collected Works of Triantaphyllides are easy to find in University libraries—but I'm at home, and have not photocopied that text; Google Books is giving me one snippet for cattus, but not the right one. Pernot's Études are less easy to find in my garage, but I did find them; he does not however explain the [ts], and I suspect Triantaphyllides didn't either.

My suspicion is that the expected diminutive *κατίν—which we do see in Standard γατί—was modified to κατσί(ν) under the influence of the diminutive -ίτσιν, which was particularly widespread in Early Modern Greek. The accent is wrong for an analogy (*kaˈtin "cat" ~ piðimat-ˈitsin "little leap" < kaˈtsin). A haplology from *kat-ˈitsin "little cat" to kaˈtsin also is awkward, because the syllable being eliminated isn't precisely repeated. But that's my guess.

The Anastasiadis–Symeonidis reverse dictionary gives 10 words in Standard Modern Greek ending in stressed /ˈtsi/; there is a parallel to κατσί in βουτσί "barrel" < βουτίον (attested in the Hippiatrica) < Hellenistic βοῦτις "vessel in the shape of the frustum of a cone" (Hero of Alexandria) < Late Latin buttis. There's less of a cause to pronounce "barrel" in a cutesy way than there is for "kitten"; so my guess is probably wrong; but there's a large number of Ancient diminutives in -τίον that have stayed as -τί: αφτί, γατί, κουτί, πορτί, σκουτί, χαρτί. Whatever happened with βουτίον > βουτσί did not happen with κυτίον > κουτί "box".

So this is a dread irregular phonetic change, and linguists appeal to analogy when they don't have a better answer invoking phonological rules.

If someone has already solved this, I'll be happy to hear it.
...Read more

Pontic infinitive, real and imagined

I too noticed the breathless article in the Independent, right after New Year's Day, on the discovery of

a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece.

The actual Independent article is not as over-the-top as the daft lead-in article, which has done the rounds through the world's press. I didn't comment on it at the time, because I was still on blog hiatus, and the over-the-top renditions I had seen made me roll my eyes. (Newspaper sensationalises science story, film at 11.) But if you read the actual article, interviewing the linguist involved (Ioanna Sitaridou), it's reasonably sober, and tells you much of what you might have already gathered over the past few decades of Greek dialectology—and indeed, from this blog :-) .

The article is talking about the Muslim speakers of Pontic, who have stayed in Turkey after the 1922 population exchanges, in the Of valley. They call their language Romeyika, which is of course Romaic, the pre-Modern name for Greek. Linguists call it Ophitic, as a subdialect of Pontic Greek.

Ophitic is indeed somewhat archaic compared to other variants of Pontic, in its infinitive, and its preservation of Ancient οὐκ ~ οὐκί /uk ~ ukí/ "not" as uç (where the rest of Pontic has 'κ' [kʰ]). You'd expect such conservatism in a geographically and culturally isolated linguistic enclave. The "closest to Ancient Greek" claim, though, is a bit much; as Nikos Sarantakos pointed out on his Magnificent Blog,

just as every mother considers her child the must beautiful in the world, so too every researcher considers their field of study and research findings to be of exceptional importance.

We know why the researcher had to highlight the conservatism of Ophitic in the press release: that's how you get funding, and Vahit Tursun, himself a Muslim Pontic-speaker now living in Greece, was quite happy to give her a pass:

For nearly twenty years we have been busying ourselves, writing and talking, yet we have not been able to convince Greeks and Greece of the existence of this culture, the danger that it will disappear, and how Greek it is. Leave Dr Sitaridou alone; maybe she can convince the English to do something about it.

Fair enough.

Still, as Prof Angeliki Ralli pointed out in the Greek press (also reproduced at Sarantakos' blog), Ophitic isn't the only survival of the infinitive: it has also persisted in Southern Italian Greek. And in both cases, as in Early Modern Greek, the infinitive is much reduced—it's still an infinitive in retreat, restricted to modal verbs. So you use the infinitive in these variants of Greek in phrases like "I want to talk" or "I can walk", but not "Better to walk than to run" or "I told her to walk".

(No, Tsakonian did not preserve the infinitive. It did however preserve the participle used as a verb complement at least up to 1930: Pernot records Costakis telling a fairy tale with the phrase (ο κούε) αρχίνιε κχαούντα "(the dog) started barking", where Modern Greek only allows "started to bark", άρχισε να γαυγίζει. And even that seems to have vanished soon after; in the texts Costakis recorded from the late '40s on, there are no such participles.)

The infinitive is still a remarkable survival for Greek dialect, and it used to be a point of pride for linguists that Pontic had an infinitive. News of the Ophitic infinitive had reached the linguistic republic from Michael Deffner's research on Pontic in 1877.

Deffner, M. 1877. Die Infinitive in den pontischen Dialekten und die zusammengesetzten Zeiten im Neugriechischen. Monatsberichte den Königlich Preussischen Akademie de Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 191-230. Berlin.

Yes, that Michael Deffner.

The problem with that claim was, the Pontic that refugees spoke in Greek had no infinitive. In 1977, this claim struck the linguist Tombaidis, himself the son of Pontic refugees: he kept reading that Pontic had infinitives, but there were no infinitives in the Pontic he spoke, or in any Pontic he'd ever heard. So Tombaidis circulated a linguistic survey among several Pontic speakers, and published his findings in:

Tombadis, D.E. 1977. L'Infinitf dans le Dialecte Grec du Pont Euxin. Balkan Studies 18: 155–174.

