The declension of -ευς: Ionic forward to Modern Greek

In the last (but one) post, we worked out a reconstruction of the -ευς declension, to the point that we could explain the Homeric inflections. Where we wanted to get to was not Homer, but Aristophanes' Attic. But once we have the proto-forms in place, we can use sound change rules and analogy to explain how forms have changed, so that we can make sense of why Attic looked the way it did. After all, being able to account for later forms is the point of reconstruction.

I'm going to start by putting up those Homeric endings again; we'll be treating Homer, rather than proto-Greek as a starting point—because the dialects we're working with will allow that. (Epic Greek is a mishmash of a lot of dialects, but its core is Ionic; and Attic is a deviant sibling of Ionic.)

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom	εύς eús	ῆε ɛ̂ːɛ	ῆες ɛ̂ːes
Gen	ῆος ɛ̂ːos	ήοιν ɛ́ːoin	ήων ɛ́ːɔːn
Dat	ῆι ɛ̂ːi	ήοιν ɛ́ːoin	εῦσι eûsi
Acc	ῆα ɛ̂ːa	ῆε ɛ̂ːɛ	ήᾱς ɛ́ːaːs
Voc	εῦ eû	ῆε ɛ̂ːɛ	ῆες ɛ̂ːes

No small number of you will be quite familiar with Attic (or with Koine, or with Modern Greek, whose lineage is more or less from Attic). Some of those endings wouldn't fit in Attic at all. Why?

• For one thing, the Homeric table has a whole lot of vowels next to other vowels. That's hiatus: Greek is normally not comfortable with hiatus, and proto-Greek vowel pairs usually merge ("contract") to a new vowel or diphthong. In fact, hiatus in Classical Greek is usually a sign that there used to be a digamma there that has dropped off; while the /w/ was there, it prevented contraction. That's exactly what has happened with these endings: *-ɛːwos > -ɛːos. But Greek kept contracting vowels after Homer, and we will see some of that on the way to Attic.
  
• The other thing that may strike you as odd is that it's an eta preceding another vowel. Some vowel pairs do make it into Attic: contraction is not universal. But pairs like ηε, ηο, ηα don't show up in words of Attic: they scream out Homer. That suggests that something has happened to eta in pairs in particular, since that eta has not survived into Attic.

I'm going to start with the second observation. There is a rule that long vowels are shortened before another vowel (if they survive contraction). This doesn't happen in all dialects, and it doesn't happen to all vowels; but it does happen in Attic and Ionic with η; for example, Homeric ἠώς /ɛːɔ́ːs/ corresponds to Attic ἔως /éɔːs/.

We can use that rule, on its own, to explain what has happened in Ionic. It's not the only possible explanation, but it will serve for this exposition:

	Singular	Plural
Nom	eús	êːs
Gen	éos	éɔːn
Dat	êː	eûsi
Acc	éa	éaːs
Voc	eû	êːs

We can explain this table almost entirely by shorting the Homeric /ɛː/ systematically, whenever it occurs in front of another vowel (which, for this declension, is always). There are a couple of peculiarities:

• The table has a long e, /êːs/, where we would expect two short e's, /ees/. That's a new contraction, and I don't think anyone should be surprised at that contraction. The suffix has a circumflex on the final syllable, which is usually a giveaway that contraction has happened.
  
• The table also has a long e in the dative singular, /êː/, where we would expect /éi/. That's also a contraction (as the circumflex tells you), and the contraction shouldn't be a surprise either. In fact, the shortened /e/ occasionally turns up in this declension in Homer already, which as a result does feature the expected /éi/ -έϊ.

The contraction of /ei/ to /eː/ was early: early enough, that <ei> is actually how you write /eː/ in Ancient Greek: ει. Because /ei/ turned into /eː/, you need historical linguistics, or pre-Classical texts, to tell whether an instance of ει reflects an earlier /ei/ ("genuine diphthong"), or started out as /eː/ ("spurious diphthong").

So we've been able to explain Ionic reasonably easily as well. There's some features that the textbooks are sweeping under the carpet to simplify things, and make the dialects look purer than they are. For instance, the grammars don't highlight the fact that you'll occasionally see short epsilon in Homer; they're describing internally consistent dialect tables, that are abstracted from the messier dialect mixes of texts. But this is a clean table.

The table for Attic is not as clean, which is why you have to go via the cleaner Homeric and Ionic tables to make sense of it:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom	eús	ɛ̂ː	ɛ̂ːs
Gen	éɔːs	éoin	éɔːn
Dat	êː	éoin	eûsi
Acc	éaː	ɛ̂ː	éaːs
Voc	eû	ɛ̂ː	ɛ̂ːs

It looks like the Ionic table, but it's not quite the same. In fact, while the Ionic table is explained by a systematic shortening of /ɛː/, the Attic table shows that the shorting was not systematic.

Let's start with the genitive singular, which is /éɔːs/ -έως, where Epic had /ɛ̂ːos/ -ῆος and Ionic had /éos/ -έος. That -εως suffix turns up as a genitive elsewhere in Attic, with both penult and antepenult stress; so Attic λύσις, λύσεως, corresponding to Ionic λύσις, λύσιος. But there's something very wrong about the accent of λύσεως /lýseɔːs/. Greek is not supposed to allow stress on the antepenult if the ultima is long (the three-mora rule): ἄνθρωπος /án.tʰrɔː.pos/, ἀνθρώπου /an.tʰrɔ́.poː/. λύσεως ends in a long syllable; but it is accented on the antepenult.

So λύσεως is accented as if it ends in a short /o/, and it is a case which in proto-Greek (and other dialects) ends in a short /o/. The conclusion is that genitive /eɔːs/ comes from the Old Ionic /ɛːos/, and (in those other declensions where it is stressed on the antepenult) is still accented like the Old Ionic /ɛːos/.

We just saw that Ionic shortened /ɛːos/ to /eos/. Attic is also shortening /ɛː/ in the suffix—but it seems to be lengthening the following /o/, in compensation. This is called quantitative metathesis: the longness of the vowel ("quantity") is being swapped ("metathesis") from the first vowel to the second; and Attic does it routinely for /ɛː/ before /o/. In fact, it does so regularly enough, that it gave rise to a new flavour of the second declension:

• Proto-Greek *λᾱός */laːós/, Doric λᾱός /laːós/, Epic λᾱός /laːós/, Ionic ληός /lɛːós/, Attic λεώς /leɔ́ːs/, Koine λᾱός /laːós/, Modern λαός /laˈos/
  
• Proto-Greek *νᾱός */naːós/, Doric νᾱός /naːós/, Epic νηός /nɛːós/, Ionic νηός /nɛːós/, Attic νεώς /neɔ́ːs/, Koine νᾱός /naːós/, Modern ναός /naˈos/

So second-declension nouns, which in Greek end in a short /o/, could end in Attic in a long /ɔː/—provided there was compensatory lengthening quantitative metathesis from a preceding /ɛː/. This was an oddity specific to Attic; and although Koine normally went along with Attic, this was an oddity that Koine smoothed over.

Compensatory lengtheningQuantitative metathesis means that Attic didn't just shorten all /ɛː/, like Ionic did. It lengthened the following syllables as well, where it could. If we do quantitative lengthening metathesis to the Homeric table, we end up with the following:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom	eús	*éɛː	*éɛːs
Gen	éɔːs	*éɔːin	éɔːn
Dat	*éiː	*éɔːin	eûsi
Acc	éaː	*éɛː	éaːs
Voc	eû	*éɛː	*éɛːs

That's close to the actual Attic table. If we do some contractions, it becomes even closer. Attic liked to contract; and even if there used to be a digamma there, Attic would contract two e's together if it caught them. Remember that the aorist *ἔϝεργον /éwerɡon/ became ἔεργον /éerɡon/ in Epic, but εἶργον /êːrɡon/ in Attic—which could not stand two /e/ in a row. Attic also contracted /eɛː/ to /ɛː/; for example, the subjunctives λύ-ῃς, λύ-ητε /lý-ɛːis, lý-ɛːte/ correspond to the subjunctives *ποιέ-ῃς, *ποιέ-ητε /poié-ɛːis, poié-ɛːte/, which in Attic contract to ποιῇς, ποιῆτε /poiɛ̂ːs, poiɛ̂ːte/. (And remember: a circumflex on the final syllable points to contraction.)

If we contract /eɛː/ to /ɛː/, our mapping to Attic is pretty much done:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom	eús	ɛ̂ː	ɛ̂ːs
Gen	éɔːs	*éɔːin	éɔːn
Dat	*éiː	*éɔːin	eûsi
Acc	éaː	ɛ̂ː	éaːs
Voc	eû	ɛ̂ː	ɛ̂ːs

Chantraine in his historical morphology reports that inscriptions do contain -έης /éɛːs/ plurals at around 400 BC; but the default plural was contracted -ῆς /ɛ̂ːs/.

There are two exceptions to deal with in the table; Chantraine takes it upon himself to address both. The dative is not uncontracted */éiː/ (έῑ), but contracted /êː/ (εῖ), just as in Ionic; its protoform (as with Ionic) is */ei/ not */ɛːi/. Chantraine says that the short /e/ of */ei/ was an analogy from other cases (eús, éɔːs, éaː); maybe, but I can see /éiː/ contracting to /eː/ anyway, and there were plenty of /eː/ datives in other third declension nouns, to serve as an analogy.

The other exception is the dual genitive/dative, which is not *έῳν /éɔːin/, but έοιν /éoin/—again, as it would have been in Ionic, with no quantitative metathesis. The dual was already dying out in Attic, and was dead in Ionic; that's why I didn't give any Ionic duals above. So Attic can't have borrowed έοιν from Ionic. Chantraine's take on it is cheeky, with the kind of cheekiness that neogrammarians can display: if the manuscripts have a dual that doesn't match the predictions of historical linguistics, then the manuscripts must be wrong.

In particular, Chantraine latches on to a genitive plural βασιλέων in Aescyhlus (Suppliants 327), which refers to two kings: this might have been a correction of the original dual βασιλέῳν. And the 1972 Page edition does indeed present βασιλέωιν in this text: πῶς οὖν τελευτᾶι βασιλέωιν νείκη τάδε; "So how did this strife between kings end up?"

Again, maybe; but again, έοιν duals turn up elsewhere in Attic, and could have served as a pattern of analogy to get rid of the idiosyncratic (and rare) dual. The same ending shows up in the dual for "ships": proto-Greek *νᾱοῖν /naːoîn/, Homeric *νηοῖν /nɛːoîn/ should have generated Attic *νεῷν /neɔ̂ːin/, but instead Thucydides has νεοῖν /neoîn/—bringing it back in line with all the other duals ending in /oin/. And if speakers of Attic didn't do the analogy, then subsequent scribes would: "A dual in -έῳν? That doesn't look right."

(Analogy did not get rid of -εως, because it was just as idiosyncratic, but it was also really really common: speakers were just too used to it. In fact, even when Koine did back away from -εως where it could—λύσις λύσιος instead of λύσις λύσεως, ναός instead of νεώς; but it did not back away from βασιλέως. Soon enough, βασιλέως was pronounced identically to the more normal Ionic βασιλέος, anyway.)

So it looks like Ionic shortened the -η- consistently, while Attic shortened it with quantitative metathesis, lengthening the following vowel. This resulted in several strange endings, and some of them stuck (notably -έως), while for others, the lengthened final vowel went away, and went back to looking like Ionic (-εῖ, έοιν). In a few cases, the metathesis wouldn't make a difference: ῆες and έης both contract to ῆς.

Now, all that explains why Acharnians would be written Ἀχαρνῆς: *Ἀχαρνῆϝες > Ἀχαρνῆες > Ἀχαρνέης > Ἀχαρνῆς, *akʰarnɛ̂ːwes > akʰarnɛ̂ːes > *akʰarnéɛːs > akʰarnɛ̂ːs. But why would Sarantakos have used the Ionic Ἀχαρνεῖς /akʰarnêːs/ instead?

