Mariupolitan transcribed through Russian ears

Challenging people on what phonemes they're hearing, when they're analysing a language: that's thankless stuff. There are subtle continua of phonetics, and if you're actually doing this kind of thing for a living, you rely on spectrograms and electropalatograms, with chocolate paste to tell where your tongue is actually moving. One's ears? They hear what they're used to hearing, and fail to hear what they're not used to hearing.

I'm biased in saying so, I have to admit, because I have a tin ear. My experiences of trusting my ear have gone badly. I did a phonetics assignment as an undergrad on establishing the phonology of a random language. I picked Cantonese. Easy choice given the demographics of Melbourne University Engineering (as opposed to Arts); insane choice for linguistics. Has anyone settled on how many tones Cantonese has? I checked, and the model of Cantonese I came up with had very little to do with any reality; my model was still exhaustively enough argued to get a good mark, regardless.

Which is how science works.

Even worse was the beginning lecture of of Field Methods, when I had to transcribe unreleased stops. Unreleased stops. Cantonese had them too. I mean, what's the point of unreleased stops when the release is the only way to hear the difference. What a daft thing to do to the listener.

I should… come to the subject at hand though, shouldn't I. My topic is the phonetics of Mariupolitan, and how it is reflected in its orthography.

There is scattered work on Mariupolitan: Solokov's and Sergievskij's 1930s studies, work by Chernyshova and Beletskij in the '50s and '60s, which I can't check halfway across the Pacific from my library; Zhuravliova's 1982 thesis and work in the early '90s, published in the Studies in Greek Linguistics series; and finally the grammar by Symeonidis and Tombaidis, the first time linguists from Greece worked on the language. My bibliography is on my web site, search for "Mariupolitan [MRP]".

• Συμεωνίδης, Χ. ϗ Τομπαΐδης, Δ. 1999. Η Σημερινή Ελληνική Διάλεκτος της Ουκρανίας (περιοχής Μαριούπολης). Αθήνα: Επιτροπή Ποντιακών Μελετών.

Zhuravliova and Symeonidis & Tombaidis disagree on two allophones of Mariupolitan.

• Zh reports that Mariupolitan has a central allophone for /i/, [ɨ], which is said to occur "before hard consonants". S&T aren't clear what a hard consonant is meant to be (in a Slavic linguistic context, it's pretty obvious, but I'll argue that here it ended up circular). At any rate, they did not find the distribution that systematic in her own transcriptions: it's frequent word-finally. But S&T did not hear [ɨ] when they were surveying Mariupolitan; in fact, they could not hear it in the recordings Zh provided, where she had already transcribed [ɨ].
  
• Zh reports that /k/ palatalises to [tʲ]: so /kifali/ comes out as [tʲifaʎ]. Again, S&T note the change is not systematic in the transcriptions, and S&T did not hear this in the field or on the tapes: all they heard was /k/. S&T consider whether this is because of Standard Greek influence, but reject it as unrealistic: Standard Greek influence has been limited, especially with the elderly villagers they've been dealing with. S&T also call the posited change "peculiar", and remark that "it is not the purpose of this study to determine the reasons for Zhuravliova's mishearing."

That's an uncollegial thing for them to say, but it's allowed if it's what the data says. Still, I'm going to be uncollegial in turn:

• The standard Greek palatalisation of /k/ is to [c], which means that what S&T are hearing is [cifaʎ]. If it was [kifaʎ], they would have mentioned the deviation from Standard Greek as noteworthy: it gets mentioned in studies of Cappadocian Greek.
  
• There's not a lot of difference between [tʲ] and [c]. There may be less, since Zh had described her [tʲ] as palatal, not palatalised alveolar—but she does distinguish [tʲ] from [kʲ], so maybe not.
  
• S&T don't mention [c] as an alternative to [tʲ]: they dismiss Zh's phonetics, but aren't showing the required awareness of phonetics in this case themselves. Talking about just <κ> to refute [tʲ] is lazy.
  
• The change of /k/ to [c] to [tʲ] is not absurd, and in fact there is a parallel within Greek, in Tsakonian. Tsakonian /k/ has palatalised to [tɕ] while Tsakonian /t/ has palatalised to [c]. So "weather" καιρός /keros/ is in Tsakonian τχαιρέ [tɕere], while "I honour" τιμώ /timo/ is κιμού [cimu]. That means that palatalised /t/ and /k/ have actually swapped places in the palate, with [tɕ] further front than [c].
  
• And if there is a [ɨ] in Mariupolitan, Greek linguists don't have a good track record hearing central vowels in their dialects. We only found out Samothrace has [ɨ, ə] in the '90s, and that only because Katsanis, who discovered it, is a native speaker of Aromanian—a language which unlike Standard Greek has those central vowels.
  • Κατσάνης, Ν.Α. 1996. Το γλωσσικό ιδίωμα της Σαμοθράκης. Θεσσαλονίκη: Δήμος Σαμοθράκης.

Two more things. First, why Zh "misheard" (if that's what's happened) may not have been of interest to S&T, but it is of interest to me. Second, Zh is not the only person to hear those allophones in Mariupolitan. From the Shevchenko poem I posted before, Kir'jakov writes скутъеты ратлых виглызу /skuθetɨ ratlɨx viɣlɨzu/. He has the palatalisation of /k/ to [tʃ], which S&T noted as occasional (прощину /prostʃinu/), but he also has тен тъэос /tʲen θeos/ ("there is no God", Pontic 'κ έν Θεός [kʰ en θeos], Early Modern Greek οὐκ ἔνι Θεός), and тюнурю /tʲunurʲu/ for "new" (Standard Greek καινούργιος [cenurʝos].)