Tombaidis found that all but one of the speakers he surveyed didn't use an infinitive; many of them indeed completely misunderstood the examples of the infinitive he showed them from Deffner's research. Tombaidis could find no evidence of the infinitive surviving in any Pontic text or language use he had access to over the past century; and since Deffner was *that* Deffner, Tombaidis concluded that the claims of the infinitive were not to be trusted.

Greek linguists weren't particularly aware of Ophitic until Peter Mackridge reported on them in 1987, and didn't have ready access to Ophitic speakers:

(Mackridge, P. 1987. Greek-Speaking Moslems of North-East Turkey: Prolegomena to Study of the Ophitic Sub-Dialect of Pontic. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 11: 115–137.)

One of the archaisms Mackridge noted was the survival of the infinitive; so Deffner, it turns out, did not make the infinitive up. But it's just as true that Pontic as spoken in Greece does not have the infinitive; nor is it likely that the infinitive died out the minute the refugees hit the shores of Greece. Ἀρχεῖον Πόντου, The Pontic Archive was publishing texts from its establishment in 1928, six years later; and folklore journals were publishing Pontic texts from a fair while before that.

What's happened is straightforward: Christian Pontic had lost the infinitive some time after the Of valley converted to Islam (17th century, I think), but long before it was displaced to Greece and Russia. Christian Pontic had remained in some contact with the rest of the Greek-speaking world, and in any case was a much larger population, where innovations could travel.

Oh, that one speaker Tombaidis found who insisted he used the infinitive? Tombaidis can't name him; but he drops enough hints on who he was. In retrospect, it's clear why he insisted he used the infinitive too. No, he wasn't a Muslim Pontian. He was Odysseas Lampsides (1917-2006), historian specialising on Trebizond, and editor of The Pontic Archive.

Of course, you don't want to say on the record that a researcher is lying—even if the researcher is in this instance acting as a research subject. But then again, it needn't be counted as lying: people can convince themselves they do all sorts of things linguistically. That's why elicitation should not be the only tool you rely on in investigating a language. (As any syntactician has found who's tried to work out whether a sentence of English is acceptable—and then repeated the exercise with five related sentences. After a while—you just can't tell any more. ...Read more

Language minorities of Bithynia

The Wikipedia articles on Anatolian Bulgarians, English and Bulgarian, imply that Kızderbent was far away from the other settlements where Bulgarian was spoken. That's why Bulgarians in Bulgaria became aware of the bulk of settlements in the 1860s, but Kızderbent was documented since the 1800s—and Shishmanov discusses Kızderbent in a separate chapter from the other settlements, as най-известното на европейците българско село в Мала Азия—"the most renowned European Bulgarian village in Asia Minor" (I think).

To test this out, I'm plotting the documented Bulgarian-speaking villages in Asia Minor on Google Maps. There are three listings:

• Kănchov's list, from Wikipedia
  
• Dorosiev's list, also from Wikipedia
  
• The list from Dimitri Shimshanov 2001. Необикновената история на малоазийските българи, Sofia: Пони—available online
  

I haven't been able to identify all the villages with modern-day Turkey: some villages will have been renamed, or no longer exist. Moreover, the English Wikipedia makes a laudable effort to guess the Turkish spelling of the villages from the Cyrillic, but has made some mistakes.

So herewith the listing. Villages without an "Actual Turkish" entry, I have not been able to match with modern-day locations—although they are mentioned in Turkish in Pars Tuğlacı. 1984. Bulgaristan ve Türk-Bulgar ilişkileri. Cem. The identifications may not all be correct…

Cyrillic	Wikipedia Romanisation	Actual Turkish
North-Western Anatolia [Bithynia]
Къз-дервент	Kız-Dervent	Kızderbent
Коджа бунар	Kocabunar	Kocapınar
Мандър	Mandır	Mandıra
Гьобел	Göbel	Göbel
Аладжа баир	Alacabair	Alacabayır
Тьойбелен	Toybelen	Toybelen
Ташкеси (Ташкесен)	Taşkesi	Taşkesiği
Ново село (Йеникьой, Къзълджилар)	Yeniköy (Novo Selo)	Yeniköy
Сьоют	Söüt	Söğüt
Хаджи Паункьой	Hacıpaunköy	—
Киллик	Killik (also Ikinlik)	Killik
Чалтик	Çaltik	—
Трама	Trama	—
Мата	Mata	—
Кубаш	Kubaş	Kubaş
Юрен	Üren	—
Читак	Çitak	—
Çanakkale, Lapseki, Biga [Troad]
Урумче or Дермендере or Дерменалан	Urumçe	Değirmendere
Чатал тепе	Çataltaş (also Çataltepe)	Çataltepe
Ново село (Чифлик)	Yeniköy [Çiftlik]	Yeniçiftlik
Стенгелкьой	Stengelköy	"20 km from Kerem near Biga"—ancient Parium, Greek Kamares
Маната	Manata	—
Симавла	Simavla	—
Байрамич	Bayramiç	Bayramiç

This is the Google map. Kızderbent is in red, the Bulgarian villages in blue. For jollies, I've added in the Tsakonian villages of Bithynia in green. I've plotted two Greek villages I know of in yellow (Demirtaş = Demirdessi, and Başköy (Μπάσκιοϊ), one of the Pistikohoria group), but there were a whole lot more.

