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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Markos Vamvakaris: Ο ισοβίτης, Final verse

The reason why I picked Markos Vamvakaris' song Ο Ισοβίτης for my ruminations on hiatus is its last verse, with its startling macaronic juxtaposition:

όπως τον Έκτορα ο Αχιλλεύς τον έσουρνε στο κάρο
Like Achilles dragging Hector in his cart

The clash isn't just thematic of course, it's also linguistic: Hector and Achilles are solemnly invoked in Puristic phonology; Achilles desecration of Hector's corpse—τον έσουρνε στο κάρο, "dragging in his cart"—lands in a colloquial thud. It's the kind of register switcheroo that Greek—and I imagine other diglossic languages—can exploit for artistic effect; it's one of the main things lost in translation in Cavafy, for example.

So Homer had Achilles bind Hector to his δίφρος, his chariot-box; the word is obscure enough that Greeks now speak of his ἅρμα, the more generic word for chariot. Yet the hárma too is displaced in the song by a a vehicle rather more familiar to the 1930's streetscape: κάρο "cart". It's a Romance word, and oddly enough, Alexander Pope chose the same word in translating the same passage: Proud on his car the insulting victor stood.

And when Achilles drags Hector, it's not using the Ancient and Puristic verb έσυρε /ˈesire/, or even in the colloquial έσερνε /ˈeserne/; Markos uses the Athenian slang form έσουρνε /ˈesurne/.

Ironically, the sin of /ˈesurne/ against the standard language is that it actually preserves the upsilon of Ancient Greek (ἔσυρε /ésyre/.) It's no good being an archaic dialect like Athenian, if none of the other dialects have stayed archaic—and if spelling pronunciation prevents people from realising that it's archaic: that just gets your dialect called weird. (Hence Theodosius Zygomalas' mistaken verdict in the 16th century, that Athenian was tragically the most corrupt dialect of Greek.)

On the other hand, the Homeric heroes are unrepentantly textbook in their pronunciation. The vernacular would demand Έχτορας /extoras/ instead of Έκτορας /ektoras/ for Ancient Ἕκτωρ /hektɔːr/. You will still on occasion hear κτ in learnàd loans pronounced as [xt], but it is decidedly out of fashion to write it so. But Alexander Pallis' translation of the Iliad was written to follow Psichari's ideal of a pure vernacular phonology; his Hector is indeed written down as Ekhtoras, but that's not the translation Markos read in school, nor indeed the translation read in school now. Hector keeps his non-vernacular /kt/ in the song; and in the song, the non-vernacular /kt/ is jarring.

The modern ear is more shocked to hear the Achilles in his Puristic garb, as Αχιλλεύς /axiˈlefs/, a spelling pronunciation of Ancient Ἀχιλλεύς /akʰilleús/. To the modern ear, the only legitimate Demotic form is Αχιλλέας /axiˈle.as/, which has switched its third declension for the surviving first declension. Anyone still using the third declension (and unprononouncable) Akhilefs now is deemed ideologically suspect. Surely Markos should have known better than to use such a retrograde form.

But of course Markos in 1935 would have known no such thing. After all, there is nothing vernacular about the hiatus in /axiˈle.as/. It's not the form he would have got at school; and it's not the form Achilles would have, had it in fact survived as a vernacular name.

In fact, Αχιλλέας is a compromise form: it is a reconstruction of a mediaeval pronunciation, after the word switched declension, but before the vernacular's grubby [j] got to it. So too βασιλεύς "king" /basileús/ became βασιλέας /vasiˈle.as/ in the Middle Ages, abandoning the now unpronouncable /vasiˈlefs/; but the modern vernacular form is βασιλιάς /vasiˈljas/, following the i > j /_V rule. Achilles should similarly have ended up as Αχιλλιάς /axiˈljas/ in the vernacular.