The Mariupolitan of the '30s, written in phonetic Greek, does not have a distinct letter for [ɨ]: it's an allophone, and alphabets aren't normally in the allophone business. But Kostoprav clearly thought he heard [tʲ] too, at least some of the time: from Φλογομινίτρες Σπίθες p. 92, κε ντρυπιαχτικά κρέμαςιν τυ τιφάλτς /ke drupiaxtika kremasin tu tifalts/ "and she hung her head in shame", Standard Greek και ντροπιασμένα κρέμασε το κεφάλι της /ke dropiasmena kremase to kefali tis/.

As /ke/ "and" shows, the change is hardly systematic; as in Pontic, Mariupolitan has an unfortunate homophony of /ki/ < /ke/ (more frequent for "and") and /ki/ < /uki/ "not". Pontic deals with it by aspirating "not" as [kʰi] (and writing it as 'κι); Mariupolitan seems to deal with it by writing them as ки and ти.

Do they sound different? Is there a distinction made between [ci] or [ki] and [tʲi]? I can't check Zh's thesis at the moment, and S&T's phonology doesn't tell me, but the transcriptions don't differentiate them. The orthographic distinction Kir'jakov makes of ки and ти could be artificial of course, but I don't think they made their <т> up completely.

Assuming that S&T are right, and there is just [c] in Mariupolitan, we should remember that the Mariupolitans are bilingual in Russian now, and many of them already were in the '30s. A Cyrillic alphabet for Mariupolitan is going to bring with it Russian notions of phonetics, and of palatalisation in particular: Kir'jakov's Cyrillic alternates between е and э [je, e] and I don't see a consistent pattern for it—especially when the distinction is carried across to Cyrillic publications of Kostoprav, who originally wrote in phonetic Greek.

So the act of writing down Mariupolitan in the Ukraine filters Mariupolitan phonology though Russian—certainly in Cyrillic, maybe even in Kostoprav's Greek script, which was after all phonetic. All it takes for the "mishearing" is for Mariupolitan [c] to sound closer to Russian /tʲ/ than to Russian /kʲ/. And I wouldn't be too harsh on the "mishearing": S&T didn't exactly highlight that [k] and [c] are not the same either.

About [ɨ], I'm less certain. Kostoprav doesn't have it, and wouldn't have been in a hurry to write down as an allophone (and how would he write it anyway, <η>?) Kir'jakov has it, but S&T can't hear it though they tried. I suspect this is influence somehow from Russian, with some Mariupolitan dialects picking up the Russian vowel, and applying it haphazardly to their Greek. Zh's "hard consonants" don't tell us why, because they're only hard (unpalatalised) if there's no [i, j] next to them to begin with in Russian.

Filtering your orthography through the majority language's ears is nothing now. It's an uncomfortable fact for linguists working on minority languages. Alphabets normally code just phonemes and not allophones: that's why Greek dropped its koppa. Linguists work out the phonemic inventory of a language, reuse the spare letters for phonemes not in English, and present coherent well-thought out alphabets to their communities.

But the communities' priority is not literacy in the minority language: it's literacy. If the proposed orthography for their language looks confusingly different to the orthography of the majority language they actually need access to, they'll reject it. Papua New Guinea communities for instance can reject reusing <q> for [ɣ], because that's not what <q> means in English; and learning to write their tokples shouldn't be getting in the way of learning to write English (or Tok Pisin).

At any rate, if Kir'jakov thinks Mariupolitan has [ɨ] and [tʲ], then that's how his texts should be transcribed. [tʲ] is a particular problem for Standard Greek speakers, because it's so far from their expectation; in transliterating Kostoprav's poems into Greek, Ioakimidis silently emended them back to <κ>. I didn't help by transliterating тен тъэос as τ' έν Θεός; following Pontic 'κι, I should have written ʼτʼ έν Θεός, but I doubt that would have been clearer.

Oh, and Kir'jakov writing тен "isn't" as one word? Never trust native speakers on word segmentation. There's confusion already in his text between н та "with the" and н та "when".

• (S&T record /min/ > /mi tun/ for "with", but not /n/; and they record "when" as /an, anda/. So /nda/ for "when" is not "with the", but a variant of Greek dialectal /onde/ "when". But native speakers aren't historical linguists, so they can't tell when something historically was a single word.
  
  You should see what Tsakonians do to their clitics when they write in the dialect…)

...Read more

The status of Urum

I've already posted about the seesaw in the Soviet Union of the '30s between Demotic and the indigenous variants of Greek, Pontic and Mariupolitan. As I've also mentioned, Greek is not the only language spoken by the ethnic group around Mariupol. A minority instead speak the Turkic language Urum.

A group identifying itself as Greek and Christian but speaking a Turkic language is a challenge to the levelling impulse of modern nationalism—and far from the only one. At the Other Place, I posted what was going to be the lead-in to this post: its maudlin meditations on identity were more appropriate there, and I ended up talking more about the Karamanlides than the Urum anyway. But there's still some sociolinguistic outcomes of the situation that it's worth going through here.

Urum is a variant of Crimean Tatar, a language distinct from Tatar and closer to Turkish. The language came with the Greeks from Crimea. The entire ethnic group moved to Mariupol in 1778, invited by Catherine the Great to bolster the local Christian element: the fact that some of the Christians spoke the Muslims' language obviously wasn't a concern before modern notions of nationalism.