View Anatolian Bulgarians in a larger map
Kızderbent does seem to be a way away from the other Bulgarian villages, which can explain its isolation. The only exception is Yeniköy/Novo Selo, 58 km away—if I've got the right Yeniköy. (The name, "Newville" in Bulgarian and Turkish, is fairly generic.) Then again, Söğüt and Mandıra (Greek Μάντρα, "paddock") look just as isolated.

Provided I've got the right Söğüt and the right Mandıra, of course.
...Read more

Thanasis Costakis RIP

Thanasis Costakis, doyen of Tsakonian Linguistics, has died, and the next Tsakonian Studies conference at Lenidi will be held in his memory.

I have not heard of his passing anywhere else, and cannot find an obituary online, so I assume it has been this past year.

I was lucky enough to talk to him in Athens in '95. A kindly old man, and resigned to the death of his language.

Θανάσης Κωστάκης, 1906-2009. Αιωνία του η μνήμη.

Where are the Tsakonian villages in Turkey?

I'm revising my paper on Tsakonian lexicostatistics, that I took a month off my PhD to write in 1997. (No idea what I'll do with it yet.) As part of that, I needed to provide an updated map of where Tsakonian was spoken, including the villages in the Propontis, Havoutsi (Χαβουτσί) and Vatika (Βάτικα) (aka Mousatsa Μουσάτσα). Of course, these were the Greek names, and they don't have Greek names any more. Costakis monograph on the villages has distances from towns and a sketch map, but no latitude/longitude (Κωστάκης, Θ.Π. 1979. Βάτικα και Χαβουτσί: Τα τσακωνοχώρια της Προποντίδας. (Βιθυνία 1) Αθήνα: Κέντρο Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών.) Google Maps doesn't speak pre-1922 either.

Luckily for me, a PDF of the Turkish Bulletin of the Mineral Research and Exploration 121 (1999) had an article on the geology of the Gönen (ancient Asepus) Delta, including a map in Fig.4 (p.8). So now, I know that Havoutsi is Havutça, and Vatika aka Mousatsa is Misakça. (Αs I would have found out in Costakis' monograph, had I kept reading.) After 1922, the Vatikiots ended up in Servia (Σέρβια), near Kozani. The Havoutsiots ended up in Hionato (Χιονάτο, at the time Garleni), near Kastoria.

This now lets me put a map of Tsakonophonie—also including Vatika, in far south Laconia, which sounds suspiciously like Vatika on the Propontis, and may be circumstantial evidence that Tsakonian used to be spoken far further south than it is now.


View Tsakonophonie in a larger map

Allemannic description of Tsakonian

I'd like the record to show that the Allemannic Wikipedia (as in the dialects of Switzerland, Southwest Germany, Western Austria) have an article on Tsakonian with stuff not seen elsewhere online, including some photos of Tsakonian greetings, and a list of villages with their Tsakonian names. In fact, they're using a source I don't happen to have (Vagenas' history of Tsakonia). [EDIT: Strike that, I do have it.] Their article on Greek ain't bad either.

Wikipedia's full of surprises like that. The Serbian article on the Greek "political" verseform has a much better grasp of the verseform's Byzantine practice than the English or Greek article.

Tsakonian song online

For our next text in our tour of Greek linguistic oddities: this collection of Tsakonian songs has been online for something like ten years, and it's about time I tried to translate the one song in Tsakonian.

Before I do, a trap for the unwary. The first song, Σου 'πα, μάνα, πάντρεψέ με "I told you mother, marry me off", is not in Tsakonian but standard Greek. It is however the song to which the Tsakonian dance is danced. At least one Internet denizen who didn't know Greek and found the song on YouTube was misled to say how she liked the sound of Tsakonian.

Our Tsakonian song, posted without translation, is this. Exercise to Greek readers: do you have any idea what this says? Coz if not, Tsakonian is a language distinct from Greek.

Απατζά τσυρά Μαρούα
Απατζά το Μαρασία
Απατζά το Μαρασία
Τσ ' ακατούσε τθάν Ελία
Τσ ' ακατούσε τθάν Ελία
Εκεί έχα τθα κουνία
Ζατσ ' οβού τσυρά Μαρούα
Ζατσ ' οβούε τθαν Ελία
Ζατσ ' οβούε τθαν Ελία
Τσε κατσούτσε τθα κουνία
Τσίντα βου τσυρά Μαρούα
Τσιντα βούα κακομοίρα
Τσιντα βούα κακομοίρα
Πε κατσούτε α κουνία
Πε κατσούτε α κουνία
Πφού θα ζάει το τσίε Λία

OK, lemme try and make sense of this. I'll use my transliteration (which is pretty much the lay translation plus my hobbyhorse τχ), and I'll put a literal Greek gloss next to it to illustrate how the Tsakonian happened.