Noone has dared devise so self-consciously Demotic a form of Achilles... except, unsurprisingly, for Pallis. Hard though it may be for contemporary Greek speakers to credit, Pallis does in fact use Αχιλλιάς. But not only is Pallis an extreme of Psicharist phonology among modern writers; even Pallis was reluctant to clothe Achilles in that much synizesis. In Iliad I, he has 16 /axiˈle.as/, hiatus and all, and only two vernacular /axiˈljas/:

Μούσα, τραγουδά το θυμό του ξακουστού Αχιλέα, I 1
...
παρά άσ' την μιάς και δόθηκε στον Αχιλιά απ' τους άντρες I 276

So Pallis only dared break Achilles' hiatus one time out of ten, and the subsequent vernacular standard didn't even dare that much. Vamvakaris was not going to deliver a more Psicharist version of Greek than Psichari's pupils. But nor was Vamvakaris going to come up with the post-Psicharists' compromise form Akhileas—a form as artificial as the spelling pronunciation Akhilefs is, even if Greek speakers no longer realise it.

Of course, Akhileas was artificial and a compromise, but the post-Psicharists weren't the only ones cowed by awe before Homeric names, and forced to Mediaeval compromises. Such a compromise can be seen in the name of the warrior Androutsos, a couple of generations before Psichari. By the start of the 19th century, Greek national awakening meant that Greeks started taking Classical first names, to assert that they too were Hellenes. And so Androutsos, born in Ithaca while has family was on the run from Roumeli, was called Odysseus.

Odysseus' name is just as hostile to the vernacular as Akhillefs [axilefs]. The spelling pronunciation of the original name, /oðiˈsefs/, was unpronouncable and undeclinable. None dared come up with a Pallis-like reduction, which would rhyme with /vasiˈljas/. The contemporary standard has done the same: the Odysseus king of Ithaca is /oðiˈse.as/, and Odysseus Androutsos of Ithaca is recorded in Greek textbooks as /oðiˈse.as/.

But Androutsos' contemporaries did at least vernacularise his name a smidgeon more than people now do. One of the many vernacular rules ossified thouɡh Puristic influx is that unaccented initial /o/ is dropped; so ὀλίγος /olígos/ "few" is now λίγος /ˈliɣos/, and ὡρολόγιον /hɔːrolóɡion/ "clock" is now ρολόι /roˈloj/. His comrades called Odysseus Δυσσέας /ðiˈse.as/, 'Dysseas.

These are the shoals of Homeric proper names in Modern Greek; and this is why Markos used a more archaic version of Achilles then contemporary Greeks are comfortable with—not that /ektoras/ and /axile.as/, the versions they are comfortable with, are any more true to the vernacular phonology. And this is how Markos' /ektora o axilefs/ sounds jarringly pedantic in the song, just as the mention of Hector and Achilles should.

It would be the cherry on the cake if his pronunciation of Hector and Achilles would also follow the pedantic hiatus of Puristic, and set up the phonological force field around them that the legal terms ισοβίτης and έφεση already carry. But in his scansion, Markos elides three syllables across word boundaries, in a most un-Puristic fashion:

όπως τον Έκτορα ο Αχιλλεύς τον έσουρνε στο κάρο
opws| ton e|ktora o ax|ilefs || ton e|surne| to ka|ro

Which means /ektora o axilefs/ is supposed to be pronounced [ektorw axilefs], in order to scan.

Well, you tell me what you hear; 2:53:

I head [ek.to.ra.o.a.xi.lefs], with each syllable distinct. What I hear is that, for all that his versifying has Hector cozy up to Achilles in synizesis, when he comes to singing the names, he balks. Even if he is singing in the voice of a murderous street thug, his street thug has been to school, and can't shake the shade of Puristic, any more than Pallis could.

Which would be a nice example to end on, except that I have been listening to all of Markos' early songs, and his singing does not support the conclusion. It turns out that Markos has trouble doing synizesis with a final -o, whether the words are colloquial or learnèd. The year before Ο Ισοβίτης, Markos recorded Στα σίδερα με βάλανε, "They've locked me in chains." Yes, once again, the song's subject is in prison for murdering a rival lover. Again, the metre is iambic heptameter, and again, there is a synizesis:

Φωτιά μεγάλη μʼ άναψες βρε άπιστη γυναίκα.
Μόλις θα βγω απ' τα σίδερα θα σφάξω κι άλλους δέκα
fotja| meɣal|i m a|napses || vre a|pisti| ɣinek|a
molis| θa vɣo ap| ta si|ðera || θa sfa|kso kj a|lus ðe|ka
You've lit a great fire under me, you faithless woman
As soon as I get out of chains, I'll kill another ten men

/θa vɣo ap/, "I'll get out of", scans as a single foot, two syllables: [θa vɣw ap]; and θα βγω απ' is as vernacular a phrase as you can get. I hear Markos singing three syllables (1:18)—very distinctly:

So no, the hiatus in Markos' singing of /ektora o axilefs/ is not indicative of anything.