There are a couple of causes to go through. The immediate cause is that Athenians also started using the Ionic Ἀχαρνεῖς, but not at the time of Aristophanes. The Acharnians were written in 425 BC. With the 404 BC spelling reform, Attic acquired the letter Η from Ionic, and started differentiating /eː, e, ɛː/, as the Ionic alphabet did. At that time, the plural was written as -ης. But between 350 BC and 325 BC, the plural changed to being written as -εις, /êːs/ instead. Which happens to be the Ionic plural, derived from */ées/, not /ɛːes/ > /eɛːs/. Later on, this -εις nominative was copied to the accusative as well—by analogy with other third declension nouns (nom. sg. πόλις, ἡδύς, nom. pl. and acc. pl. πόλεις, ἡδεῖς).

Why would the switch have happened? Sihler thinks that the first -e- in */ées/ came in by analogy with the -e- in the other plural cases, /éɔːn, éaːs/. But that means Sihler thinks /ɛ̂ːes/ changed to */ées/; and we don't think it did: we think it had already changed to /éɛːs/ by quantitative metathesis. So that explanation doesn't make sense.

Chantraine takes a broader view of what would have happened: inscriptions around 400 BC had -εης /eɛːs/, Attic poets used -έες /ées/—"possibly an Ionicism"; and then /ées/ contracted into /êːs/. So while Chantraine isn't outright claiming it, he is allowing that /êːs/ is indeed a borrowing from Ionic.

This means that Aristophanes would have written Acharnians as Ἀχαρνῆς, but Athenians a century later were pronouncing and writing it as Ἀχαρνεῖς. I have no idea what the earliest manuscripts of Aristophanes have it as; I can easily see people, a century on, respelling the Acharnians they way they would now pronounce it, because they did not know yet that every vowel of Aristophanes was sacred. Even if the entire manuscript tradition of Aristophanes had the Ἀχαρνεῖς spelling, modern editors are doing their job in trying to work out how Aristophanes would originally have spelled it, and would see it as in their rights to restore the spelling as Ἀχαρνῆς.

At any rate, the Hellenistic grammarians certainly knew about -ῆς as a spelling specific to the Athenians; so people two or three centuries on were certainly aware what would have been the original spelling. Herodian in ii AD spells out our reconstruction implicitly:

Nouns ending in -εις are recessively accented, if their singular is recessively accented: Δημοσθένης, Δημοσθένεις. But if the singular has an acute or circumflex on the ultima, they take the circumflex: εὐγενής εὐγενεῖς, Ἡρακλῆς Ἡρακλεῖς. But Athenians contract these with an η, and they similarly put a circumflex on that: ἱππῆς from ἱππέες, βασιλέες becomes βασιλῆς. (De prosodia catholica p. 424 Lentz)

In ix AD, George Choeroboscus spells it out explicitly, if mistakenly:

Rarely, in the dual, εε are contracted into the diphthong ει, as in ταρίχεε ταρίχει, πόλεε πόλει [...] and in the plural they are contracted into η, as in ἱππέες ἱππῆς and βασιλέες βασιλῆς. These are Attic, and the Attic-speakers do this only with ευς nouns, I mean contracting εε into η in the nominative plural. (Prolegomena et scholia in Theodosii Alexandrini canones isagogicos de flexione nominum, p. 182)

That is, Choeroboscus doesn't know about *έης, and thinks the Attic ending -ῆς is an exception to the normal contraction of /ee/ to ει /eː/. (He repeats elsewhere that outside of Attic, the plural is of ἱππεύς βασιλεύς is ἱππεῖς βασιλεῖς.) He goes on to offer two theories why this exception has happened; another's, that it's because of the following /s/; and his own, that first and second declension nominative plurals also end in ι (φίλοι, κοχλίαι).

So that's why there could be a question about whether to write Acharnians as Ἀχαρνῆς or Ἀχαρνεῖς. The -ῆς ending was identified as peculiarly Old Attic, and it did not make it into Koine: the plural there is the Ionic and New Attic -εῖς.

Classicists have no compunction spelling it the Old Attic way. Puristic was supposed to revive the glories of Ancient Greek (which predate New Attic); you'd have thought they would have tried to get all Greekdom speaking of βασιλῆς. Yet you'll never see βασιλῆς written in Puristic, only βασιλεῖς. In fact, Modern Greeks will only be familiar with the βασιλῆς spelling if they paid attention in Ancient Greek class (and sometimes, not even then: I have been asked whether one instance was a spelling mistake).

The reason for that is, the mission of Puristic was not defined positively, as restoring Attic, but negatively, as cleansing Modern Greek of foreign elements and corruption. The cleansing of foreign elements in vocabulary was pretty successful; but the cleansing of corruption could mean anything, depending on how far back you consider corruption to have set in. The result was that Puristic morphology became pretty eclectic and inconsistent, because different writers decided on different levels of corruption to deign to put up with; but outside a few decades of insanity in the end of the 19th century, Puristic gave up on trying to revive Ancient Greek outright. What it did seek to do consistently was use anything but what the contemporary vernacular was using.

So sometimes Puristic went back to Early Modern Greek (futures in θέλω + Infinitive); but often, Puristic would go back to Koine, as opposed to going all the way back to Attic. Puristic displaced the Arabic targumān > δραγουμάνος "interpreter", and replaced it with the Byzantine διερμηνεύς (instead of the Koine διερμηνευτής). And it never used the Attic plural *διερμηνῆς: Puristic used the same plural as the Byzantines would have used, the Koine διερμηνεῖς.

Modern Greek also uses διερμηνεῖς, because of Puristic; but that is not the vernacular development of -ευς nouns (which διερμηνεῖς is not). The vernacular switched all its third declension nouns to first declension in the singular, so βασιλεύς /basileús/ became βασιλέας /vasiˈleas/. Initially, the vernacular left the nominative plural of the third declension alone, so the plural would have remained βασιλεῖς /vasiˈlis/.

But avoidance of hiatus made βασιλέας into βασιλιάς /vasiˈljas/, a first declension noun accented on the final syllable. And the vernacular gave such oxytone first declension nouns a plural in -άδες: βασιλιάς βασιλιάδες /vasiˈljas vasiˈljaðes/, μαθητής μαθητάδες /maθiˈtis maθiˈtaðes/. Modern Greek has rolled that plural back for -ης nouns, under indirect Puristic influence, but βασιλιάδες is still the Modern plural.

Why is -άδες a plural? Well, in Koine, -ᾶς became a widespread agent suffix: ζυτᾶς κασσιτερᾶς κλειδᾶς "brewer, tinker, locksmith". The suffix still exists in Modern Greek: ψωμάς, κομπιουτεράς, Ζητάς "breadmaker, computer geek, Zeta Force guy (police motorcyclist)". This meant that there were suddenly a lot of first declension /-as/ nouns accented in Greek on the ultima; in Attic they had been few and obscure, and even fewer had a plural.

But Greek had a lot of third declension nouns ending in accented /-as/, since that was a widespread feminine suffix: Κρονιάς, κυκλάς, λαμπάς, ναϊάς "Saturnalia, encircling, torch, naiad". And its plural, -άδες, was much less odd-looking than the correct, contracted first declension plural -αῖ would have been. So the plural of torches, λαμπάδες, was carried across to these new agent nouns, κλειδᾶδες, and eventually to the normal first declension nouns, ending in -ής, μαθητάδες.

As linguists have pointed out before me, the clash of Puristic and Vernacular Greek has meant that Modern Greek now has two ways of saying "kings": the kind of mess that was the natural legacy of diglossia. Colloquial Greek has βασιλιάς βασιλιάδες. Puristic had βασιλεύς βασιλεῖς; high register Modern Greek cleans up the singular to be first declension rather than third declension, but it goes back to Middle Greek to do so, with βασιλέας βασιλεῖς.

So if you want to show royalty more deference than is usual in contemporary Greece, you will use the pseudo-Puristic βασιλέας βασιλεῖς, instead of the colloquial βασιλιάς βασιλιάδες.

Markos Vamvakaris managed to show deference to the king with the colloquial βασιλιάς (Καλώς μας ήρθες Βασιληά, "Welcome back, King!"; but 1935 was a very different time.

I'm curious how many Greeks' heads are exploding right now, to hear Vamvakaris wrote a royalist paean in rebetiko (right after recording Κάν' τονε Σταύρο Κάντονε, "Get that bong ready, Stavros" no less, his catchy ditty about group drug intoxication.)

I could go back and report what the historical grammars say about other Ancient dialects' declensions, but I've established what I needed to establish, and there are posts on Modern Greek compound accentuation to write.
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The declension of -ευς: Homeric back to Proto-Greek

I've been neglecting Ancient Greek, and I don't know that my posts on Ancient Greek are particularly quality offerings anyway. But, once again, perusing the comments of the Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog has given me an idea for a posting—on Ancient rather than Modern Greek for a change. The post is no surprise to anyone who has read an Ancient Greek grammar; it's half a page's worth of a Historical Grammar of Greek.

I'll walk through the page in slow motion, because I'm loath to pass up an opportunity to be didactic. It'll be slow enough, it'll drag through two posts.

It's not much of a premiss. Sarantakos spelled Acharnians in a post as Αχαρνείς, and the first comment off the cab rank asked, simply: Εν τέλει είναι “Αχαρνείς” ή “Αχαρνής”;

To the classicists whose teeth have been set on edge by the monotonic, I'll render that as: "Should it be spelled Ἀχαρνῆς or Ἀχαρνεῖς?" I'm going to spend most of this post and the next working through the historical morphology of -ευς nouns. In this post, from Homeric backwards, and in the next post, post-Homeric (including why Attic had the plural Ἀχαρνῆς and then Ἀχαρνεῖς.) In the second post, I'll add a codicil on why a Modern Greek speaker would hesitate over the spelling. Yes, once again, Puristic is to blame—this time, because it wasn't as pure as it claimed it was.

Ancient Greek had lots of dialects, and dialects had different ways of declining the same nouns. In historical linguistics, we reconstruct proto-forms, not because we particularly care to know what some tribe's language was five thousand years ago, but because we can use those proto-forms to explain the diversity of later forms. There's several dialects to explain; we want to explain the Attic of Aristophanes ultimately, but we're going to start with the variant of Greek that everyone starts with, Homeric Greek.

Now, there are three declensions of Ancient Greek nouns, and -ευς nouns are third declension nouns. That means that, underlyingly, it shares the following inflections with all other third declension nouns:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom	s	e	es
Gen	os	oin	ɔːn
Dat	i	oin	si
Acc	a	e	as
Voc	—	e	es

That in itself is a reconstruction. In some nouns, the pattern is clear: φύλαξ, φύλακος, φύλακι, pʰýlak-s, pʰýlak-os, pʰýlak-i... For other nouns, the pattern is harder to see: λύσις, λύσεως, λύσει, lýsi-s, lýse-ɔːs, lýse-i. With historical linguistics, comparison with other dialects, and some imagination, we can work out that they all belong to the same underlying pattern.

But what's obvious to us was not obvious at the time. The Roman-era Greek grammarians were pretty good at reconstructing forms to explain their grammar, but the three underlying declensions eluded them: they were happy to have fifty-odd declensions on the books. When in the Renaissance Greek grammarians discovered that Latin grammar had managed to get Latin declensions down to five, they realised they needed to take another look at their own grammar. In the first attempt, they managed to get it down to ten.