• ρζ [r̝, ʒ] < [rj]
  
• σχ [ʃ]
  
• τσχ [tʃ]
  
• τθ [tʰ]
  
• πφ [pʰ]
  
• κχ [kʰ]
  
• ννι [ni] < /ne/
  
• νι [ɲi] < /ni, mi/
  
• λλι [li] < /le/
  
• λι [ʎi] < /li/
  
• τχ (or τζ) [tɕ] (or [tsʰ] < [c]
  
• ντζ [dz]
  

My Tsakonian rendering	Greek crutch
Απαντζά (α) τχυρά Μαρούα Απαντζά το Μαρασία Τχ ' ακατούσε τθάν Ελία έκι έχα τθα κουνία Ζατχ ' ο βού' τχυρά Μαρούα Ζατχ ' ο βούε τθαν Ελία Τχαι κατσχούτχε τθα κουνία Τσχίντα βου' τχυρά Μαρούα Τσχίντα βούα κακομοίρα Πφ' έ' κατσχούτε α κουνία Πφού θα ζάει το τσίε Λία	όπᾳ-αντί (α) κυρά Μαρία όπᾳ-αντί το Μαραθία και κάτωσε σταν Ελέα ήτο έχουσα στα κωνίς. Διάβηκε ο βους κυρά Μαρία διάβηκε ο βους σταν Ελέα και τσάκωσε στα κωνίς τσίζουσα βοών κυρά Μαρία τσίζουσα βοώσα κακομοίρα που ένι τσακωμένο α κωνίς πώς θα διαβείς (σ)το zio Ηλία
Standard Greek	English
Απέναντι η κυρά Μαρία απέναντι το Μαραθία και αποκάτω στην Ελέα είχε (σ)τη στάμνα Πήγε το βόδι κυρά Μαρία πήγε το βόδι στην Ελέα κι έσπασε τη στάμνα. Λύπηση–κλάψα κυρά Μαρία λύπηση–κλάψα κακομοίρα που είναι σπασμένη η στάμνα Πώς θα πας στο μπάρμπα-Λία.	Opposite—Lady Mary— opposite Marathias and under Elia she had a jar The ox went, Lady Mary, the ox went to Elea and broke the jar. Sorrowing and lamenting, Lady Mary, sorrowing and lamenting poor thing that the jar is broken. How will you get to Uncle Elias?

Not terribly confident in the emendation of the transcription, but that's what I've come up with. There are alternations of τo "the" and τθο "to the" in the text given which don't make sense, and I'll put down to mishearng? Note that κουνία "jar" is *not* κούνια "cradle" (which also exists in Tsakonian). οβού is likely ο βού, but βούε is the plural oxen, which doesn't make sense after singular article ο: poetic license, or utter misunderstanding on my part? In Tsakonian κακομοίρα should be only κακόμερε according to Costakis' dictionary (feminine as well as masculine), and κακομοίρα is a loan from Standard Greek which matches the metre; so the song would have been composed with Standard Greek influence on the vocab. I'm hoping I got τσχίντα βούα right as the active participles "sorrowing and lamenting", which is not at all a Standard Greek way of saying things.

[EDIT: Translation confirmed.] ...Read more

Michael Deffner, scoundrel

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

The problem with what little you get about Tsakonian is, it hasn't been written by linguists. So no, Michael Deffner is not renowned among linguists: he was a clunky amateur, and anyone who mentions his name before Hubert Pernot either knows nothing about the linguistic study of Tsakonian, or is giving their patriotism precedence over their science. Costakis long superseded his dictionary. Pernot says about the phonetics of the grammar and the dictionary that "Mr Deffner, as the Greeks would say, has 'made a sea' of the phonology of the language"; and those Greek-speakers among you who have just mentally translated τα 'κανε θάλασσα know how contemptuous Hubert is being. And as for his impassioned defence of the Doric heritage of Tsakonian, those fascinated by the Spartans (and not by what is truly interesting about Tsakonian—how much it has been restructured away from the mainstream of Greek) owe a far greater debt to Pernot than to Deffner. Deffner never saw a connection too tenuous to Doric. Pernot on the other hand started out in the 1890s a Doric skeptic, and if he admits any Doric in his 1934 grammar, it's because it really is uncontroversial and tested.

Now that isn't reason enough to castigate Deffner. He was early on the scene (though hardly the first—Deville's thesis on Tsakonian is 1866); he was an archaeologist and not a linguist; and well, he cared. I find the anecdote relayed on YouTube about him creepy and not praiseworthy, but it does demonstrate commitment. (Deffner's song son died in Prastos. When Deffner went up from Leonidion, he stopped outside, transfixed by the Tsakonian laments, and started transcribing them.)

No, two little episodes have made me resent Νιχάλη Δέφνερ. The first was what he did when Dirk Hesseling suggested Tsakonian might be a creole. Dirk Hesseling is someone who does not get enough appreciation in either fields he worked on. He was a hellenist by trade; his most important contributions to Modern Greek linguistics have been his publication in 1897 of the 1543 Torah in Judaeo-Greek, and his publishing with Pernot of the Ptochoprodromos poems in 1910.

Hesseling was interested, as a Hellenist, in how the Hellenistic Koine came about from the dialects of Greek; this led him to study creoles, and made him one of the first to do so. He doesn't get enough love in creolistics either, because he was a generation too early, and he published in Dutch. Peter Muysken and Guus Meijer, Dutch creolists who publish in English, has written a couple of appreciations of his work, which can be retrieved from Radboud University's repository (whose cafeteria I have dismissed elsewhere): "On the beginnings of Pidgin and Creole Studies: Schuhardt and Hesseling", and their introduction to a volume of Hesseling's work (D. C. Hesseling, On the Origin and Formation of Creoles, Story-Scienta, 1979.)

The Radboud U caf is not the closest I've gotten to Muysken. In my historical linguistics lectures, I'd namechecked his work on mixed languages. A couple of years later, I was crawling under a desk trying to find an IP for him as a visiting scholar. But my professional disgruntlements are for another post.)