Crimean Tatar was the "bazaar language" of the Crimea, its language of trade and of dealings between speakers of different languages. One of the main reasons Mariupolitan Greek is so hard to understand for Standard Greek speakers is its profusion of Tatar words. And even though Urum is closer to Turkish than Tatarstan Tatar, it's still different enough for those loans to sound somewhat off-kilter to Standard Greek speakers, compared to their own loans from Turkish.

How it came to pass that a group of Christians spoke Tatar and followed Greek-speakers to the Ukraine is a question we're not equipped to answer. The lazy answer is that they were Greek-speakers who switched their language, presumably in villages with a majority Tatar population. There were penalties against switching from Islam, so it is an easier answer than the alternative, that they are Tatar-speakers who switched their religion. Still, it would be foolish to get too precious about notions of Hellenic DNA—especially when we can be reasonably sure there is Gothic blood in the Mariupolitans, with the last (and first) documented speakers of Crimean Gothic switching to Greek, and their bishop in Crimea still being the bishop of Gothia. (It would be foolish to get precious about DNA in general, but that's a topic for the Other Place.)

The Urums felt Greek enough to move to the Sea of Azov, and they feel Greek enough to call themselves members of the Greek ethnic group (and to call their Turkic Greek: their "Urum" corresponds to the Mariupolitan Greek's "Rumeyka"). But there was some sense of separateness, because the Urums and Grecophones did not live in the same villages in the Ukraine (18 Grecophone, 15 Urum villages), and E. Perekhval'skaya (whose online description I am using extensively, via Google Translate) thinks that sense was already there in the Crimea.

The Urums' language was still, to some perspectives, the "wrong language" for Greeks to be speaking. This was not particularly an issue under Ottoman or Russian Imperial rule, when language wasn't much of an identity determiner anyway. But as I posted in the Other Place, once Turkic speakers find themselves in a Greek nationalist context, they will be pressured to drop Turkic—and the Karamanlides would likely have been all too happy to comply.

The Azov region is not Greek Macedonia; but something did happen during the Springtime of the Nationalities, when the Mariupolitans were cultivating their dialect as a literary language. The presses of Mariupol produced poetry and agitprop and theatre and journalism in Greek; but Urum got nothing. Perekhval'skaya cites a bibliography by S.A. Kaloerov documenting 23 Greek writers; only one wrote in Urum. Wikipedia tentatively mentions just one school primer produced in Urum; that contrasts with full school education in Greek—although unsurprisingly, Demotic Greek, not Mariupolitan.

Even more strikingly, as Pontus And The Left mentions, Mariupolitans carried out a campaign of linguistic purism, to rid Mariupolitan of Russian. We can see that in the translations I put up in the last post: Kir'jakov now renders "Ukraine" as /ukraˈina/, but Kostoprav at the time rendered it as /ukraˈnia/, just as Demotic does. But Elinizatsia was also targeted at ridding Mariupolitan of Tatar elements.

There is a chuckle to be had that the campaign was called Elinizatsia (ελινιζάτσια), which itself is Russian for Hellenisation; but with Russian long the language of literary discourse, I'd be more surprised if they called it Ekselinizmos (εκςελινιζμος). The getting rid of Russian makes sense: it's asserting their own place in the world, where they hitherto used Russian (and still did for words like Elinizatsia).

But getting rid of Tatar words was about something else. The Urums were a minority (15% in 1926), Tatar wasn't encroaching on Greek any more the way it had in the Crimea, and the way Russian was now. The advocates of Elinizatsia were working with literary Mariupolitan, and were against adopting Downlander Demotic (as I posted about); so they were supposed to be holding on to what made Mariupolitan distinct from Demotic. But Tatar—which is what makes Mariupolitan most distinct—is not part of that picture.

Vlasis Agtzidis closed his article on the debate between Demotic and Pontic & Mariupolitan with a question: why did the Soviets not encourage the USSR Greeks to adopt a separate ethnicity from the Downlander Greeks, as they did elsewhere during the Springtime? I had some guesses, but what struck me was the short shrift Urum got.

I get it why the Grecophones didn't want to know about Urum: their nationalism was informed by "language = ethnicity", by contacts with Greece, and possibly with ambivalence towards the Urums. (I have no idea whether there was hostility, I just know they don't live in the same villages.) I get it why the Urums would have gone along with it, once "language = ethnicity" notions took hold in the Ukraine.

What I don't get is, why did the Soviet government go along with it? The Springtime of the Nationalities was all about splittism, raising new national consciousness where there was none before. Sure the Urums didn't want to be called Urums instead of Greeks; to this day, Perekhval'skaya reports, both Urums and Grecophones are proud their passports say they are ethnic Greeks, and were upset that the Ukraine is getting rid of ethnic labels in passports. But why would the Soviets have listened to them, instead of presuming to know what's best for them?

I have no idea, and from the two seconds I spent researching the Springtime of the Nationalities on Wikipedia, I can tell there is a huge literature on the topic that I have no intent of getting into, to find out. I can only guess that at least in this instance, where there were no national security angles at stake, the decision-making was more local than I'd assumed.

The lack of pride in Urum has endured. To quote Perekhval'skaya:

It is interesting to note that while the "Hellenic" language is an important factor in Rumeic [Grecophone] ethnic identity and has a high prestige in the eyes of the Greek population of the Azov region, Urum is not such a factor (or is to a much lesser extent), and has substantially less prestige.
[...]
Unlike Rumeic, the Urum (Turkic) language does not have symbolic value as a marker of national identity. It seems connected to this that to date, the degree of preservaton is significantly lower than the relative safety of the Rumeic Greek language in the Sea of Azov. In the Urum village Mangush we could not find a single person who could translate the linguistic form, which Rumeic-speaking Greeks coped with easily. That is, the language shift among the Urum-speaking Greeks has gone much further, and this language is really threatened with extinction. The situation with the Greek Urums of Azov is typologically similar to the ethno-linguistic situation of the Turkic-speaking Greeks living in eastern Georgia.