Homeric Greek is a few centuries older than Attic, which means there are a few centuries less phonetic change in Homeric Greek to need to disentangle. In Homeric Greek, -ευς nouns *almost* follow the third declension pattern. Here's the Greek characters:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom	εύς	ῆε	ῆες
Gen	ῆος	ήοιν	ήων
Dat	ῆι	ήοιν	εῦσι
Acc	ῆα	ῆε	ῆας
Voc	εῦ	ῆε	ῆες

And here's the IPA:

	Singular	Dual	Plural
Nom	eú-s	ɛ̂ː-e	ɛ̂ː-es
Gen	ɛ̂ː-os	ɛ́ː-oin	ɛ́ː-ɔːn
Dat	ɛ̂ː-i	ɛ́ː-oin	eú-si
Acc	ɛ̂ː-a	ɛ̂ː-e	ɛ̂ː-as
Voc	ɛû-	ɛ̂ː-e	ɛ̂ː-es

This almost follows the pattern of pʰýlak-s, pʰýlak-os, pʰýlak-i...; but there is a problem. The thematic vowel—the ending of the stem, which goes before the inflection—alternates between /ɛː/, in front of a vowel, and /eu/, in front of a consonant.

That alternation between /ɛː/ and /eu/ isn't right: surely underlyingly there should be just one vowel or diphthong that the stem ends in, throughout. We're going to work out what that vowel or diphthong is, by internal reconstruction: we'll use just the forms in Homeric Greek, and what we know of language change elsewhere in Greek—to arrive at a pre-Homeric Greek form.

Note the distinction: pre-Greek works backwards from just one dialect; proto-Greek takes all the data into account, from other dialects of Greek as well as related languages. The two will look different, but not that different.

To explain the alternation between /ɛː/ and /eu/, we need two sound changes:

1. Either the stem adds a /u/ (or a /w/) in front of a consonant, or else the stem drops a /u/ (or a /w/) in front of a vowel.
   
2. Either the stem lengthens its /e/ to /ɛː/, when it drops its /w/, or else it shortens its /ɛː/ to /e/, when it adds its /w/.

Second change first: we know that when languages drop consonants, they lengthen the preceding vowel. This is called compensatory lengthening, and it makes phonetic sense: if you drop one phoneme, and lengthen the preceding phoneme, the result vaguely takes the same length of time to pronounce as before. Here's some examples from other languages—because phonetic change happens along the same lines across languages: it involves facts of articulation, which are universal to humans:

• The spelling cart in English preserves the original pronunciation /kaɹt/, which has survived in American /kɑɹt/. When Commonwealth English dropped its r's, it lengthened the previous vowel: Australian English /kaːt/.
  
• Modern Greek preserves the old pronunciation of Turkish <ğ> as /ɣ/ in loanwords. In Modern Turkish, /ɣ/ was dropped before consonants, and the previous vowel is lengthened: Greek τσογλάνι /tsoɣlani/ "knave", Turkish iç oğlanı /itʃ oːlanɯ/ "inside boy = palace servant".
  
• Ancient Greek digamma, ϝ /w/, disappeared from most dialects of Greek. The first instances of /w/ to go were /w/ after another consonant. When it did, Ionic lengthened the preceding vowel—though Attic did not. So we explain pairs like Ionic ξεῖνος Attic ξένος, Ionic κούρη Attic κόρη, Ionic οὖρος Attic ὄρος, by positing an original /w/ (which does in fact turn up in very early inscriptions): Proto-Greek /ksenwos, korwaː, worwos/, Ionic /kseːnos, koːrɛː, oːros/, Attic /ksenos, korɛː, oros/.

So we have good precedent for /w/ being dropped, and /e/ lengthening when it does. We could then reconstruct the stem as ending in /ew/: *-ews, *-ewos, *-ewi > -ews, -ɛːos, -ɛːi.

Neat, but I'm afraid, wrong. The compensatory lengthening happens when /w/ follows a consonant; but our deleted /w/ in *-ewos would be following a vowel. And when Homeric /w/ is deleted, the preceding vowel keeps its length.

We have evidence of that from augment. Normally, the aorist in Greek is formed by adding an /e/ at the start of a verb, if the verb starts with a consonant; but if the verb starts with a vowel, the vowel is lengthened instead. So δράμω, ἔδραμον drámɔː, é-dramon, but ἐγείρω, ἤγειρα egéːrɔ, ɛ́ːɡeːra. (You may have noticed that sometimes ε /e/ is lengthened to η /ɛː/, sometimes to ει /eː/. /ɛː/ is the old lengthening, which is in Homer; /eː/ is the new lengthening, which is post-Homeric.)

But some verbs in Homer do not lengthen the initial vowel: they add an /e/, as if the verb started with a consonant: ἔργω, ἔεργον /érɡɔː, éerɡon/. We would rather not concede an arbitrary exception: it is simpler to claim that there used to be a consonant there, which was dropped after the augment was added: ϝέργω, ἔϝεργον /wérɡɔː, éwerɡon/. We can see the /w/ in old dialect inscriptions. We can also see the /w/ in English: ϝέργω has the same stem as work.

But notice that /éwerɡon/ went to /éerɡon/ in Homeric Greek, without any compensatory lengthening. Attic Greek does have a long vowel there, as εἶργον /êːrɡon/; but the /eː/ is merely how Attic concatenates two /ee/.

So a pre-Greek -ews, -ewos, -ewi would end up in Homeric Greek as -ews, -eos, -ei. That's not what Homeric has. We know that the /w/ must have dropped out between vowels, because it did so all the time: the alternative, that /w/ popped up between /e/ and /s/ in -eus, doesn't make sense. So we're on the right track; but the original vowel must have been a long /ɛː/: if the Homeric genitive was /ɛːos/, the pre-Greek must have been /ɛːwos/. And that means the pre-Greek must have been */-ɛːws, -ɛːwos, -ɛːwi/. What we're now looking for is a rule to explain why */ɛːws/ and */ɛːwsi/ turned into short /ews/ and /ewsi/.

That rule exists, and is called Osthoff's Law. It does more than explain /ɛːws/ going to /ews/: it says that in general, if a long vowel if followed by a resonant and then another consonant (VːRC, where R is one of /m n l r j w/), the vowel is shortened. We know that there used to be long vowels there, because Osthoff's Law did not apply to Indo-Iranian.

So the sky god, the textbooks say was dyā́us (/djáːws/) in Vedic Sanskrit; but /djáːws/ fits the VːRC pattern. The equivalent word in Greek, then, has a short vowel through Osthoff's Law. Can you guess the Greek equivalent?

/dj/ corresponds to Greek /zd/: yes, the Greek for /djáːws/ is /zdéws/, Ζεύς, and we reconstruct the Proto–Indo-European (PIE) Sky God as *dyēws /djeːws/. (Sanskrit defaulted its vowels to /a/; Greek is considered to have preserved PIE vowels better than Sanskrit, because it has a lot more /e/ and /o/.)

With Osthoff and digamma-dropping, we have explained almost all of the Homeric declension of -ευς:

• Pre-Greek: -ɛːws, -ɛːwos, -ɛːwi, -ɛːwa, -ɛːw-, -ɛːwe, -ɛːwojn, -ɛːwes, -ɛːwɔːn, -ɛːwsi, -ɛːwas, -ɛːwes
  
• Osthoff: -ɛws, -ɛːwos, -ɛːwi, -ɛːwa, -ɛːw-, -ɛːwe, -ɛːwojn, -ɛːwes, -ɛːwɔːn, -ɛwsi, -ɛːwas, -ɛːwes
  
• Drop digamma between vowels: -ɛws, -ɛːos, -ɛːi, -ɛːa, -ɛːw-, -ɛːe, -ɛːojn, -ɛːes, -ɛːɔːn, -ɛwsi, -ɛːas, -ɛːes

There is one form that this does not explain: Osthoff's Law does not apply to the vocative singular, /-ɛːw-/, but this has ended up as short /-eû/ regardless.

When in doubt, we appeal to analogy: in third declension nouns based on stems ending in /i/ and /u/, the vocative singular is the same as the nominative, except for dropping the /s/: ὀφρύς, ὀφρύ /opʰrýs, opʰrý/; πόλις, πόλι /pólis, póli/. Following that pattern, the vocative *-ɛːw was also made to look like the nominative, except for dropping the /s/: βασιλεύς, βασιλεῦ /basileús, basileû/. If any of the cases was going to fall under another's sway, it would be the vocative, which is a minor case—and which is conflated with the nominative in everything but the masculine singular.

So for a good Homeric word like βασιλεύς "king", then, we have just reconstructed the pre-Greek nominative as *βασιληύς, /basilɛ́ːws/.

The proto-Greek, as opposed to the pre-Greek, is based on more evidence than just Homeric: it seeks to explain *all* forms that have appeared in Greek, not just one dialect's. And the proto-Greek for βασιλεύς is not /basilɛ́ːws/. It's /ɡʷatilews/, with a genitive of /ɡʷatileːwos/.

That's nuts, I know. But:

1. /b/ in Greek corresponds to Indic /g/, Latin /b, w/, and Germanic /k/ (English cow, Sanskrit gau, Greek βοῦς). This means we're looking for a single Proto–Indo-European consonant to explain all of these, which has something in common with both the labial /b/ and the velar /g/. The convention in Indo-European is to call that something a labio-velar, /ɡʷ/. In fact, there has been no need to assume PIE had a /b/ at all.
   
2. PIE /ti/ ended up in Greek as /si/, through assibilation: affricating a palatalised consonant. It's the same process through which Latin natio ended up pronounced in French as /nasjɔ̃/; and (applied to /k/ rather than /t/) it's what Modern Greek linguists call tsitacism.

The proto-form has PIE /ɡʷ/, not /b/, and PIE /ti/, not /si/. On the other hand, it has Osthoff's Law already operating, unlike PIE (ɡʷatilews, not ɡʷatileːws). The reason for all that is, there are forms of Greek with /ti/ instead of /si/ (Doric); and the point of a proto-Greek form is to explain the forms in all variants of Greek.

Likewise, the proto-form already has Osthoff's Law, because Osthoff's Law applies to all variants of Greek, so it doesn't need to account for any forms in which Osthoff's Law is absent. The proto-Greek form explains the Greek variants of the word, not how the Greek variants differ from the non-Osthoff Sanskrit.

The proto-form also has /ɡʷ/, not /b/, which means we're claiming there is a form of Greek which still had the PIE labiovelars. There's no Greek letter for /ɡʷ/, so no form written in the letters introduced by the Phoenecians recorded such a /ɡʷ/.

There is, however, a Greek *syllable* for /ɡʷa/. βασιλεύς turns up in Linear B, as qa-si-re-u: 𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄. We also have a genitive of -εύς turn up in Linear B, complete with its digamma: ἱερῆϝος /hierɛ̂ːwos/ "of the priest" (Attic ἱερέως) turns up in Linear B as i-je-re-wo, 𐀂𐀋𐀩𐀺.

1. The astute reader may have noticed that proto-Greek has a /ti/ in ɡʷatilews, but Linear B has a /si/ in qa-si-re-u. /si/ is supposed to be a later development than /ti/. But that just proves that Linear B is not proto-Greek: it is the earliest form of just one dialect branch of Greek—which did not retain /ti/ like Doric did. So in some features, Mycenaean is more innovative than Doric was a millenium later. (But only some.)
   
2. We know now that 𐀣 qa corresponds to PIE /kʷa, ɡʷa/. (Linear B also conflates /k/ and /g/.) But the labio-velar interpretation wasn't immediately obvious to Ventris: in the first edition of the decipherment, the sign was transcribed as pa₂.
   
3. No, there wasn't really an overwhelming reason for me to cite Linear B in the original. Actually, I'm curious to know: how many of you can see Linear B in the paragraph above?