So Dirk Hesseling was one of the first people to invent a hammer; and it was only natural for him to look for other nails in the history of Greek. One such nail that his friend Pernot had identified was the oddball development of Tsakonian, a language that both morphologically and phonologically looked a lot simpler than Standard Greek. Mightn't creolisation have taken place here too? The Peloponnese has had many a stranger walk in over the centuries; Hesseling pinpointed the Avars as a likely candidate, and went to press:

• Hesseling, D. C. 1906. De Koine en de Oude Dialekten van Griekland. (Comptes rendus de l'Academie d'Amsterdam, Afdeeling Letterkunde, 4th series, part 8.) Amsterdam. 37 pp.

Deffner's response was to call a town meeting of Leonidion, to condemn the anthellenic outrage. As Pernot sniffed years later, "That's not the proper way to conduct linguistic scholarship." But whether Hesseling was right or not (and creolisation isn't the only reason for grammatical structures to melt down), what Deffner did was not scholarship.

Even that, you might give a pass on; Deffner was engagé, virtually a local; and this was hardly the last time that Greek scholars reacted to external debate with a vote of condemnation. What he did in 1921, however, was a sin against the Holy Spirit. You know, the unforgivable type.

Laographia, the journal of the Greek Folklore Society, has been the main place where Greek dialect texts have been published. The folklorists weren't doing so to be linguists; but because the linguists of the time deemed linguistics to end at the word boundary, the folklorists were the only Greek scholars to publish sentences longer than four words until well after the Second World War. And since Laographia was a Greek folklore journal, you'd expect what it published to reflect, well, Greek folklore.

Which brings us to:

• Deffner, M. [Δέφνερ, Μ.] 1921a. Δείγματα Τσακωνικής (Samples of Tsakonian.) Λαογραφία 8. 159-180.

This publication was reprinted in the same year as the self-published Α πεντάμορφο του κόσμου. Παρανύθι για τα καμπζία Τhα Τσακώνικα γρούσσα. (The Five-time Most Beautiful in the World. A fairy tale for children. In the Tsakonian language). Athens; and again in 1926 included in Επτά Ωραία Παραμύθια (Seven Beautiful Fairy Tales.) Athens. It was also submitted to the Philological Society of Constantinople as ms. 495. (The Philological Society collected dialect data, and had lent some manuscripts to the Historical Dictionary in Athens. When 1922 happened, Athens held on to what it had. I have no idea what happened to the rest of the manuscripts; I wouldn't automatically assume they were destroyed, but they haven't turned up to my knowledge.)

Now, when you read Deffner's text, the Tsakonian strikes you as somewhat odd, compared to the rest of the Tsakonian corpus. I was of course looking for relativisers, being an opoudjis; it struck me that this text did not use πφη, like every other Tsakonian text, but πφου—which looked like πφου(ρ) "how". And which also looked a lot like Standard Greek που. And the content was Snow White; of course the Grimm tales were common currency throughout Europe, but this version seemed a lot closer to Disney than I'd have expected this far south.

You've worked out what's happened, right? I don't even know if Deffner intended this as deliberate fraud; he didn't outright say "I collected this in the field" instead of "I cooked this at my desk in St Lenid, with the mixed Tsakonian of the learnèd St Lenidians around me". But if you're submitting the translation to the Philological Society of Constantinople and Laographia, what the hell were you expecting people to think?

Something for Deffner to ponder in the hereafter.

Don't worry, I'm sure I'll end up lower down still than him. If I'm to judge from reactions to the Klingon Hamlet such as this (screw you, Christie St Martin), or this (screw you, Fark commenters), or this, or.... blah blah. Whatever. Btw, however ideologically unsympatico I may find Jonah Goldberg, I found his analysis of Klingon fandom pretty insightful. But all that is a topic for a non–Greek-linguistics blog...

...Read more

Tsakonian on YouTube

User kepleon has uploaded this past month four vids of someone telling primary school kids in Lenidi about Tsakonian, with examples, and singing in Tsakonian. Must follow up.

I don't agree with everything the guy says, but the nitpicking is not relevant. (But no, they don't still speak Tsakonian in Turkey, and Costakis' dictionary was just 3 vols, not 6.) Nice to know a kid in class knows about the dictionary too!

And damn me if fronted /k/ doesn't sound just like /dzʰ/. Like Haralambopoulos said. Maybe that τχ wasn't such a good idea after all. :-( I'll keep it for now though.

Also, the sounds that are supposed to be /ɲ/ and /n/ sound to me the other way round. Eek. [EDIT: I heard right, and got the rule wrong. /ni/ > /ɲi/. /ne/ > /ni/. But /mi/ > /ɲi/, not /ni/.]

So some transcriptions from the lessons. I'm sure I'm mishearing bits, and my Tsakonian was never that crash hot; I'll fix it as I get time.

• Τχ' έσι ποίου;
  
• [cut?]
  
• Εζβαΐκατε καμπρζία;
  
• Εζβαΐαμε.
  
• Έσι ζβαΐχου Νικόα;
  
• Φίλε.
  
• Τσ' έννι ποίου ο φίλε ντι;
  
• Έννι κα.
  
• 'Εννι μορζούα α χέρα σι ακόνη.
  
• Α τηλεόραση.
  
• Οράτσερε τθαν τηλεόραση τον Ολυμπιακό πφ' ήγκαϊ παίζουντε;
  
• Οράκα. Τσ' έκι;
  
• Δράγκε, τσ΄έσι κασήμενε;
  
• Κια έσι; Κια οράτχερε;
  
• Σάμερε εκάνα από ταν Αμεριτχή.
  