Oh, did you notice the hiatus in /vre apisti/? With the vernacular-as-dirt vocative particle βρε "hey you!" I'd hate to think that disproves my entire argument; I'll take the preponderance of hiatus around learnèd words as a statistical argument.

Which would be more convincing, had I actually done any statisics. THUD. Too honest for my own good, there...
...Read more

Markos Vamvakaris: Ο ισοβίτης

We saw a couple of posts ago the rebetiko musician Markos Vamvakaris in the 1930s, being more subject to the phonology of Puristic than Greeks might now expect of a singer extolling the underworld. Such an expectation says more about the romantic notions fomented by centuries of diglossia, than it does about the linguistic realities of 1930's Peiraeus. But your humble correspondent, too, is subject to romantic notions, and your humble correspondent, too, was surprised.

There's another song Vamvakaris did, in 1935, that runs along the same lines. It has even more Puristic in it, and in that song too the Puristic results in hiatus. The hiatus is so strong, that Vamvakaris the singer ends up doing more hiatus than Vamvakaris the lyricist. And the trigger for the extra hiatus is a namecheck of antiquity. But there's a lot to say about the song—not all of it linguistic. So much to say in fact, that I'm going to hold over the lyricist/singer clash till the next post.

The song in question is not the 1937 Ήμουνα μάγκας μια φορά, "Once I was a mangas", whose namechecking is thick and obvious:

Once I was a spiv, though with an aristocrat's vein
Now I'll be a scholar, like wise Socrates.
I'd be Paris, and steal away Helen
leaving Menelaus with his heart crushed.
I'd like to be Heracles when I first saw you,
to chop your head of like the Hydra.
What else do you want me to do to make you love me?
With a mind like that, you'll be wanting to get with Xerxes.

No, the song in question is from a couple of years earlier. Its injection of antiquity works, because it's not laid on thick: it's linguistically out of place—yet strikingly appropriate to its thuggish context. The song is Ο ισοβίτης, "The Lifer":

Στη φυλακή με κλείσανε ισόβια για σένα τέτοιο μεγάλονε καημό επότισες εμένα Εσύ 'σαι η αιτία του κακού για να με τυραννούνε οι πίκρες και τα βάσανα να με στριφογυρνούνε Τώρα θα κάνω έφεση μήπως με βγάλουν όξω κακούργα δολοφόνισσα για να σε πετσοκόψω Να σου 'χυνα πετρέλαιο κι ύστερα να σε κάψω και μέσ' στο ξεροπήγαδο να πάω να σε πετάξω Εφτά φορές ισόβια τότε να με δικάσουν και στη κρεμάλα τ' Αναπλιού εκεί να με κρεμάσουν Ψήνεις ενόρκους δικαστές τούς πλάνεψε η ομορφιά σου καί με δικάζουν ισόβια για να γενεί η καρδιά σου Με τη ραδιουργία σου μπουζούριασα το χύτη δίχως να θέλω μ' έκανες να γίνω ισοβίτης Τέτοια μεγάλη εκδίκηση αν τηνε ξεμπουκάρω όπως τον Έκτορα ο Αχιλλεύς τον έσουρνε στο κάρο

They stuck me in jail for life because of you That's how great a sorrow you've made me swallow You're the cause of my ills, for them to torment me, and for disappointment and troubles to whirl around me. Now I'll lodge an appeal, in case they let me out, you evil murderess, so I can chop you to pieces. I'd pour petrol on you and then burn you and I'd go throw you into the well. Then let them condemn me to seven life sentences, and let them hang me at the gallows of Nauplion. You entice jury and judges, your beauty has tricked them, and they condemn me to life for your heart's whim. Because of your intrigue, I knocked off the metalworker (?) Without me meaning to, you've made me a lifer. Oh what revenge I'll have if I get out of here, Like Achilles dragging Hector in his cart.