So far, we've explained Homeric Greek. The plural of Acharnians in Homeric Greek would be Ἀχαρνῆες—which is neither Ἀχαρνῆς not Ἀχαρνεῖς. That involves a few more changes within the dialects of Greek, and it will need to wait for the next post.
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Accent in Modern Compounds: Further Speculations

I'm doing a quantitative survey of accent location in Modern Greek compounds, because the foregoing speculations have been rather irresponsible, absent hard data. Having thought about the issues some more—and being irresponsible, I'm making some more speculations about factors which influence accent location. We can put them to the test later.

• If the second half of a compound is a single syllable, stress never recedes back further than the last syllable of the first half: γριά /ɣrja/ "old woman" > παλιόγρια /pa.ˈljo.ɣrja/ "damned old woman", not *πάλιογρια /ˈpa.ljo.ɣrja/. We saw the same rule in Ancient Greek, and there it presumably has phonological reasons behind οἰκοφύλαξ rather than *οἰκόφυλαξ. For Modern Greek, there are no such phonological reasons: compare *πάλιογρια /ˈpa.ljo.ɣrja/ with πάπια /papja/ "duck" > αγριόπαπια /a.ˈɣrjo.pa.pja/ "wild duck".
  Rather, this is a matter of analogy. Ancient Greek has not bequeathed any compounds to Modern Greek in which the first half was accented two syllables back—like *οἰκόφυλαξ. Modern Greek kept the restriction on how far back the accent could go back on the first half.
  
• Notice the accent on αγριόπαπια, btw. It's impossible in Ancient Greek—*/a.ɡri.ó.pa.pi.a/. For this accentuation to be possible, you need /ia/ to be reduced to /ja/ in vernacular Greek. Greek speakers do manage to keep vernacular and learnèd phonologies distinct. In particular, Ancient nouns in -ía went to -ˈja in the vernacular: παραγελλία "order, bid" in learnèd Greek, παραγγελιά in vernacular Greek. But that means that how recessive accent is realised differs by register.

• As we saw with υπολοχαγός and παραστρατός, modern learnèd compounds will leave accent alone, out of a timidity that gives rise to artificiality. Vernacular preposition + noun compounds, like ancient compounds, are recessive, even if vernacular compounds tend more towards being endocentric (which I guessed might encourage accent-retention). So cf. learnèd στρατός > παραστρατός "paramilitary" with colloquial παιδί "child" > παραπαίδι "stepchild, apprentice".
  
• Proper names retain their accent—as you might expect from the general principle I guessed, that if the second half of the compound is unchanged in meaning, it is likelier not to change in accent. (Proper names are *supposed* to have a fairly strict denotation.) So "mad Nick" is τρελο-Νίκος, not τρελό-Νικος. (Athens U Math forum: Επίσης σκέφτομαι ότι γράφω αυτό το ποστ για να δω αν δουλέυει το αβαταρ που με τόσο κόπο έβαλε ο τρελονίκος, "I'm also thinking that I'm writing this post to see whether the avatar Mad Nick set up with so much effort is working.")
  The slang.gr site, that jewel of informal lexicography, has what looks like a counterexample in ντελήσαββας, "Mad Sabbas, a silly person". But the contributor notes that he heard this from a Pontian in Central Macedonia, and Pontic has different accentuation rules to Standard Greek: it's quite comfortable with stresses more than three syllables back. So this lemma doesn't count; indeed, the contributor notes the (non-Pontic?) Central Macedonian variant ντελημπάσχος, from Πάσχος "Pascal", with the stress unchanged. The only way to change the stress in Standard Greek for names in compounds is to switch inflection; and indeed, the slang.gr editors note Γιάννης > Στραβό-γιανν-ος "Blind John (novice sailor)", Αστραπό-γιανν-ος "Lightning John (dullard)".
  
• We know that Ancient nouns ending in -η /ɛː/ could only have their accent go up to the penult, because of the mora rule. Ancient nouns ending in -ις /is/ could have their accent go up to the antepenult, because /is/ was short. But in Modern Greek, these have fallen together as /i/. Modern Greek respects the Ancient restriction on -η: θήκη "case" > vernacular αβγοθήκη "egg-holder"—recapitulating learnèd ᾠοθήκη "ovary". But when it comes to nouns that formerly ended in -ις, Modern Greek seems to have remembered that they are recessive, even when the nouns are only two syllables long: Ancient βράσις, Modern βράση "boiling" > κουφόβραση "muggy weather", Ancient βρύσις "bubbling up", Modern βρύση "fountain" > κεφαλόβρυση "main fountain".
  Did the coiners of κουφόβραση and κεφαλόβρυση know Ancient Greek grammar? Highly unlikely. Did they work out that βράσις and βρύσις are verbal nominals, and associate that kind of recessive accent? True, Ancient βράσσω survives as βράζω—in use already in Koine; and the noun κουφόβραση can in fact be plausibly derived from the compound verb κουφο-βράζω "to boil in a deaf (= silent) manner, to simmer". But the verb βρύω did not survive into Modern Greek—and even if it did, the modern water tap of βρύση does not call "bubbling up" to mind.
  Greek speakers aren't born knowing Ancient morphology, but they don't need to: whereas the -σις suffix was a highly productive verbal nominal suffix in Greek, there are exactly 7 nouns in LSJ ending in -ση: two are nominalised feminine adjectives, and don't count (μέση, ὑπερμέση), and the others did not survive into Demotic (ἀποφράση, ἄση, ἕρση, κόρση, Τεμέση).
  So Greek speakers would have been able to work out that most nouns ending in /i/ could not be accented on the antepenult, but nouns ending in /si/ could. They could work that out without any recourse to derivational morphology. And they could carry that insight across to compounds.
  We can then speculate that, if another Ancient noun ending in -ῐς survived into Greek, and didn't look like a verbal nominal, its Modern Greek compounds will not be recessive—unless there are surviving compounds from Ancient Greek, which also have recessive accent, and serve as a precedent. So μύτις "snout", ῥάχις "back", μάντις "augur" and κόνις "dust" have survived into Modern Greek as μύτη, ράχη, σκόνη, μάντης; in compounds, they should accent like any another noun ending in -η, on the penult. And that is demonstrated by αετοράχη "eagle-back = sheer mountain peak", χειρομάντης "palm reader". (Yes, there's nothing vernacular about χειρομάντης—except for its ending, which was remodelled from the actual Ancient χειρόμαντις. In its μάντης guise, it's still a productive pattern, as in slang.gr's predictably scatological κοπρομάντης, "practitioner of copromancy". You may not want to google that...)
  I'm *not* vindicated by ασημόσκονη, καρβουνόσκονη, χρυσόσκονη, "silver dust, coal dust, gold dust", which are accented as if someone knew about Ancient recessive κόνις after all. But χρυσόκονις does turn up in Timothy of Gaza (§32). It's entirely possible that this word survived into the vernacular, and set up an analogy for other "dust" compounds. At least, I hope that's what's happened.
  
• Compounds based on nouns ending with consonants, as modern loans, are outside the bounds of Greek morphology; so they will leave the accent alone. βλαχομπαρόκ "hillbilly baroque, kitsch" is literally "Vlach Baroque", with the timehonoured Greek denigration of the Vlachs as mountain folk. There was no way μπαρόκ would be reaccented as *βλαχόμπαροκ. (The Vlachs translated their transhumant pastoralism into transnational financial acumen, and Vlachs financed many of the major cultural institutions of Athens. But stereotypes don't pay attention to such niceties.)
  Ditto the delightful coinage of Kaliarda (the Greek gay cant), ζουζουνοσάιλοκ, "Shylock bug = ant", because ants hoard food. OK, it's not delightful because of the easy antisemitic trope; but Kaliarda is full of such far-fetched (and overeducated) cleverness.

One more speculation—although this is being vindicated from what I'm seeing of compounds. The inflection mattered in Ancient Greek for where the accent would end up in compounds—depending on whether the inflection was a long or short vowel. Modern Greek does not have long and short vowels, and it has boiled down the ancient declensions into what, for the nominative singular at least, is a simple pattern: masculines end in -Vs (where V can be any vowel), feminines and neuters end in -V. (Other cases and plurals are a lot messier, but that messiness is not added to with compounding.)

So how should the modern declensions behave with recessive accent?

• Masculines and neuters ending in -os, -o are the simplest case, since this ending has changed the least from Ancient Greek second declension. -o nouns were recessive in Ancient Greek, and this has remained the case. There are lots of exceptions to recessiveness for -o, and they are all verbal nominals or psychopomp-compounds; that too has remained the case.
  Feminines in -o (-ω) are a fascinating grabbag of nouns: Ancient names in -ώ like Sappho and Calypso; Mediaeval names in -ω like Κρυστάλω "Crystal", modelled after the Slavonic feminine vocative; the Modern slang derivational suffix -ω (e.g. μαλάκω, σπασίκλω); and the erstwhile normalisation of Ancient feminines in -ος (η Κόρθο, η μέθοδο). It's a fascinating grabbag, but it's marginal; and outside the now abandoned forms like μέθοδο, it provides no reason for accentuation on the antepenult.
  
• The -e(s) and -u(s) declensions are also quite infrequent: -e(s) nouns are Turkish and Romance loans, -us nouns are a couple of Ancient leftovers (παππούς "grandfather", Ιησούς "Jesus"), -u nouns are the convention for borrowing Turkish feminines in -ı/i, or deriving them locally from Turkish masculines (typically the feminine -τζού "professional of X, wife of professional of X", from Turkish -cı/ci, as in καφετζού "café owner's wife, tasseomancer", στριπτιζτζού "stripper"). Again, no reason to assume accent on the antepenult, and not a whole lot of nouns following the pattern to begin with.
  
• The -i(s) nouns are mostly derived from Ancient -η(ς), and in Ancient Greek they were accented only as far back as the penult, because of the long syllable. This has been preserved in Modern Greek; as we saw in previous posts, it would take overwhelming analogy to dislodge the accent of -η(ς) to the antepenult; and that hasn't happened with compounds. The exception is with Ancient nouns that originally ended in -ῐς instead of -η; and again, as I've argued, it's analogy that has allowed those nouns to remain an exception.

That leaves the -a(s) nouns. There is good reason for there to be confusion about where to accent such compounds. That's convenient for me, because it justifies me getting the accent of ξέμαγκας wrong, and it explains the variability that was pointed out in comments last post, between παλιοπαπάς and παλιόπαπας.

At least some of the confusion is as old as Ancient Greek. Feminines could end in both -ᾰ -and -ᾱ; the former could be accented on the antepenult, the latter could not. As a result, there are compounds of the former, which are recessively accented on the antepenult (λιμνο-θάλασσα "lake–sea = lagoon"), and compounds of the latter (περι-τιάρα "round cap"), which are recessively accented on the penult. To a Modern Greek speaker, the latter would look accent-preserving, because there are no long syllables in Modern Greek to explain why the accent doesn't move.

There are a lot less penult -ᾱ(ς) nouns in the Modern Greek vernacular: -έᾱ(ς), -ίᾱ(ς) /-ˈea(s), -ˈia(s)/ in the vernacular went to -ιά(ς) /-ˈja(s)/, so if the vernacular were left on its own, few nouns would look like offering a counterexample to the recessive accent of θάλασσα. Except that -ία is a very productive verbal nominal suffix, and would not have been reaccented in the verbal nominals inherited from Ancient Greek. Like ανεμοβλογιά /a.ne.mo.vlo.ˈɣja/ "chickenpox" < *ανεμ-ευλογία /anem-eulogía/ "wind-blessing", which did not end up as *ανεμόβλογια /a.ne.ˈmo.vlo.ɣja/.

Masculines in Ancient Greek only ended in -ᾱς (or -ης, as a regular sound change); so they were never accented on the antepenult. But as we also saw a couple of posts ago, Modern Greek is awash with antepenult nouns ending in /as/, from the erstwhile third declension. So again, we have some compounds ending in -ας whose accent is antepenult; and some compounds which cannot possibly be antepenult—because they are preserving the Ancient Greek moras, as first declension nouns. Again, they will look to Modern Greek speakers as arbitrarily accent-preserving. Hence, the potential for confusion in general with -a(s) nouns, as to whether they are accent preserving or not.