Not that Rumeic is so much better off. Symeonides & Tompaides in their 1995 survey found old speakers in the villages struggling to produce Rumeic. Perekhval'skaya is more sanguine about claims of the death of Mariupolitan, which has been predicted for the past 150 years. But she admits it is no longer a language of daily communication, and its domains are severely restricted, to daily banalities or even just formulaic conversation-starters—a story very familiar in accounts of language death.

(She also concurs the real risk is from the Greek government sending Standard Greek teachers over, displaying the sensitivity to organic linguistic heritage and diversity that one would expect from the Greek government. Admittedly Symeonides & Tompaides, who were doing fact-finding for the government, think the dialect is so far gone, education in the dialect would not help anyway.)

• Συμεωνίδης, Χ. ϗ Τομπαΐδης, Δ. 1999. Η Σημερινή Ελληνική Διάλεκτος της Ουκρανίας (περιοχής Μαριούπολης). Αθήνα: Επιτροπή Ποντιακών Μελετών.

One thing has changed though. The '30s Mariupolitans ignored Urum as far as I know. The '90s Mariupolitans celebrated it. I have three volumes of literature published by Mariupolitans—though in Donetsk and Kiev, not Mariupol; they are all mostly in Mariupolitan Greek (and the Mariupolitan is mostly Kir'jakov's), but they all feature Urum from Valerii Kior as well. Kir'jakov and Kior also worked together on an Ukrainian–Rumeic–Urum phrasebook, whose cover picture (sorry I don't have a colour copy) is… well, it's something:

• Кирьяков, Л.Н. (ed.) 1988. Пирнэшу Астру: Стихя, пиимата, дъыимата. Донецк: Донбас.
• Кирьяков, Л.Н. (ed.) 1989. Пирнэшу Астру: Стихя, пиимата, дъыимата, хурато, паримия, аинигмата. Донецк: Донбас.
• Шевченко, Т. 1993. Кобзар: Билыгмена пиимата пас та румейка ки урумика глоссис. Схиматыстыс: Кирьяковс, Л. Київ: Український письменник.
• Мороз, Г.А., Кир'яков, Л.Н., Кіор, В.І. 1993. Українсько-Грецкий Розмовник (Українська, румейська, урумська мови). Донецьк: Донбас.

What has changed? I don't know, but as I speculated at The Other Place, both languages are now dying, and the encroachment of Russian means Tatar is no longer sensibly a threat to Greek, but a fellow victim. Kir'jakov was a schoolchild during the Springtime (born 1919); he may not have taken in the purist rhetoric that his teachers did, though he is only 16 years younger than Kostoprav. And as Perekhval'skaya dryly notes, "literary Rumeic is confined, unfortunately, to a small number of enthusiasts". The rapprochement with Urum may likewise be a matter of a small number of enthusiasts; most Mariupolitans may not even know there's an issue.

I don't know if Urums have got in touch with other speakers of Crimean Tatar—which is alive and kicking as a literary language back in Crimea. That would involve seeking out a Roofing Langauge (Dachsprache) that has nothing to do with Greek, and I still can't imagine the Urums take enough pride in their Crimean Tatar to align it to a more standard version. Kior's ad hoc Cyrillic, with <о' у'> for Latin <ö ü> or Turkic Cyrillic <ү ө>, simply means they did not have access to Turkic-specific typography in Donetsk or Kiev. (This was still 1993.) Would they have the motivation to seek out more standard Tatar typography now? Is there any activity in producing Urum literature now at all? I don't know.

If they do meet with their fellow speakers of Crimean Tatar, it will likely be awkward, like the meetings of Vlachs from Greece and Vlachs from elsewhere in the Balkans are. Too much separation in identity to work through. Anecdotally, the Greek Vlach approach to dealing with the separation in identity in get-togethers, though what I like to call the Grkoman Syllogism, backfires. ("We speak Vlach. We are Greek. You also speak Vlach. Argal, You're Actually Greek. And you will appreciate us telling you so.")

I can't imagine how such a meeting with their linguistic kin would go for Urums. For all I know, twenty years on, there's noone confident enough in their Urum to go. ...Read more

Shevchenko in Mariupolitan and Urum

The following are translations of Taras Shevchenko's Testament into Mariupolitan Greek and Urum. They appeared in 1993 side by side, in a volume of (mostly Greek) translations of Shevchenko, the Ukraine's national poet.

The texts appeared in Cyrillic—including Kostoprav's abridged translation, which would originally have appeared in the Soviet phonetic Greek alphabet. The transliterations into (sort of) Greek historical orthography and Turkic Latin (again, sort of) are mine. As standard in Mariupolitan Cyrillic, дъ тъ are δ θ, ти corresponds to palatalised κι, and the typically Slavic central vowel ы appears; I've transliterated it in Greek as <ɨ>. Greek linguists don't believe the latter two phonetic phenomena are real, and there'll be a separate post about that.

The Urum doesn't quite come out looking like Crimean Tatar: I can't tell where <ğ> has gone, and <ä> is new. (I'm confused from the comparison with Tatarstan Tatar on whether they actually have the same vowels, including <ä>.)

There will be more on the sociolinguistics of Urum; the publication these appeared in are in fact part of that story.