• Τσ' έσι ποίου; Ένι κα.
  
• Εζβαΐερε; Νι εμαθήτσερε το μάθημα;
  
• Σάμερε εκινάκα.
  

• Άφε νι, νι αφήτσωμε.
  
• Άφε νι, όννι καλέ.
  
• Όνι πλερούκχου.
  
• Μάτη, κάτσε ορεγί, τχ' άμα ντι το τηλέφωνε, θα νίερε ότσι όνι ορεγί ο Νιχάλη. Έννι ζατέ τθον Άη Λήδη να ψωνίσει.
  
• Όννι ορεγί ο Νιχάλη.
  
• Όννι ορεγί σι επέκα.
  
• Αφού όσι νίντα, νι εκατσούκα τχ' εζού τα τσουφά.
  
• Όκη νίντα.
  

• Πουάτσα πφ΄ έτθε έκχουντε ...
  
• να δήτε χαιρεκίσματα ότσ' έμε τθο Τχιβέρι.
  
• Τα σύνταχα θα φύτσωμε θα ζάμε τθο Δερβένι
  
• να πολεμήμε μέκουντε (?) του Δράμαλη τ' αζέρι
  
• πουρτέσ' ένε ο Νιτχηταρά κίσω ο Κολοκοτρώνη
  
• τχαι παρακίσω οι Τσάκωνες.
  
• Έα να ζα τθά βρύση να κρίσωμ' άχανα
  
• να ντι μοσχοϊθυλύου τα δύ ντι μάγουα
  
• Έα πέρα όι περούα γιατσι μ' έσ' πετσχοβοούα
  
• Θα περάε θα περάε τχαι το τσχέρβουλε θα χάε
  

...Read more

News in Tsakonia, 1895

When Thanasis Costakis, fresh out of high school, sat down in 1930 with Hubert Pernot to give him language data, Tsakonian was still quite different from Standard Greek, not just in morphology, but syntax as well. The phrase I keep coming back to is αρχίνηε κχαούντα "he started barking": participles could still be the complements to verbs in Tsakonian, as with Ancient Greek (and English); but that's long been impossible in Standard Greek, which can only use the subjunctive:  άρχισε να γαυγίζει.

That difference did not last. Costakis started collecting texts himself in the mid '40s, and nothing he collected since has any such surprises. By the time Dimitris Houpis was writing his bilingual works in the '80s and '90s, the Tsakonian read like a word for word translation from the Standard Greek on the opposite page. (And it may well have been.)

So any Tsakonian text we can get from before 1930 is most welcome. There isn't a lot. The Lord's Prayer got picked up by Thiersch in 1831, but that's not the kind of text you'd trust the most. There are a couple of letters from the 1820s, some poems and songs that Oikonomou published in 1846 and 1870, and some folk tales that Scutt published in 1912. There's Stratigis' novella Τσουράννα, published posthumously in 1943. And that's almost it.

Except that in 1895, a D.M. Latsis published a "Tsakonian Calendar". And this Tsakonian Calendar clearly had Tsakonian prose in it. It certainly had enough jokes to pop into issues of Chronicles of Tsakonia for at least two issues; and Manolis Triantafyllidis quoted text from it for his Historical Introduction to his Grammar of Modern Greek—which for a fair while was as good a history of Modern Greek as we had.

So when I was in Greece in 1995—and 2000—I went looking for this book. It wasn't in the National Library; it wasn't in the Linguistics Departmental Library in Athens U; it wasn't in the Departmental Library in Thessalonica U either (although we know Triantafyllidis had a copy, so it likely is somewhere on campus). I gave up the search eventually...

until Crete U digitised it and popped it online. It never would have occurred to me to look for it in Rethymnon; more fool I.

So. Now that we have access to the text, what does it tell us about Tsakonia and Tsakonian in 1895?

Well, I won't be doing a linguistic analysis at 1 AM on a school night. I'll just cherry pick the interesting stuff, and sociolinguistics will be easier this time of night than straight linguistics.

• 51 pp; the thing starts with a calendar, so the actual content starts on p. 15.
  
• It starts with a rather gossipy account of life in Lenidi in Puristic Greek. The highlights:
  
  
  
  • The steamship started coming to Lenidi around 1883. Getting into port was perilous, and porters would have to wade in and lift passengers out to terra firma for half a drachma.
    
  • Lenidi serviced not just Tsakonian villages, but Greek-speaking villages to its south, like Tsitalia (where Costakis was actually from.)
    
  • Big coffee drinkers; the author attributes this to the number of Lenidians in Turkey.
    
  • Not big café dwellers, being simple farmers; mostly fruit.
    
  • Lament singers would show up before the person actually died. One woman actually smirked εκάναϊ να μι βάτσωι "they're here to cry over me."
    
  • Pernot gets mentioned several times, and he obviously made quite an impression—although he's only ever called The French Professor. So p. 22: "In 1892 a funeral in Leonidion was attended by the French professor, who had just arrived to learn the Tsakonian dialect; during the whole duration he kept wiping his eyes full of tears, which as he said did not cry as much under similar circumstances in his country in Paris, at the death of not an old man as here, but of someone in the flower of youth." p. 23, Father Kleanthis Oikonomou was Pernot's "interpreter, so to speak".
    
  • They held funeral dinners.
    