There will be maybe a couple of thousand compounds out of slang.gr, that I will go through in a future post, to see if these claims are borne out by the numbers. Yes, the corpus is problematic; I'll talk about that too, and I'll make up some excuse or other for insisting on using such a fun word list.
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ἐκαληθεύω: an ill-fitting prefix in Choeroboscus

The prepositions of Ancient Greek, which were also used as verbal prefixes, had a rich and subtle semantics. As is the doom of all linguistic subtleties, the system has not survived, and the couple of dozen prefixes of antiquity have collapsed to a handful in the modern vernacular.

(How does Nikos Sarantakos put it? Οι όμορφες διακρίσεις όμορφα καίγονται. Nice distinctions burn down nicely.)

The phonology of the prefixes, on the other hand, was the same as that of prepositions used as distinct words. This phonology was not particularly subtle, but it did have rules, which made sense in ancient phonology—although some prepositions dodged them. These rules have not survived into their much-attenuated modern vernacular counterparts.

The first rule is Elision: if a preposition ends in a vowel, that vowel is lost before another vowel. So μετα-μορφῶ /meta-morpʰɔ̂ː/ "I transform", but μετ-εμόρφωσα /met-emórpʰosa/ "I transformed"; ἀντί-θεσις /antí-tʰesis/ "opposition" but ἀντ-αλλαγή /ant-allaɡɛ́ː/ "exhcange", ἐπὶ τόπου /epì tópu/ "on the spot" but ἐπ’ ἀγροῦ /ep aɡrû/ "in the country". A couple of prepositions never followed that rule: περί, πρό, and in later Greek ἀμφί.

The elision rule persisted for the rest in learnèd Greek, and indeed in 19th and early 20th century coinages: μετεκλογικός "post-election", μεταπελευθερωτικός "post-liberation" (World War II). But it was abandoned in the vernacular's prefixes (whose meaning has changed a lot):

Ancient	Modern
μετ-εῖπον /met-eîpon/ "I spoke amongst"	ματα-είπα /mata-ˈipa/ "I said again"
παρ-έτρωγον /par-étrɔːɡon/ "I nibbled"	παρα-έτρωγα /para-ˈetroɣa/ "I was over-eating"
ἐξ-ίδρωσα /eks-ídrɔːsa/ "I perspired"	ξε-ΐδωρσα /kse-ˈiðrosa/ "I stopped sweating"
ἐξαν-έρχομαι /eksan-érkʰomai/ "I come forth from"	ξανα-έρχομαι /ksana-ˈerxome/ "I come again"

If anything, its the next vowel which can get deleted in Modern Greek: ξαναέκανα or ξανάκανα /ksana-ˈekana ~ ksaˈna-kana/ "I did again". And contemporary coinages, however well-educated, also no longer bother with elision.

• "Anti-national", which was coined in 1825, has elision: αντ-εθνικός. Usage has respected this: 9400 instances in Google of αντεθνικός vs. 93 of unelided αντιεθνικός. (Not least because the word got a lot of use out of the Colonels' regime.)
  
• "Anti-nationalist" on the other hand is very much a 20th century notion, and accordingly it lacks elision: αντι-εθνικιστικός (Google: 8:760).
  
• The World War II coinage "post-liberation" has elision, μετ-απελευθερωτικός (Google count: 9:1)
  
• But the Google count for "post-colonial" is 5:40 against elision, μετα-αποικιακός.

The second rule is aspiration: if a prefix ends in an unaspirated stop (once its vowel is lost), and it goes in front of a rough breathing, it becomes aspirated. In Ancient phonology, while /h/ existed, that is just common sense:

• μετά + ἐμόρφωσε /metá + emórpʰɔːse/ > μετ-εμόρφωσε /met-emórpʰɔːse/
  
• μετά + ἵστημι /metá + hístɛːmi/ > /met-hístɛːmi/ > μεθ-ίστημι /metʰ-ístɛːmi/
  
• ἀπό + ἄνθρωπος /apó + ántʰrɔːpos/ > ἀπ-άνθρωπος /ap-ántʰrɔːpos/
  
• ἀπό + ἥλιος /apó + hɛ́ːlios/ > /ap-hɛ́ːlion/ > ἀφήλιον /apʰ-ɛ́ːlion/
  
• ἐπὶ αὐτοῦ /epì autû/ > ἐπ’ αὐτοῦ /ep autû/
  
• ἐπὶ ἡμῖν /epì hɛːmîn/ > /ep hɛːmîn/ > ἐφ’ ἡμῖν /epʰ hɛːmîn/

The aspiration is concealed somewhat in the alphabet, because /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ are written as single letters, <φ θ χ>. But writing /met-hístɛːmi/ as μεθ-ίστημι is exactly what you'd expect to write using the Ancient Greek alphabet—so long as <θ> is pronounced something like /t-h/.

By the time of Christ, initial /h/ has disappeared, and /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ were on the way to their modern pronunciations as /f θ x/. So aspiration was no longer phonological common sense; it was becoming orthographic voodoo.

If a compound had survived from antiquity into your spoken language, you kept pronouncing it as an aspirated compound, even if you could no longer take it apart. That's how ἀφίημι /apʰíɛːmi/ < /apó + híɛːmi/ "I let" has ended up, after much analogical reformulation, as Modern αφήνω: noone would even begin to think of prying /af-/ apart from /-ino/, because there is no such verb as /-ino/. If you were making up new compounds in the vernacular, the fact that there used to be an /h/ there is meaningless. In any case, with elision gone for prepositional prefixes, you wouldn't get the chance to apply aspiration.

If you were writing in learnèd Greek, on the other hand, you still tried to apply aspiration to your compounds. But applying aspiration has now became a matter of rote memorisation: you had to remember which words used to start with an /h/ (and were still written with a rough breathing), and you would switch the final consonant of the prefix because the grammar books said so, not because changing a /p/ into an /f/ made any phonological sense to you. Because the spelling of Greek also retained rough breathings, correct spelling in polytonic Greek involved memorising tables of words starting with rough breathings—as everyone educated in Greece before 1981 still remembers.

Your correspondent is among the youngest people alive to whom ᾅδης ἅγιος ἁγνός "Hades, holy, pure" rings a bell. Or at least, he should be; but moral panic has brought the teaching of Ancient Greek forward; so "Hades, holy, pure" have now merely shifted from primary to secondary education.

So aspiration was a rule of Ancient Greek, that made no sense in the native language of the people still writing in Ancient Greek. That provides an opportunity for the rule to break down: for those writers to forget to aspirate their prefixes.

There are occasional such instances in Byzantium; and they are brought up in polemics against the polytonic. (Nikos Sarantakos in the linked piece cites ἀντυπουργήσειν in Constantine Porphyrogenitus and ἀντυπενεχθείσας in Gregory of Nyssa.)

One of the only linguistic arguments made for polytonic accentuation is that it enables you to do correct aspiration in compounds. The counterargument is that noone is using aspiration in compounding any more: peals of laughter would greet *ἀνθηλιακός "sun protection" or *ἀνθισταμινικός "anti-histamine". And if you want to passively make sense of a compound like ἀφήλιον "aphelion", there's little point memorising that ήλιος "sun" takes a rough breathing. It's more useful to deduce the rough breathing of ήλιος from ἀφ-ήλιον—or else, to do your rote memorising of /h/'s where it will have more of a pay off. Like learning English, and picking up Helium and heliocentric from there.

If the Byzantines slipped up in failing to aspirate compounds, we also expect them to do the opposite: to aspirate compounds where there is no justification in Ancient Greek. That is hypercorrection. Hypercorrection happens when speakers are trying to apply a rule in a language variant that is alien to them (such as the formal variant of their language). Speakers can't readily apply the rule, because the conditions of the rule don't make sense in their native version of the language. So they lurch for the more formal-sounding option from the rule, in the hope that it will pay off. English-speakers end up saying "between you and I", because they can't understand why they have to say "it is I" instead of "it's me".

Unsurprisingly, hypercorrect aspiration happens in Byzantine Greek. After all, it happens even now in Greece; Nikos Sarantakos mentions a teacher from Drama Prefecture so confident in his command of Ancient Greek (which he inflicted on primary school students), that he spoke against καθ’ επάγγελμα εκκλησιομάχοι, "professional anticlericalists". That's επάγγελμα, as in ἐπ-άγγελμα /epáɡɡelma/, and the prefix /ep(i)-/ has never begun with an /h/.

Hypercorrection in aspiration does not happen in Byzantine Greek as frequently as I'd expected; I've found maybe a hundred instances in the TLG. But it does happen often enough to show that not everyone was confident about how well they'd memorised their "Hades, holy, pure" tables.

• So when John of Gaza writes καθ’ ἧμαρ "by day" (Anacreontea 6.93), the καθ’ leaves no doubt that he has got the breathing of ἦμαρ wrong. He's trying to sound elevated by using a Homeric word; but he hasn't got the Homeric aspiration to go with it.
  
• When Ephraem the Syrian (or rather, his early Greek translators) write μεθέπειτα instead of μετέπειτα "afterwards" (De paenitentia, Frantzoles p. 81), they are making the same mistake as the teacher from Drama: /ep(i)-/ in /met-ep-eita/ has never begun with an /h/.
  
• When Paul of Aegina writes ἀφ-ουροῦντας "urinating away" (Epitomae medicae, 3.18.5.26), he's forgetting that the word is "urinate", not *"hurinate" (or, given how Ancient Greek relates to Indo-European, *"surinate").

So much for aspiration. Having gone through the rule violations in the TLG corpus, I wondered whether the rule for /ek-/ was also violated. That rule is: Movable /s/: ἐκ /ek/ becomes ἐξ /eks/ in front of a vowel. So ἐκ-βάλλω /ek-bállɔː/ "I throw out" but ἐξέβαλον /eks-ébalon/ "I threw out", ἐκ τοῦτου /ek tûtu/ "from this" but ἐξ αὐτοῦ /eks autû/ "from that".

But what is the likelihood that Byzantine writers would get the rule wrong? For a rule of Ancient Greek to be violated, the conditions for the rule have to be inapplicable to later Greek; that was indeed the case with aspiration, once aspiration had disappeared in the spoken language. Vowels, on the other hand, still existed in later Greek; so the rule for /ek/ going to /eks/ was still learnable by Byzantines, with reference to their spoken language.

The rule itself also needs to have been no longer applied in the vernacular, so that speakers trying to apply it to Ancient Greek could go astray: the vernacular would need to have used /ek/ before vowels as well as consonants (if indeed /ek/ survived at all), for writers to get the /ek ~ eks/ rule wrong in Ancient Greek.

As it turns out, ἐκ as a preposition did survive, in at least some dialects of Greek, as αχ or οχ, before both vowels and consonants. That does suggest that the alternation between /ek/ and /eks/ broke down in some locations, but not that it had globally broken down: most dialects of Greek don't have a reflex of /ek/ at all. The prefix /ek-/ has also survived in the vernacular, again without the alternation of /ek/ and /eks/. But in the vernacular, it's /eks-/, not /ek-/, which is in universal use.

Now that's an odd development: speakers should have a devil of a time trying to pronounce compounds like /eks-vrakono/ "to strip naked, to un-pants" or /eks-xtenizo/ "to tussle hair, to uncomb"; so how did /eks/ end up taking over?

Here's how: with verbs, Modern Greek has always preferred the aorist stem to the present, as the more regular formation. Unlike the present stem, the aorist stem ends in only a few, predictable consonants—mostly /s/. So the present was usually remodelled to line up with the aorist, with a few simple rules. (That's where the Modern language got the idea that as many present stems as possible should end in /n/.)