Mariupolitan Greek: Georgii Kostoprav (†1937)
Вісият Ан путъену—сикусет-ме пас т уба, педъыя. Пес ту чол платы ки ису, пес ту Украныя. Ас драну платэя занья ки ас сон ста фтыя-м ас Днипро та тьорка ярья т фувиро-т лалыя! Сикусет-ме—сикутъэты, сикутъэт апану. Фуртиксеты пес ту эема-т т атху тун душману! Ки атотыс, анда стэкит дугкуши ты флога, ми змунат на ме ангкевит дъыхос атху логу! (25 ту дъэкември 1845, ас ту Переяслав)	Βισιιάτ Αν πουθαίνου—σήκουσετ' με πας τ' ουμπά, παιδɨ́ια. Πες του τσ̌ολ πλατɨ́ κι ίσου, πες του Ουκρανɨ́ια. Ας ντρανού πλατέια ζάνια κι ας σών' στα 'φτɨ́ια μ' ας Ντνιπρό τα τιόρκα ιάρια τ' φουβηρό τ' λαλίια! Σήκουσετ' με—σηκουθέτɨ, σηκουθέτ' απάνου. Φούρτιξετɨ πες του αίμα τ' τ' άτ'χου τουν ντουσ̌μάνου! Κι ατότɨς, άντα στέκιτ' ντούgουσ̌η του φλόγα, μη ζμουνάτ' να με αγκέβιτ' δɨ́χος άτ'χου λόγου! (25 του Δεκέμβρη 1845, ας του Περεϊασλάβ)
[Shevchenko, Taras. 1993. Кобзар. Билыгмена пиимата пас та румейка ки урумика глоссис . [Kobzar: Selected poems in the Rumeic and Urum languages.] Ed. Kir'jakov, Leontii. Kiev: Україньский письменник. p. 174]
Mariupolitan Greek: Leontii Kir'jakov
Висият Ан путъану, парахосит пас т уба сис мена, с миданлыдъку т Украина, сту агапимену. Ап ату ту чол на феныт, ту Днипро чаларку, на виглызы, на акугу ту даушт хулчарку. Н та тъа рекс ах т Украина ема душманытку сту яло чах… го атотыс, та чоля намлыдъка— Фину ола-па, пету го, с тун тъэо паэну прощину-тун… ос атоты, тен тъэос ста мена. Парахосет-ме, скутъеты ки та пхавя хасит, ки н ту ема душманытку ту ратлых ифтясит. Ки атот, сн тайфа тюнурю, ол н та нышкны соя, ми змонат на ме ангкепсит н та кала та лоя. (25 ту дъекември 1845 ас ту Переяслав)	Βισιιάτ Αν πουθάνου, παραχώσιτ' πας τ' ουμπά σεις μένα, σ' μιντανλɨ́δκου τ' Ουκραΐνα, στου αγαπημένου. Απ' ατού του τσ̌ολ να φένɨ́τ', του Ντνιπρό τσ̌αλάρκου, να βιγλɨ́ζου, να ακούγου του νταούσ̌τ χουλτσ̌άρκου. 'Ντα θα ρέξ' αχ τ' Ουκραΐνα αίμα ντουσ̌μανɨ́τκου στου ιαλό τσ̌αχ… γω ατότɨς, τα τσ̌ολιά ναμλɨ́δκα— 'Φήνου όλα πα, πετού γω, στουν Θεό πααίνου προστσ̌υνού τουν… ως ατότɨ, τ' έν Θεός στα μένα. Παραχώσετ' με, σκουθέτɨ κι τα πχάβια χάσιτ', κι 'ν του αίμα ντουσ̌μανɨ́τκου του ρατλɨ́χ ιφτιάσιτ'. Κι ατότ, σ'ν ταϊφά τιουνούριου, ολ 'ν τα νɨ́σ̌κνɨ σόια μι ζμονάτ' να με αγκέψιτ' 'ν τα καλά τα λόια. (25 του Δεκέμβρη 1845, ας του Περεϊασλάβ)
[Shevchenko, Taras. 1993. Кобзар. Билыгмена пиимата пас та румейка ки урумика глоссис . [Kobzar: Selected poems in the Rumeic and Urum languages.] Ed. Kir'jakov, Leontii. Kiev: Україньский письменник. p. 175]
Urum: Valeri Kior
Сонти лаф Мен о'льсем, мены го'мерсыз, мезара хойарсыз, чо'лу'н орта бир йэрнэ-де Вкраиндэ агларсыз. Беретет мешерелеры, Днепрын ко'пу'рлеры мен го'ру'рду'м, мен шитырдым, насын бу'нгу'рлердыр. Тетырсе-дэ Украиндан сийа дэнызе-де душман ханы… сора мендэ джапнан изаннары— мен брахырдым, дэ учарым Аллага го'кэ мен хачетмейе… ну олмаздан Аллагы бильмем мен. Нас го'мерсыз, аман халхныз, путлары парланыз, душманнарын йаман ханнан вола'йа тамнаныз. Дэ мены йены достларнан, балабан тайфанан унутманыз анмайа сиз ийи йуваш лафнан. (25 декабырин 1845 Перейаславда)	Sonti laf Men öl'sem, menı gömersız, mezara hoyarsız, çölün orta bir yerne-de Vkrainde aglarsız. Beretet meşerelerı, Dneprın köpürlerı men görürdüm, men şitırdım, nasın büngürlerdır. Tetırse-de Ukraindan siya denıze-de duşman hanı… sora mende capnan izannarı— men brahırdım, de uçarım Allaga göke men haçetmeye… nu olmazdan Allagı bil'mem men. Nas gömersız, aman halhnız, putları parlanız, duşmannarın yaman hannan voläya tamnanız. De menı yenı dostlarnan, balaban tayfanan unutmanız anmaya siz iyi yuvaş lafnan. (25 dekabırin 1845 Pereyaslavda)
[Shevchenko, Taras. 1993. Кобзар. Билыгмена пиимата пас та румейка ки урумика глоссис . [Kobzar: Selected poems in the Rumeic and Urum languages.] Ed. Kir'jakov, Leontii. Kiev: Україньский письменник. p. 176]
Ukrainian: Taras Shevchenko	English: John Weir
Заповіт Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі, Серед степу широкого, На Вкраїні милій, Щоб лани широкополі, І Дніпро, і кручі Було видно, було чути, Як реве ревучий. Як понесе з України У синєє море Кров ворожу... отоді я І лани і гори -- Все покину і полину До самого Бога Молитися ... а до того Я не знаю Бога. Поховайте та вставайте, Кайдани порвіте І вражою злою кров'ю Волю окропіте. І мене в сім'ї великій, В сім'ї вольній, новій, Не забудьте пом'янути Незлим тихим словом. 25 декабря 1845 в Переяслові [Cited in Brama.com]	Testament When I am dead, bury me In my beloved Ukraine, My tomb upon a grave mound high Amid the spreading plain, So that the fields, the boundless steppes, The Dnieper's plunging shore My eyes could see, my ears could hear The mighty river roar. When from Ukraine the Dnieper bears Into the deep blue sea The blood of foes ... then will I leave These hills and fertile fields -- I'll leave them all and fly away To the abode of God, And then I'll pray .... But till that day I nothing know of God. Oh bury me, then rise ye up And break your heavy chains And water with the tyrants' blood The freedom you have gained. And in the great new family, The family of the free, With softly spoken, kindly word Remember also me. 25 December 1845, Pereiaslav Translated in Toronto, 1961 [Cited in Wikipedia]