  • Just like the Maniots, the Tsakonians called outsiders Vlachs. A quarter of the houses in Lenidi were owned by "strangers from the surrounding villages." The Greek-speakers in turn called Tsakonian men κουφά ("deaf things"?), and Tsakonian women Μαρούας "Marys".
    
  • No illiterates in Lenidi town under 50, apart from shepherds.
    
  • Six churches, two chapels by the sea: the Holy Apostles, and St Leonidas (Άγιε Λήδη), after whom the town was named. Lots more in the surrounding region.
    
  • Many Tsakonians had already emigrated, to Athens and Peiraeus, Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire, as well as Romania.
    
  • The Tsakonians in Athens and Constantnople were mostly winemakers: 3/4 of the wineries in Constantinople. This, although there were no vineyards in Tsakonia.
    
  • Lame antisemitic joke at the end: Jew flees Greek commercial competition, goes to the middle of Anatolia to set up shop, a Peloponnesian turns even there; Jew dies of envy. "That Greek must have been a Tsakonian!" Latsis exults. And you're a shmuck, Latsis.
    
  
  
• p. 31. Standard Greek ballad.
  
• p. 32. Shaggy Dog story in Tsakonian: "Maroua's Wedding"
  
• p. 34. Lament on migration in Tsakonian, rhyming, and clearly originally in Tsakonian (unlike a lot of later song transcriptions).
  
• p. 36. Shaggy Dog story in Tsakonian: "Macaroons in Athens", on the mishaps of two old monolingual Tsakonian women in a patisserie in Athens. (They don't understand Standard Greek, but they do know that one drachma a macaroon is much too much.) Oh, proof of monolingual Tsakonians.
  
• p. 39. Lament on the Death of John Charamis in Tsakonian. Also rhyming.
  
• p. 41. Jokes in Tsakonian.
  
  
  
  • In Vatsina (a shepherd community, and the most isolated of all Tsakonian settlements—in fact, the only place Charalambopoulos could get a young native speaker for his PhD in the 1970s.) Mother [in standard Greek]: George, come, let me give you bread and cheese.—Och you, I dinna want "bread" and "cheese"; 'tis breid an' tjees I want!" [sorry]
    
  • "I won't set foot in water again, unless I learn to swim first!"
    
  • "You're sick? What ails you? ... You can't answer me? Well, if I get sick, and you come see me, I won't answer you!
    
  • Crows are said to live 200 years. Man from Vatsina puts a crow in a cage. And waits to see if it's true.
    
  
  
• p. 42. Tsakonian translation of the "Letter of Jesus Christ": a piece of "neoapocrypha" that was doing the rounds at the time in many a language, and mostly was about insisting on taking Sundays off.
  
• p. 49. List of subscribers. Four times as many in Athens as in Lenidi, and several also in Constanţa, Romania.
  

...Read more

Tsakonian orthographic reform

If you're Hubert Pernot, the great hellenist whose grammar of Tsakonian is a Neogrammarian masterwork, Tsakonian gets written in some bizarre adaptation of a bizzare French dialectological alphabet (Gillieron-Rousselot, which seems to have evolved into the French Romance transcription.)

If you're Agathocles Haralambopoulos, former prof at Aristotle Uni who did his doctorate on Tsakonian phonology, you use the IPA, and call Nick's favourite phoneme /tsʰ/ instead of /tɕ/, thereby not making Nick your fan.

If you're any other Greek linguist, and particularly the native speaker Thanasis Costakis (who was Pernot's main informant), you use historical Greek orthography, with any diacritics your printer allows (as is normal Greek dialectological practice)—and different printers will allow different diacritics. So it'll be κ̔ τ̔ π̔, σ̌, ρ̌, λ̣ ν̣, λ̑ ν̑, and τσ̕ or τσ̑.

If you are Michael Deffner, enthusiast who stayed in Tsakonia for fifty years but did not become any better as a linguist as a result (Pernot has some gallically charming things to say about his phonology), you have even more diacritics than you actually need, because you haven't quite grasped that whole phoneme concept.

If you're a lay Tsakonian—as happened in the few times in the 19th and early 20th century when Tsakonians wrote Tsakonian—you just use the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, and a *lot* of digraphs. The system is pretty much laid out in Wikipedia (citing me, and with my corrections). So σχ is /ʃ/; ρζ is /r̝/ or /ʒ/ (socially conditioned); πφ τθ κχ is /pʰ tʰ kʰ/; λλ and νν are /l/ and /n/ before front vowels, where you'd expect /ʎ ɲ/. (That one's subtle, and much less often complied with. In Tsakonian /ne/ goes to /ni/, and /ni/ goes to /ɲi/.) [c] is just κ, which occurs before front vowels as in standard Greek (but is in fact a reflex of palatalised /p/ or /t/: κίνω /cino/ < πίνω /pino/).

The reflex of palatalised /k/ is not [c] in Tsakonian, but what Haralambopoulos transcribed as /tsʰ/, and what I'd like to think is closer to /tɕ/. (Alas, even though Pernot actually did some pioneering instrumental phonetics, and Haralambopoulos did spectrograms too, it's hard to tell.) Lay practice was to render this as τζ. So κήπος [cipos] went to τζήπε [tɕipe].