The beginning of the aorist is regular too: the indicative aorist always began with an augment, which means it always began with a vowel. So while the present tense alternated between /eks-/ and /ek-/, the aorist indicative reliably used /eks-/: ἐκβάλλω :: ἐξέβαλον, ἐκβάλλετε :: ἐξεβάλατε, ἐξαγανακτῶ :: ἐξηγανάκτησα, /ek-bállɔː/ :: /eks-ébalon/, /ek-bállete/ :: /eks-ebálate/, /eks-aganaktɔ̂ː/ :: /eks-ɛːɡanáktɛːsa/.

In Modern Greek, unstressed initial /e/ was dropped; that made unstressed augments optional. So ἐκτένιζα /ekténiza/ "I combed" became χτένιζα /ˈxteniza/, and /eks-ekténiza/ could be metanalysed as /eks-eˈxteniza/ > /ekse-ˈxteniza/. The initial unstressed /e/ of the prefix /eks-/ was also dropped; so the prefix became /kse-/. With its /-e-/ no longer considered an augment, the /kse-/ prefix could be applied to the present as well as the aorist: ξεχτένιζα /kse-ˈxteniza/ "I uncombed", ξεχτενίζω /kse-xteˈnizo/ "I uncomb".

The prefix applies to nominalisations as well as verbs; so learnèd εκκίνηση "starting point" has the vernacular counterpart ξεκίνημα "beginning". The ancient meaning of "movement out of" is retained with older compounds, such as ξεκινώ < ἐκκινέω "to move out from = to set off, to begin". In productive use, though, it usually means undoing an action—like we saw with "uncomb" and "unpants". The prefix even applies to nouns, though in a more ad hoc way; there is an old rebetiko song called Ο Ξεμάγκας, "the un-mangas, someone who has rejected being a mangas". (In particular, giving up on hashish and bouzouki music.)

(You'd think I was looking for excuses to include YouTube videos in linguistics posts, or something...)

So, because /eks-/ survived in the vernacular as /kse-/, we don't have strong evidence that /eks-/ was strange to the vernacular as a prefix, and that speakers would be going vernacular by using /ek/ before a vowel. On the other hand, while /eks-/ survived precisely because it preceded a vowel, it's not like Ancient Greek offered any counterexamples with /ek/ preceding a vowel. So there would be little reason for writers to think that /ek/ before a vowel was a more proper way of writing—i.e. a plausible hypercorrection.

The /ek ~ eks/ alternation may have been on the way out; but any instances of /ek/ before a vowel in Byzantine writing, I conclude, would be infrequent; and they would more likely be thinkos, than harbringers of vernacular influence.

So, I did a search among unrecognised words in the TLG corpus, substituting /eks/ for /ek/. It's a first cut; if Trapp's Lexicon has already registered such compounds with /ek/ before a vowel, such a search would not find them. Nonetheless, while I just predicted that there wouldn't be many instances of /ek/ before a vowel, I was surprised to have found exactly one such instance.

That one instance is from the pen of Leo Choerosphactes. We have already bumped into Leo in this blog, as the target of the rage of Constantine of Rhodes, which resulted in the longest adjectives of Byzantine Greek.

Choerosphactes' instance is from a letter to Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria, with whom Leo was conducting diplomatic negotiations—sometimes from a Bulgarian prison cell. It is a short letter, but it could have been a lot shorter. Apparently, Simeon had sent Leo a letter, in which Simeon wrote an untruth which Leo found more telling than the prosaic truth. In other words, Simeon wrote a joke; and Leo reacts with all the awkward wordiness of someone puzzled at the invention of humour. Or lying.

G. Kolias. 1939. Léon Choerosphactès, magistre, proconsul et patrice; biographie—correspondance (texte et traduction). Texte und Forschungen zur Byzantinisch-Neugriechischen Philologie 31: 77–129. Letter 12.
Τοῦ αὐτοῦ, Συμεὼν ἄρχοντι Βουλγαρίας.
Θαῤῥεῖς πρὸς ἀλήθειαν, ἀρχόντων ὁ ἀληθέστατος, θαῤῥεῖς πρὸς τὰ λίαν ἐπαινετά· θέλεις δὲ καὶ τὸ σὸν οὐχὶ ἐν ἴσῳ τοῦ τῶν ἄλλων πιστεύεσθαι, ναί, καὶ τὴν δοκοῦσαν κατὰ παιδιὰν ἄρνησιν, ὁμοίαν εἶναί τε καὶ νομίζεσθαι τῆς ἑτέρων ἀληθοῦς κατανεύσεως. Δείκνυται οὖν ἡ ἐπιστολὴ ἀληθεύουσα πράγματι, κἂν δοκῇ τῷ γράμματι ψεύδεσθαι, ἵν’ ᾖ ὑπὲρ τὴν τῶν ἄλλων ὑποπτευομένην ἀλήθειαν ἡ σὴ σοφῶς ὑποπαίζουσα καὶ κωμικευομένη ψευδομυθία. Καὶ τοῦτο θαυμαστόν, καὶ τοῦτο γέμον φιλανθρωπίας, ἵνα, εἰ δοκῶν ψεύδεσθαι ἀληθεύεις, ἐκαληθεύοντός σου τίς ἔσται ὁ πιστεῦσαι δυνάμενος, ὡς ψεύσῃ πώποτε; Ὢ ψεύδους ἐγγραμμάτου, ἀληθείας ἐμπράκτου γέμοντος! Οὕτω δοκῶν ψεύδεσθαι ἀληθεύεις, καὶ ἀληθεύων οὐκ εἰς ψεῦδος αὖθις ἀποκλίνεις. Ἔῤῥωσο.

By the same, to Simeon Lord of Bulgaria.
You have the courage for truthfulness, most truthful of lords; you have the courage for matters most praiseworthy. And you want your writings not to be believed equally to others'; yea, nor do you want your denial, seemingly in jest, to be just like others' truthful assertions, or even to be thought as such. So your letter is shown to be truthful in reality, even though it seems to be lying literally. Thus your sagely playful and antic telling of lies surpasses others' supposed truthfulness. And this is a marvel, and a thing full of humanity: if you tell the truth while seeming to lie, then who can believe you would ever be lying, if you should stray from the truth literally tell the truth? Oh what a literate lie, full of truth in practice! Thus do you tell the truth when seeming to lie, and you do not deviate back into lies when telling the truth. Farewell.

The verb ἐκαληθεύω should be ἐξαληθεύω; but no such verb has been attested in Greek. If the rule about /eks/ was ever going to be violated, it would be in a verb such as ἐξαληθεύω, which was newly coined by the author. Any writer of Greek would have imbibed hundreds of verbs prefixed with /eks-/, from both the Classical language and his own vernacular; he'd be unlikely to get the prefix wrong on a verb he was already familiar with. Coining a new verb, he would momentarily been thrown into unfamiliar territory. And unfamiliar territory is where thinkos are likelier to happen.

The verb ἐξαληθεύω is not attested; but ἐξαληθίζομαι is. LSJ cites it from the Etymologicum Magnum, compiled a couple of centuries after Choerosphactes; but the Etymologicum is citing Photius, a generation older than Choerosphactes:

Διαπορεύεται δὲ τά τε ἄλλως περὶ θεῶν τοῖς Ἕλλησι μυθολογούμενα καὶ εἴ πού τι καὶ πρὸς ἱστορίαν ἐξαληθίζεται.
And he goes through all the other myths about the Gods told by the Greeks, and whatever is "out-truth-ised" in history. (Bibliotheca, Codex 239 p. 319a)

The difference between the -εύω and -ίζω suffixes is slight: having the condition or activity of X, vs. doing the action of X. ἐξαληθίζομαι, by that token, should mean something like "to act 'out from' about truth". In a compound, /ek/ has the following meanings:

Out, from, off, away (cp. ἐξελαύνειν drive out and away); often with an implication of fulfilment, completion, thoroughness, resolution (ἐκπέρθειν sack utterly, ἐκδιδάσκειν teach thoroughly)

So "to act about truth thoroughly", which makes more sense than "to act 'out from' about truth". What sort of actions can you carry out with truth? Telling it; so ἐξαληθίζομαι should mean "to tell the truth thoroughly". And LSJ's gloss of ἐξαληθίζομαι is indeed, "to be truly recorded".

ἐξαληθεύω in turn should mean something like "to have a condition 'out from' about truth", or "to do an activity 'out from' about truth". What condition or activity is associated with truth? Again, telling it. In fact, ἀληθίζω is glossed in LSJ as ἀληθεύω (scroll to the end, Perseus' LSJ has conflated ἀληθίζω with ἀληθής), and ἀληθεύω is glossed as "to speak truth". ἀληθίζω and ἀληθεύω are synonyms. ἐξαληθίζομαι and ἐξαληθεύω should also have been synonyms: Choerosphactes' verb should have meant the same as Photius'.

[EDIT: The following paragraph is incorrect—see comment #1]

From the context, clearly it doesn't. Choerosphactes has gone back to the literal meaning of /ek/, "out from, away": his ἐξαληθεύω is "to do an activity of being away from the truth", i.e. "straying from the truth". It's not the sense that occurred to Photius. And in fact, that too shows that Leo was in unfamiliar territory, when he coined the verb: he didn't use the most obvious sense of /ek/ in context, but the most literal. It was literal enough to make him forget to modify the prefix /ek/, and to leave it, ill-fitting, as ἐκαληθεύω. ...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

Maximus of Gallipoli: linguistic commentary

I posted an excerpt of the 1638 New Testament translation by Maximus of Gallipoli last week. I've been rather busy and will continue to for at least a fortnight, and the promised linguistic commentary on the text has held me up from writing other stuff. Well then, here it is. It's a lot of information, and may lapse into being dry, but if you're looking at some indication of how Greek has changed between 70 and 1638—and more to the point, between 1638 and 2010, this might get you started.

What is interesting to see is that quite often, Modern Greek has evolved backwards since 1638: expressions that were acceptable in print then are ineptly folksy or even unheard of nowadays. That's because Contemporary Standard Modern Greek (which I keep abbreviating as CSMG) has been profoundly affected by Puristic Greek, and its studied avoidance of hitherto colloquial forms. To the extent, as you'll see, of banishing words spoken since Homer, precisely because they had had the bad taste of surviving in use in the vernacular.

Phonology

The aphaeresis of Modern Greek (deleting initial unstressed/e, o, i/) hasn't been followed consistently in this text: εβγαίνοντας for Modern βγαίνοντας (1) (the Ancient is ἐκβαίνοντος, so this isn't an obvious archaism); οπού for Modern που (often; που only in 14); ετούτος (2, 4, 7, 9, still heard on occasion), ειπέ (4), ημπορούν (9), υπάγουν (11), ειπείτε (11), ιδείτε (14), εγκαστρωμένες (17), οπίσω (16), ημέρες "days" (17, 19, 20, may be archaism), ολιγόστευσε (20), ειπεί (21), and augments: ερωτούσαν (3), εδιάλεξε (20), εκόντεψε (20).

The aphaeresis resulted in some forms alternating o- for ε-: ομπροστά "before" (9) < Ancient ἔμπροσθεν, in CSMG just μπροστά. Unstressed initial ε- is assimiliated to απάνου "on" < ἐπάνω (2); the text also has αναντίαν (Ancient and CSMG εναντίον) "against" (9).

There are final /n/s throughout the text that CSMG would drop. This happens throughout published Early Modern Greek, and does not necessarily mean they were a feature of the spoken language.

Διατί "because" and δια "for" appear in their ancient forms, whereas in CSMG they are reduced to γιατί, για ([jati, ja]—i.e. the initial /ð/ has been deleted). Not necessarily an archaism.