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Demotic in the Soviet Union

In the short-lived Springtime of the Nationalities, in the late '20s and early '30s, the Soviet Union encouraged its multitudinous constituent ethniticies to develop their languages into modern instruments of proletarian thought. Many languages were first written down in that period, and it was a freewheeling time, just as it was in art, poetry and music. The Springtime didn't last long: many of the intellectuals involved were shot in the Great Purge, many of the ethnicities involved were internally displaced as undesirables, and the primacy of Russian was reasserted. Even more than that, the primacy of Cyrillic was reasserted, and the Latin-based Turkic alphabets of the Springtime were thrown out.

Which means they're now coming back in messy ways, but that's not what I'm posting about.

The ethnic Greeks of the Soviet Union were one of the ethnicities encouraged in the Springtime, and decapitated in the Purgetime. There are two major groups of ethnic Greeks: the larger group are Pontians who migrated to Russia and the Caucasus in the 18th and 19th century.

The smaller group are the Mariupolitans, who are a fascinating enclave in the history of Greek. Their language isn't Pontic, though it has some elements in common; it is a good deal closer to the European variants of Greek. They originally lived in the Crimea, and had been there certainly since Byzantine times. (Yalta and Livadiya still have Greek names.) In fact, when the first and last fragments of Crimean Gothic were recorded in 1562, "one was a Greek speaker who knew Crimean Gothic as a second language, the other a Goth who had abandoned his native language in favour of Greek", and Busbecq's manuscript is full of Greek definite articles.

The Crimean Greeks were invited to live in the region of Azov by Catherine the Great, and moved en masse in 1778—naming one of their new villages Yalta. A portion of the population spoke a form of Crimean Tatar, which they call Urum ("Roman", i.e. Greek, because that's what they considered themselves to be.) There's an interesting sociolinguistic story with Urum as well, but I'm deferring that to a following post.

There's a third group of Greeks in the former Soviet Union, btw, though they weren't there in the Springtime: political refugees from the Greek Civil War. Reportedly, these Greeks thought the decapitated local Greek intelligentsia got what they deserved, because Comrade Stalin was infallible. But this post is not about that either.

Now, Pontic is not mutually intelligible with Standard Modern Greek. Especially when the Pontic is spoken by someone in Sürmene or Stavropol, and not Kalamaria. You have a far better chance understanding it written, because the historical orthography used by both Standard and Pontic offer helpful hints. And if you're informed about the key differences between Standard and Pontic, it doesn't take much for you to work Pontic out: a few key words and sound changes, and you're substantially better equipped to understand it. It's not English and German, or even English and Dutch (that'd be Tsakonian); it's more like English and Scots. (Not Groundskeeper Willie Scots. Real Scots, as in "what the hell is that Aberdonian saying to me?") Nonetheless, even if it is spoken by someone in Kalamaria, snippets of Pontic on Greek TV will be subtitled; standard Greek speakers will definitely struggle to get what's going on if they hear Pontic spoken. And that distinction matters.

I'm tiptoeing around the ghost of the old (and false) assumption "language = ethnicity", because it's the debate underlying this post. This post is about the debate during the Springtime of the Nationalities, on what form of Greek to use. Vlasis Agtzidis gives a detailed account of how the debate ran, with a tug of war between the two major camps that was resolved by a committee decision in Moscow—and by death squads a couple of years later.

Agztidis' paper was on the site ocena.info, itself a fascinating subject. ocena.info appears to be down, and I've copied it to my site for now. The original citation: Aγτζίδης, Βλάσης. "Το γλωσσικό ζήτημα στις ελληνικές κοινότητες της Σοβιετικής Ένωσης", Τα ιστορικά 43, Dec 2005.