The problem with τζ is, Modern Greek speakers will read it as /dz/, and there are already /dz/ in Tsakonian. (Admittedly they're overwhelmingly /ndz/, but a couple of Turkish loan words are all you need to throw that off.) I've long thought that, if Tsakonian keeps getting written in lay transcription, that τχ [tç] would be a less problematic rendering of /tɕ/. And by its resemblance to the digraph tx, it would finally establish a connection between Basque and Tsakonian! :-)

So τχήπε instead of τζήπε. There, I've said it, now I just wait for the Googlers to find it...

How to teach historical linguistics

It was 1991, and I was an engineering student who was not interested in engineering, and for whom the joy of mathematics had recently been killed by the "Shut Up And Learn The Formula" approach to the proof of Fourier Transforms. I met a girl at a party, and followed her into a linguistics course. It was Historical Linguistics, taught at the time by Ilia Pejros. Twelve years later, I would lecture that course. Sixteen years later, the University of Melbourne would cease offering that course. Aber alles Irdische ist übel, selbst das Geld geht in Verwesung über.

But it was 1991, and I just grinned through the entire course. The linguistics undergrads, leery of the loud engineering student who suddenly turned up among them, assumed that I was grinning at Ilia's accent. I was in fact grinning because I didn't believe a word of it. Historical reconstruction is a special kind of magic, and when you convince yourself it works, it's breezy and amazing. But you need to be convinced that it works first, and I wasn't being convinced by Ilia's assertions that it was obvious.

I convinced myself a couple of years later, but you need some special circumstances to be convinced.

• You need to take a proto-language that you know reasonably well.
  
• And a daughter language that you know at least somewhat.
  
• And the daughter language must in at least some ways look nothing like the proto-language.
  
• Yet the phonological changes from the proto-language to the daughter language need to be reasonably regular,
  
• So that, finding out about one rule, you unlock a whole suite of correspondences where you did not expect them.
  

For me, the stars lined up with Tsakonian, which is one of the reasons I ended up liking Tsakonian so much.

• The proto-language is not quite Doric, as the enthusiasts will tell you; there's bits of Doric in there, but most Tsakonian words, you can reconstruct armed just with v AD Koine Greek; and you can usually get to v AD Koine Greek straightforwardly from the historical spelling of xxi AD Modern Greek.
  
• Tsakonian has dictionaries and grammars, so you can see the words in action.
  
• Tsakonian really looks nothing like Greek should—not just morphologically, but phonologically as well: the clusters have melted away, and the language is pretty much CV syllables (as long as you allow aspirated stops and affricates to be a single C).
  
• But the rules for how the phonological meltdown happened are pretty regular, and in fact continued in productive use into the 19th century: ειρηνοδίκης [irinoðicis] "justice of the peace", a calque from German, ended up quite regularly as ρζινοδίτχι [r̝inoðitɕi], and γραμματική [ɣramatici] "grammar" as γραμμακιτχή [ɣramacitɕi].
  
• And once you know the phonological rules, a lot of opaque words suddenly make sense: /tʰuma/ is /stoma/, /ʎuke/ is /lykos/, /atʃe/ is /aðros/, and so forth.
   

(Btw, I've snuck in there an orthographic reform I'd like to see if Tsakonian does go online with the wikipedia and what-not. Posting on that separately.)

For students in Europe, the stars traditionally lined about around Romance. Everyone knew Latin; everyone knew French (and could be convinced about Portuguese); neither particularly look like Latin in their core vocabulary; but explain the core changes, and suddenly chère does connect to carus, and hui to hodie. In fact, one of my students at the time—who's now my colleague in my day job—told me at the time that his stars-lining-up moment was realising in my final lecture, through a combination of Grimm's Law and velarisation, that French peau was cognate to English fell "the skin or hide of an animal; pelt."

Now, if you're teaching historical linguistics in the University of the South Pacific, as the late Terry Crowley used to, French and Portuguese aren't going to convince your students about the validity of the comparative method. Moreover, given how close the Polynesian languages are to each other, Fijian and Tongan and Maori will convince your students, because after all, you are at the University of the South Pacific. Which means that Terry Crowley writing a historical linguistics textbook based on Polynesian examples was an entirely appropriate and sensible thing to do.

I would also like to suggest that using a textbook based on Polynesian examples in Australia, for students who don't know any Fijian or Tongan or Maori—but a lot of whom have had high school French or German—is paedagogically lame, and deserves all the grins that loudmouth engineering students can muster. Because Tongan will not convince people who know neither Tongan nor Hawaiian that the comparative method works. Sorry, OUP, you got no sales from me; the also late Larry Trask did instead. (I thought it was a bit on the easy side, myself; but apparently my course was the hardest one some of my students ever took in linguistics, so one should err on the side of caution.)

And I can only shake my head at the prof whose very first page of lecture notes on historical linguistics illustrated a phonetic change (I think it was lenition)... with the development of an Australian proto-language into an Australian daughter language. Dude, noone in the room knows Pitjantjara (except for you—we ain't in Bachelor College), and certainly noone in the room knows proto-Pama-Nyungan. INCLUDING YOU. That's just circular reasoning, and its risible to put it in your first lecture. Prove to me lenition happens with languages someone else in the room can nod along to; then get back to me with proto-whatever.

(It's liberating to be able to say this kind of thing, now that I'm no longer anywhere near trying to get a linguistics job...)

That, incidentally, is why dialects are really helpful for convincing yourself of the validity of phonetic change: they're close enough that the cognates are obvious, but still have all the range of phonetic change that languages display. Unfortunately English dialect does more vowel change than consonant change; but its not like you can't find plenty of palatalisation, or cluster reduction, or analogical change...