The /ɣm/ cluster is simplified to /m/ in διαλεμένους "elect" (20, 22); in CSMG this is no longer allowed because of Puristic influence (Google: διαλεμένους::διαλεγμένους : 123::1670—the instances of διαλεμένους are almost all citations of Makriyannis).

Morphology: Inflection

Δες (1) for "look!" is a surprise: the shibboleth of Thracian Greek (including Constantinopolitan) is that their aorist of είδα has a [j], διές. Maximus may have been nudging his Greek in a more standard direction, realising that διές was a localism.

Τες (2, 17, 19) as the accusative plural feminine article is an older form, now mostly displaced by τις. (Google τες γυναίκες::τις γυναίκες "the women": 1190::411,000, and the hits for τες on the first page are older literature or dialect).

Modern Greek often changes -ω at the end of adverbs to -ου, though in CSMG this is stigmatised: απάνου "on" (2, 12) < ἐπάνω, Modern επάνω ~ απάνω ~ πάνω.

τίποτες "something" (15) has an added final /s/, by analogy with other adverbs ending in -ες. τίποτες is now considered dialectal, but turns up online enough to suggest some more general non-standard use (Google: 23,500 τίποτες to 4,610,000 τίποτα, 8,650,000 τίποτα)

The genitive is used after adverbs, where CSMG would use από "from": αγνάντια του ιερού "opposite the temple" (3). (I discuss the odd πέτρα απάνου την πέτραν below.)

The imperative ειπέ "say!" (4) is Ancient, and common in Early Modern Greek; CSMG has gone to πες, with -ες imperatives formed for a small class of monosyllabic verb stems. We have already seen δες "look!" follow that same new pattern (1).

A third member of the class is μπες "go in"; its subjunctive is now μπει, dropping its original unstressed /e/ (εμπεί < ἐμβῇ). This text has the regularised accentuation έμπει (15), so that the /e/ is not dropped. CSMG has not taken up this innovation, but other dialects have, and it seems to have some non-standard use online (971 hits on Google, not all of them literary.)

The Mainland 3rd pl present ending -ουν (for Ancient and Cretan -ουσι) is used: θέλουν "will" (4, 6), λέγουν "they say" (6), ημπορούν (9), υπάγουν (11), παραδώσουν (11), πλανούν (22), σύρουν (22)—but θέλουσι "will" (6, 8, 22), απολογηθούσι (9), φεύγουσιν (14). Using the two variants in the same sentence with the same verb (6) is nothing unusual: Modern Greek had not yet been standardised.

The plural σύγχυσες "confusion" (8) uses a first declension plural on what was historically a third declension noun in -ις. This usage is nowadays lambasted as "extremist Demotic", and only Psichari's circle supported it in recent times. But this usage merely reflects what had happened in the vernacular, with the third declension eliminated in all contexts and replaced by the first declension. (ερημώσεως "desolation" (14), OTOH, is in the Ancient 3rd declension.) The CSMG situation, with 1st declension singular and 3rd declension plural for historical -ις nouns, reflects an awkward compromise: people resisted making -ις nouns consistently 1st declension in CSMG, because they are mostly abstract nouns, and hence learnèd. Noone blinks at the plural ράχες of the non-learnèd ράχη < ῥάχις "back".

Early Modern Greek formed its first declension masculine plural as -άδες: αυθεντάδες (9). CSMG has rolled this plural back in favour of generalising the feminine plural -ες, although -άδες survives in colloquial use. The rollback is only 20th century, and indeed the Puristic plural in -αί held out for a long time in spoken use—with -άδες felt too colloquial for words like "professor", and -ες too artificial.

Different dialects of Greek have moved -εω verbs across to the -αω paradigm to different extents, so an -εω in the text which is an -αω verb in CSMG does not prove archaism. The text has the original -εω forms for λαλείτε "speak" (11, but this rarely goes to λαλάτε: Google 5360::747); and for παρακαλείτε "ask" (18: παρακαλείτε::παρακαλάτε Google 22,200::44,000, and the former count includes a lot of Ancient Greek)

Morphology: Stems

The aorist γένει "happen" (4, 7) survives in dialect, but CSMG has made the stem consistent with the present stem, and uses γίνει. (The resulting ambiguity is dealt with in a curious way: the present is middle voice, the past is active; so Ancient γίγνομαι, ἐγενόμην is now γίνομαι, έγινα. There is no Aorist Middle in Modern Greek, but the normal outcome would have been to switch to the Aorist Passive, as in κοιμῶμαι, ἐκοιμησάμην "sleep" > κοιμάμαι, κοιμήθηκα.)

The text already uses the modern είναι "is", rather than Early Modern έναι.

The aorist πλανέσει (5) for Ancient πλανήσει (6) is a vernacular change first seen in φορέσω "wear"; the verb does not seem to be used in colloquial CSMG in the aorist.

κάμει "does" (7, 22) is a Modern sense (the ancient verb κάμνω means "to toil"); its /m/ variant is no longer used, and CSMG instead uses κάνω.

πάγει "take, go" (9) still has its original /ɣ/ < ὑπάγει "lead"—so υπάγουν (11). Ιn Modern Greek /ɣ/ is deleted between a vowel and a verb ending. So also λέγει "he says" (1), which in colloquial CSMG is λέει, and φυλάγετε "guard" (9) (Ancient φυλάσσετε, the -γ- is analogical from the aorist φυλάξω). Ιn CSMG φυλάγετε is further reduced to φυλάτε. (Dropping the /ɣ/ turns -αγω verbs into -αω verbs.) The form λέγει at least is still acceptable in CSMG because it was in Puristic; πάγει has no such warrant, and is not now used.

The future construction permits the survival of the Early Modern Greek infinitive of "be", είσται (11, 13). This has not survived into CSMG: the perfect tenses still use an infinitive-equivalent, but είμαι does not form a perfect in CSMG (*έχω είσται "I have been"), because the perfect needs an aorist (perfect) infinitive, and "be" is imperfective.

Syntax

The adverbial participle is used productively: Και εβγαίνοντας από το ιερόν ο Ιησούς "and as Jesus was coming out of the temple" (1). My own hunch is that this was not the most vernacular syntax possible, and that explicit conjunctions were more colloquial; but that's a hunch, and the participle is still around in that role. (The adjectival active participle OTOH is now ossified, surviving only in lexicalised noun. So η μαυροφορούσα "black-wearing (woman)" does not imply a masculine ο *μαυροφορόντας.)

Maximus of Gallipoli was a speaker of Northern Greek, so he used the accusative instead of the genitive for indirect objects: λέγει τον "told him" (1, 2)

The text uses the Finite θέλω + Infinitive Verb construction (2, 4, 6, etc) to express the future, and the corresponding Finite Imperfect ήθελα + Infinitive (20) to express conditionals. The Modern construction with θα + Finite Verb dates from around 1700. The alternate future with μέλλω "is destined to" is also used (4), but should be taken as an archaism. The colloquial future έχει να "it has to" (19) is now used almost always as it is here, in the fixed expression έχει να γίνει "there will be", predicting something momentous positively or negatively.

The earlier να future may be lingering in να μην μεριμνάτε πρωτύτερα τι να ειπείτε "don't study ahead of time what you might (will) say" (11); in CSMG this would θα πείτε. The subjunctive used instead does make sense in CSMG, but CSMG treats such indirect questions as indicative, and the brevity of να may have helped it survive here. There is an even stronger survival in μηδέ να γένει "and nor will there be" (19): CSMG does not allow a subjunctive ("??nor might there be"), and the survival may be a fixed expression involving "nor".

In Modern Greek, απάνω "on" is an adjective, and can only act as a preposition by combining it with σε "to": έθνος απάνου εις άλλο έθνος "nation on to other nation = nation against nation" (8). πέτρα απάνου την πέτραν "a stone on a stone" (2) is treating απάνου as a preposition on its own; that's odd enough I suspect an error. Ancient Greek did treat ἄνω as a preposition, and Kriaras' dictionary of Early Modern Greek has some comparable instances with επάνω—but they all take a genitive, which makes them archaisms: this takes an accusative, making it a Modern preposition.

The text has a subjunctive relative clause, indicating intensional reference (the clause defines what is referred to), as is common in Modern Greek (and indeed Ancient too): πέτραν οπού να μην χαλασθεί "(any) stone which will not be ruined" (2), as distinct from "a stone which will not be ruined".

Subjunctive relative clauses take να in Greek, as the class of connectives that can precede a subjunctive verb is limited. In (11), the relativiser οπού introduces a subjunctive directly: εκείνο οπού σας δοθεί "that (anything) which is given to you". This usage turns up before the modern standard, but is quite rare in CSMG. A reason the construction may formerly have been more common is that Early Modern Greek and dialect allow οπού as a headless relativiser, "whoever" (surviving in CSMG only in the proverbial οπού φύγει φύγει "whoever leaves, leaves = it's everyone for himself"). Headless relativisers are intrinsically intensional, so they naturally take the subjunctive.

Adding αυτός "he" to the archaic absolute participle καθεζόμενος "sitting" (3) is awkward, but done to avoid a hanging participle in Greek: Ancient Greek allowed participial clauses to have different subjects from the main clause, and that's what Maximus is translating (καθημένου αὐτοῦ), but Modern Greek does not.

The phrase έστοντας να "being to" (5) as a vague temporal or causal connective is common in Early Modern Greek. It has vanished without a trace in Modern Greek, as indeed has the participle έστοντας; Modern Greek only uses όντας, reformulated based on Ancient Greek via Puristic.

οπού is used to indicate result (consequential) (19), but without a correlative in the preceding clause: Διατί θλίψις έχει να γένει εκείνες τες ημέρες, οπού… "for there will be a sorrow in those days, [such] that…". Arguably the correlative is supplied immediately afterwards, οπού τέτοια δεν έγινεν "that such has not happened"; but CSMG requires a preceding correlative, so this phrase sounds odd. (Dialect does not, and indeed Cretan even allows a truncated απού phrase as an exclamation: είναι ωραίο απού! "it is [so] pretty that…!"—Cf. New Zealand English sweet as!)

The counterfactual conditional εάν ο Κύριος δεν ολιγόστευσε τες ημέρες εκείνες "If the Lord had not made the number of those days smaller" (20) uses the aorist. In CSMG this cannot be a counterfactual: it would be a real condition, "if the Lord hasn't made…", and the counterfactual would have to be in the imperfect (εάν ο Κύριος δεν λιγόστευε). So the CSMG distribution of conditional tenses took a while to stabilise—as I already noted with Chantakites.

Lexicon

I'm only going to list the deviations from CSMG here:

αμή "but" (7, 13) is no longer used; CSMG instead uses μα (< Italian ma) or Ancient αλλά (11).

μηδέ "nor" (19) has been displaced in CMSG by μήτε, thanks to Puristic: μηδέ is tagged in dictionaries as "folksy". Both connectives are of Homeric pedigree, and it's likely that Puristic wanted to avoid μηδέ precisely because it had survived better in the vernacular. (Three citations of μήτε in Kriaras' dictionary of Early Modern Greek, over 150 of μηδέ.)

Modern readers may be surpised by the low register of σίχαμα for "abomination" (14); but that notion of low register is an artifice of Greek diglossia. If the translation is into the 17th century vernacular, σίχαμα is the right rendering for Koine βδελυγμία—Puristic has made people fussier. The same holds for εγκαστρωμένες "pregnant" (17): it is now felt to be vulgar, but the now "proper" έγκυος is unyieldingly Ancient, with its insistence on not having a distinct feminine ending (*η έγκυα), and it is ineligible for vernacular use.