[UPDATE: the paper is back on romeyika.com]

There were three attitudes to which language should be used. A conservative attitude was to stick with what had been the prestige language variant of Greek until then, Puristic. But the 1920s was no time to be conservative in the USSR, and that faction never got a serious hearing; in fact holdouts teaching in Puristic were reported to the authorities.

No, the 1920s were a radical time, a time to put the intelligentsia in the service of the people. A time in fact for the unprecedented step of writing Greek in a phonetic Greek alphabet. My post isn't about spelling reform either though! (The previous one was.) It's about the main conflict for which language should be used. The "moderate" party advocated the Demotic of Greece. The "radical" party advocated the local vernaculars, Pontic and Mariupolitan. (Noone advocated Urum, and that's the followup post.)

The debate went on for some eight years, with different newspapers taking different sides, and intellectuals changing sides. In his 1928 grammar of Demotic, Kostas Topcharas wrote:

An objection could be addressed to our language: Why didn't we make Pontic our instrument? We will answer: Though Pontic differs from Demotic a lot, it is a dialect. Moreover it is uncultivated, and having 150,000 people cultivate it now would be both utopian and narrowly parochial.

Of course, the Springtime of the Nationalities was all about utopias and parochialism, and making Pontic a written language in 1926 was as silly as making Athenian Demotic a written language in 1876; I don't think that was the major argument for Demotic, and I'll come back to that. But by 1934, Topcharas had changed his mind, and was advocating Pontic as the written language. As I noted, his school grammar of Pontic, which has been reprinted in Greece, is where Wikipedia Pontic orthography has got its digraphs from, particularly its telltale ςς.

At the beginning, Demotic was what was used, and what we could now call communist Demotic at that: the form of Demotic favoured by the Greek Left by the '20s, following Psichari in making less concessions to Puristic than others', and so regarded by the others as extremist. As I wrote at another time, Psichari was a royalist, and the communists of the '10s regarded Demotic as a bourgeois distraction; so that this ideological colouring was not inevitable, but it has stuck since.

I'm reluctant to call it "Standard" Demotic btw, precisely because there was ongoing debate about how many concessions to make to Puristic, and Demotic was really only standardised by Triantafyllidis in 1941 (at the request of the fascist Metaxas regime, which again shows the peril of assuming neat ideological maps). But whatever the status of this Demotic in Greece, it was clearly a language of Greece, of the κατωμερίτες "down-landers", and not the language spoken by the ethnic Greeks of the USSR.

This motivated the "radicals" to advocate using the local vernaculars, and elevating them to the status of written languages. The local vernaculars were in the ascendancy for a fair while, which caused a large body of Pontic and Mariupolitan to be published. Much of it was socialist realist literature of the girl–meets–tractor variety admittedly, but it was a literature delighting in flexing its newly found muscle.

Which made it all the more surprising when the All-Union Central Committee for a New Alphabet (consisting of Greek intellectuals and Soviet linguists) decided in Moscow in 1934 that the language of the ethnic Greeks of the USSR shall be the Demotic of Greece. It was the official decision from on high, and writers and the press scrambled to comply. Agtzidis notes that the flow of local literature dried up quickly; local authors weren't even being published in Demotic, and the presses limited themselves to reprinting literature from Greece. Some "radicals" continued to agitate for Pontic, and there was going to be a second meeting of the Central Committee in 1936, to review the decision. Then came the Purge, and that was the end of local Greek literature until Glasnost.

Agtzidis expresses surprise that the local authors didn't switch to Demotic to continue publishing. Now, I admit that I probably see the world differently to Agtzidis, and that is not necessarily an asset; but me, I'm not surprised. Downlander Greek was not their language; it was an unfamiliar language they had to learn at school. Clearly it could be learned, and journalism continued in Downlander Greek; but literary authors in particular had been sold on the notion of writing in their mother tongue, the language of their daily life. (The same rhetoric after all prevailed in the literature of Greece.) And Downlander Greek was not the language of their hearth.

Which brings us back to the perilous equation of "language = ethnicity", and the implication that if you made Pontic or Mariupolitan a distinct language (that is, formed a distinct literary norm), you were making Pontians and Mariupolitans a distinct ethnicity. Agtzidis is at pains to point out that the "radicals" were not moving in that direction: they distinguished themselves from the Downlanders or from Bourgeois Greece, but they still saw themselves as kin ("the Greek race", "our nation"). That still applies: Pontians in Russia still distinguish themselves from Hellenes (and they think Mariupolitans talk funny), but they acknowledge they're part of the same family, as the forum thread I stumbled on shows.

Got to quote the Russian Pontian forum on Greece Greeks, and on Mariupolitan:

Ксерите педья оти ипе енан филос му а по тин еллада, Оти ромеяс ке елленес ехи ена ема ;-) (Elena S.)

You know what a friend of mine from Greece said, Romei [Pontians] and Hellenes [Greece Greeks] have the same blood. ;-)

Атор епика скачать румейка трагодиас а со сайт Азовские греки. И мусики эн еморфи, ам и глосса... :-) :-) :-) Агрико олигон :-| Эна трагодия легет "Ах, курциц, курциц". Та румей лен "курцицья" та корцопа! :-D Тема та пачидес йелуне полла м ато то логон. (Olga R.)

I've just been listening to Greek songs on the site "Azov Greeks". The music is beautiful, but the language! :-) :-) :-) I don't understand much. :-| One song is called "Ah, kurtsits, kurtsits!. The Greeks call girls (kortsopa), "kurtsits!" :-D Our pachudes (?) are laughing a lot with that word.