The text uses γρικά (14) for "understand". The sense survives in dialect, alongisde its primary reading "hear". The connection is that the verb had generalised in meaning from "hear" to "sense"—hence Anglo-Australian comedians making fun of Greek migrants who "can hear the smell", conflating the senses of γρικώ. Nikos Papandreou romantically fancies this is synaethesia; no, just semantic change, and Googling tells me it's happened in Nigerian and Ghanaian English as well. (Etymologically, the verb seems to derive from ἀγροικέω "to be in the farmhouse", e.g. "to listen out for thieves in the farmhouse".) The verb, and its polysemy, are absent from CSMG.

δώμα "roof" (15) is now rare, displaced by the Puristic οροφή and στέγη. φευγατίον "fleeing" (18) is no longer used. (3 instances in Google: two from the 19th century, one from a movie script portraying pre-WWII old men.)

εκόντεψε (20) is used to mean "shorten", rather than its CSMG meaning "approach". The two meanings are related: the adjective κοντός is "short", the adverb κοντά is "short distance away = close by".

The exclamation να "lo!" (21) is Modern, first attested in the Ptochoprodromos cycle; it has not been pointed out often enough that, despite its conventional (and phonologically odd) derivation from ἤν, it sounds suspiciously like Slavic na "ibid." (Joseph, B.D. 1981. On the Synchrony and Diachrony of Modern Greek na. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. 7:139-154.)

Phrases

τι λογής "what kind of" survives as a colloqualism; to modern ears it sounds odd in an exclamation—the Modern language would just use τι on its own. In Cypriot, the equivalent ίντα λοής has become so routine, it has evolved into ίνταλος "how?"

The idiomatic έχετε τον νουν σας (5) "have your mind" means "watch out"; it is still in use.

του λόγου σου "of your word/account" is a circumlocution for "you", used as a polite indirect reference, and nowadays mostly ironic, or emphatic: "as for you, for your part". As used here (9), it is emphatic, and reflexive (φυλάγετε εσείς του λόγους σας, corresponding to Koine βλέπετε δὲ ὑμεῖς ἐαυτούς). The text as given has an accusative plural for λόγους, but a genitive singular article του: "the.gen.sg words.acc.pl your.acc.pl"; the expression in CSMG can only be του λόγου σας, with "of [your] word" staying in the genitive. This is likely Maximus trying to make sense of the formulaic expression, and putting "word" in the plural to agree with the people it refers to: the two phrases sound the same.

του λόγου μου "of my word/account" is the same circumlocution for "I", again nowadays used ironically or emphatically, "for my part". As used here (9), it is literal: δια λόγου μου "for my word = on my account" (Koine ἕνεκεν ἐμοῦ).

κάμει χρεία "it makes use = it is necessary" (7) has been displaced in CSMG by χρειάζεται, which is a Modern coinage, or είναι ανάγκη "it is a need" (10).

σημεία και τέρατα "signs and portents" (22) is proverbial in Modern Greek, and I don't think Maximus could have got rid of it if he tried.

Learnèd forms

Phonology: the text is not leaping to use the Modern cluster dissimilations: χαλασθεί (2), έλθει "come" (6), συγχυσθείτε (7), κηρυχθεί (10), αδελφός (12), κτίσεως (19), έκτισεν (19), πιστεύσετε (21). The lack of contraction in παιδία (12, CSMG παιδιά [peˈðja]) may also be an archaism; φευγατίον "fleeing" (18) is not an ancient word, but could easily be a hypercorrection.

Biblical and religious names don't follow Modern phonology, and the conservative influence of the Church has meant they almost never do—it's an act of self-conscious rebellion to do otherwise, and Maximus was not Psichari: Ιησούς "Jesus" (1), Ελαιών "Olives" (3), Ιάκωβος "James" (3), Ιωάννης "John" (3), Ανδρέας "Andrew" (3), Πνεύμα "Spirit" (11), Δανιήλ "Daniel" (14).

Noun Inflection: first declension accusative μαθητάς (1), ακοάς (7)—but the Modern inflection appears on ετούτες τες μεγάλες οικοδομές (2). The first declension nominative πείναι (8), ψευδοπροφήται (22), but αρχές (9), and indeed the seemingly überdemotic σύγχυσες, avoiding the third declension, in the same sentence as πείναι (8).

There are several third declension forms: βασιλείς (9)—the vernacular plural is βασιλιάδες, with the colloquial 1st declension plural already discussed. We have also already noted the third declension ερημώσεως (14). έθνη (10): neuters in -ος were typically switched to second declension in the vernacular, to the extent they survived at all (τὸ πέλαγος > ο πέλαγος). χειμώνος (18), θλίψις (19), κτίσεως (19).

Verb Inflection: the internal augment in απεκρίθη (2); the middle participle καθεζόμενος (for Modern active κάθοντας—note that the participle is active, but the indicative is still middle κάθομαι); the distinct subjunctive 2nd pl ακούσητε "you hear" (7); the ablaut aorist in δαρθεί "be beaten" (9).

Lexicon: διδάσκαλε for δάσκαλε "teacher" (1); οικοδομήματα "buildings" (1), κατά μόνας "in private" (3; the Koine has a different archaism, κατ' ἰδίαν), κατά τόπους "in places" (8, taken from the Koine), adverbial πρώτον (10, CSMG πρώτα); έως "until" (13, 19), κτίσεως "creation" (19), σάρξ "flesh" (20: had been displaced by κρέας "meat" in the vernacular, has come back through Puristic).

Ιερόν "holy place" for "temple" is the Koine word in the original, although the modern (Christianised) vernacular wouldn't have offered a useful alternative; the Modern ναός "temple" is itself Koine instead of Attic νεώς, but is just as learnèd. (Koine took up the Doric form, because the Attic phonetic change that switched Ionic /neːos/ to /neoːs/—the "Attic declension"—was too much of an anomaly to survive.)

The text consistently uses archaic εις "to" instead of Modern σε.

A passive is used for τελειώνω "complete > finish": τελειωθούν (4), following the middle συντελεῖσθαι of the Koine. Modern Greek only uses the active for the verb, both in its transitive and intransitive meaning.

θέλει σηκωθεί X απάνου εις Y "X will rise up against Y" (8, 12) is a translationism (Koine ἐγερθήσεται X ἐπὶ Y), especially in its use of "on".

The declinable relativiser ο οποίος (19, 20) is not an archaism, being modelled on Italian il quale, but it is learnèd, and is used sparingly compared to οπού.

εις το να πλανούν "towards that they should deceive" (22) puts a preposition and article in front of a subjunctive, clearly calquing the ancient articular infinitive (Koine πρὸς τὸ ἀποπλανᾶν). CSMG allows such constructions, and there is enough precedent to suggest the construction may have been vernacular; but they are most productive in high register, and the use of εις here does not make sense in CSMG. (Indeed CSMG would be more confortable with the original προς.)

Mark 13:1-22.

1 Και εβγαίνοντας από το ιερόν ο Ιησούς, λέγει τον ένας από τους μαθητάς του: «Διδάσκαλε, για δες, τι λογής πέτρες, και τι λογής οικοδομήματα!»
2 Και απεκρίθη ο Ιησούς και λέγει τον: «Βλέπεις ετούτες τες μεγάλες οικοδομές; Δεν θέλει απομείνει πέτρα απάνου την πέτραν οπού να μην χαλασθεί».
3 Και καθεζόμενος αυτός εις το όρος των Ελαιών, αγνάντια του ιερού, τον ερωτούσαν κατά μόνας, ο Πέτρος και ο Ιάκωβος και ο Ιωάννης και Ανδρέας:
4 «Διδάσκαλε, ειπέ μας πότε θέλουν γένει ετούτα; και τι είναι το σημάδι όταν μέλλουσιν ετούτα όλα να τελειωθούν;»
5 Και ο Ιησούς, έστοντας να τους αποκριθεί, άρχισε να τους λέγει: «Έχετε τον νούν σας να μην σας πλανέσει κανένας.
6 Διατί πολλοί θέλουσιν έλθει εις το όνομά μου να λέγουν ότι “Εγώ είμαι [ο Χριστός]„, και θέλουν πλανήσει πολλούς.
7 Και όταν ακούσητε πολέμους και ακοάς πολέμων, μην συγχυσθείτε· διατί κάμει χρεία να γενούσιν ετούτα—αμή ακόμη δεν είναι το τέλος.
8 Διατί θέλει σηκωθεί έθνος απάνου εις άλλο έθνος· και βασιλεία απάνου εις άλλην βασιλείαν· και θέλουσι γένει σεισμοί κατά τόπους· και θέλουσι γένει πείναι και σύγχυσες.
9 Ετούτα είναι αρχές των πόνων. Και φυλάγετε εσείς του λόγου σας· διατί θέλουν σας παραδώσει εις τα συνέδρια, και εις τες συναγωγές θέλετε δαρθεί· και θέλουν σας πάγει [42] ομπροστά εις τους αυθεντάδες και βασιλείς δια λόγου μου, εις μαρτυρίαν αναντίαν τους. [43]

• [42] ή θέλετε σταθεί
• [43] ήγουν να μην ημπορούν να απολογηθούσι

10 Και ανάγκη είναι να κηρυχθεί πρώτον το ευαγγέλιον εις όλα τα έθνη.
11 Και όταν σας υπάγουν να σας παραδώσουν, να μην μεριμνάτε πρωτύτερα τι να ειπείτε, μηδέ μελετάτε· αλλά εκείνο οπού σας δοθεί εκείνην την ώραν, τούτο λαλείτε· διατί δεν θέλετε είσται εσείς οπού λαλείτε, αλλά το Πνεύμα το Άγιον.
12 Και θέλει παραδώσει αδελφός τον αδελφόν εις τον θάνατον· και ο πατέρας το παιδί του· και τα παιδία θέλουν σηκωθεί απάνου εις τους γονείς τους και θέλουν τους θανατώσει.
13 Και θέλετε είσται μισημένοι από όλους δια το όνομά μου· αμή όποιος υπομείνει έως το τέλος, εκείνος θέλει σωθεί.
14 Και όταν ιδείτε το “σίχαμα της ερημώσεως„, εκείνο οπού είπεν ο Δανιήλ ο προφήτης, να στέκει εκεί οπού δεν πρέπει (εκείνος οπού το διαβάζει, ας γρικά), τότε εκείνοι που είναι εις την Ιουδαίαν ας φεύγουσιν εις τα βουνά.
15 Και εκείνος οπού είναι απάνου εις το δώμα, ας μην κατέβει εις το σπίτι του μηδέ να έμπει μέσα να πάρει τίποτες από το σπίτι του.
16 Και εκείνος οπού είναι εις το χωράφι, ας μην γυρίσει οπίσω να πάρει το ρούχον του.
17 Και αλίμονον εις τες εγκαστρωμένες και εκείνες οπού βυζάνονται εκείνες τες ημέρες.
18 Και παρακαλείτε να μην γένει το φευγατίον σας [εις την ώραν] του χειμώνος.
19 Διατί θλίψις έχει να γένει εκείνες τες ημέρες, οπού τέτοια δεν έγινεν από την αρχήν της κτίσεως, την οποίαν έκτισεν ο Θεός, έως τώρα, και μηδέ να γένει.
20 Και εάν ο Κύριος δεν ολιγόστευσε τες ημέρες εκείνες, δεν ήθελε σωθεί καμία σάρξ· αλλά δια τους διαλεμένους τους οποίους εδιάλεξε εκόντεψε τες ημέρες.
21 Και τότε, εάν σας ειπεί κανένας: “Να, εδώ είναι ο Χριστός„ ή “Να, εκεί [είναι]„, μην τον πιστεύσετε.
22 Διατί θέλουσι σηκωθεί ψευδόχριστοι και ψευδοπροφήται και θέλουσι κάμει [44] σημεία και τέρατα, εις το να πλανούν και να σύρουν (αν ήτον δυνατόν) και τους διαλεμένους.»

• [44] ήγουν δώσει

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