Agtzidis, I think it's fair to say, doesn't think a separate literary norm for Pontic would have been a wonderful idea. It is after all driving a wedge between Pontians and Downlanders—though that's a wedge already there in their spoken languages; making it a norm just makes the wedge official. And had the Purge not happened, Pontic in the USSR could have gone along with a diglossia like Cyprus' or Swiss German's (*not* like Greece's, which is why I keep saying Greece is a bad example of diglossia): Demotic as a standard language learned at school and used in public discourse, Pontic used in daily life and with limited use in literature.

I do think it would have been cool if the radicals had succeeded in getting their own norm. Cool in an entertainment-for-linguists way, I admit: if it wasn't for the radicals, we wouldn't have the corpus of Mariupolitan that we do (and that has not been used enough in linguistics), and we wouldn't have the poetry of Georgi Kostoprav. But I'm not convinced it would be a disaster for Hellenism; forcing Greeks to realise that Hellenism is not all about Athens is a useful thing.

At any rate, those are idle thoughts; after 1936 there was no Pontic or Mariupolitan literary norm; many of the Pontians and Mariupolitans of the USSR are now moving to Greece and learning Standard Greek, and Mariupolitan itself is fast dying out, yielding to Russian. (They're on the Ukrainian side of the border politically but not culturally.) The Greek government is sending Greek teachers to Mariupol', to teach the children there Downlander Greek—which is going to kill off the indigenous form of the language that much faster. You'll pardon me if I don't applaud the initiative.

Agtzidis' article ends with a question: Soviet language policy was eager to split ethnicities within the USSR from their kin outside: Moldavian differentiated from Rumanian, Buryat from Mongolian. Why then did Moscow affirm Demotic in 1934, instead of encouraging local norms of Pontic and Mariupolitan—which would inevitably have separated the local Greeks from the Downlanders?

I don't know, and I'm curious if readers that know about the politics of the time have any opinion. My guess is, the USSR was anxious to forestall irredentism, so they split ethnicities from speakers of the same language across the border; but Greece was very far away. When the Purge did come, the first Greeks against the wall were those who were advocating for an autonomous republic of Greeks in Southern Russia; so splittism was still a source of anxiety; but annexation from Bourgeois Greece was not.

That explains why Moscow wouldn't object to Demotic; it doesn't explain why they'd prefer it to Pontic and Mariupolitan, which were winning. That depends on who was on the committee in Moscow, and whether anyone higher up than the committee cared enough. Professional linguists were involved, and that this was tied up with them publishing descriptions of the local variants; but in 1934 USSR, that does not preclude ideological considerations. (It doesn't preclude them in say 2010 Brussels either, to be fair.)

• Maybe enough on the committee, even at that late stage, were still committed internationalists, and wanted a vehicle for solidarity with communists in Greece.
• Maybe they were hardheaded like Topcharas was (or claimed to be) in 1928, and thought it a waste of time to develop a literary norm when one was already available; the Committee had decided for Demotic in 1926, when it adopted the phonetic alphabet, and it did not change its mind in 1934.
• Maybe Demotic was removed enough from the hearth that they felt it could dampen the calls for an autonomous Greek republic, as less of a rallying point.
• And maybe it was just a local outcome, without intervention from the Politburo which didn't actually care enough about the debate—and with the moderate party being more effective at lobbying than the radicals. That there was going to be a second meeting in 1936 suggests the Committee were still open to argument.

To take us out, a sample of 1930s Mariupolitan. The collected poetry of Kostoprav are online from the 1995 publication, magnificently glossed word for word by Ioakeim Ioannidis, so I won't cite them. Instead, I'll cite from another volume of Mariupolitan literature that I got through interlibrary loan from Oxford—as it turns out, from Richard MacGillivray Dawkins' library) (yes, a different Richard Dawkins). It's the same volume I used in my post on Soviet Greek orthography, Φλογομινίτρες Σπίθες.

To be ornery for those who assume mutual intelligibility, I'm not going to gloss it, and I invite readers to have a go at translating it. This will be a problem, because the lack of mutual intelligibility means *I* don't know what it means either.

(Remember, υ is /u/, ςς is /ʃ/.)

Α.Φ. Σαρμπάςς: Όλι πες τ' αρτέλι! p. 27

Συρέφτανε πες τ' αρτέλ
Ολ' γαρίπκυ κόζμος.
Ατόρα κάμυμ δυλιά
Τίλογα δίχ-μας νόμος.

Τι μπικένιπςαςν-το πλυςς,
Τίνα χυλατράιβαν γιαλτζίδια
Ατίντς τι πέλςαντς πες τ' αρτέλ
Να χαραμόννε τ' δλία.

Μις μία τι' άλο τ' πλυςς' ς
Τιθά τς παρακαλίςυμ,
Μις ατόρα λίγυς πλυςς
Τι' άλυ καλά να ζίςυμ!

Τα τάτις-μας υρνέφκανταν
Μέρα-νίχτα πες τ' δυλία,
Αμα ατό τ' ίκςιραν-τυ
Οτ ίταν πες ςκυτνία

Ας το παλέο βαςιλία
Γαρίπ τράβαναν νιςτκάδα,
Ατό ίτυν αχ τ' ατό
Τα δλίις οτ τ' ίχαν γράδα.

Ατόρα κάμυμ δυλία
Τίπυς-πα τι νιάςςκυμιτς.
Μις-τον εργάτ, εργάτε-μας
Δύγνιμας τυ χράςςκυμιτς.

Ις-δικρό, άλυς-γυλφάν
Δυλέβυμ ςςένκα πες το ζαν.
Τα μαςςίνις τζαλέβνε,
Τα τζαράνια υςέβνε!

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