I'll allow myself my bourgeois indignation at the protagonist; we should remember, of course, that Markos could act, and wasn't necessarily saying it was his own wife he was planning to immolate—any more than that he had a crush on a teamster in Ο Αραμπατζής, or that he was a housewife abandoned by a drunken husband in Ο γρουσούζης. Still, the mangas that Markos sung about were no feminists.

Of course, when I told a female friend (rather more clued in to gender politics than me), that I was writing about a singer before he stopped singing about wife-beating for more bourgeois topics, she retorted that wife-beating is pretty bourgeois. Touché.

The song has a visceral grimness to it, precisely because of its nonchalant thugishness, and that does make it arresting. Which makes the trick he pulls in the final verse all the more effective. It's incongruous to invoke the Iliad in a song about some low-life in jail. And yet, this isn't just lightly worn high school learning: Markos has learnt his Iliad all too well. Achilles' wrath, which made him desecrate his opponent's corpse, is condemned by Homer himself as "shameful", ἀεικέα (Iliad XXII 395). Achilles' wrath is no more highminded than the lifer's planned immolation.

Or these reenactments, courtesy of the US secondary education system:


The song has a fair amount of Puristic words in it, as we'd expect of a song not only with a shout out to the Iliad, but also several mentions of the legal system: ισοβίτης "life sentence", ισοβίτης "lifer", έφεση "appeal", ενόρκους "jurymen"—as well as πετρέλαιο "petrol" ("stone-oil", a learnèd coinage), αιτία "cause", and ραδιουργία "intrigue". There's potentially one more learnèd word, in a passage which isn't terribly clear.

In the beginning of the final verse, Markos sings that he has μπουζούριασα το /xiti/. Neither word is extant now, and if we ask the internets, we find that μπουζουριάζω means to put someone in jail. slang.gr's illustration is eloquent enough:

Τι κάνεις ρε στρατόκαυλε, με το μαχαίρι του ράμπο στην πορεία; Θα σε μπουζουριάσουν ρε καραγκιόζη!
What the hell are you doing, you army nutjob, carrying Rambo's knife in a protest march? They'll lock you up, you maroon!

Or another instance, from indymedia, with indymedia's known anti-cop animus:

Κι εγώ θα θελα να κάθομαι και να τα παίρνω, αλλά το να μπουζουριάζω αθώο κόσμο, δεν είναι δουλειά, είναι ντροπή.
Oh I'd love to just sit around and earn money too; but locking up innocent people is not a job, it's a disgrace.

In the thread at rebetiko.gr discussing this lyric, an etymology is offered from μπουζού "hiding place, jail", which in turn is said to come from Italian bozzolo "cocoon".

But of course, Markos' Lifer isn't supposed to be in jail for imprisoning his rival, but killing him. It turns out that μπουζουριάζω has a second meaning, "to eat up". That definition is given in a 1932 song, Το λεξικό του μάγκα, "The mangas' dictionary". The song actually predates Greek recordings of rebetiko (those are mandolins on the recording, not bouzoukis), but it describes the lexicon of the same social circle, from the safe vantage point of the musical revue:

(3:16: Το μαχαίρι λέω λάσο και το τρώω μπουζουριάζω: "I call a knife a λάσο, and "eat"—μπουζουριάζω.)

Poster κκ in the rebetiko.gr thread has worked out that the second meaning applies in Markos' song: to "eat someone" (τον έφαγα) is long-standing slang for killing someone, and Markos has made the expression more vivid by substituting a slang word for "eat".

The problem is who the /xitis/ is that the Lifer has killed. Poster κκ—and just about all copies of the lyric online—assume it's a χίτης, a Chi-man. The Chi-men were members of the paramilitary organisation "Organisation X" (Chi in Greek, of course); the Chi-men appear to have been rather more enthusiastic fighting communists than Nazis, and are now roundly reviled in Greece.

The catch with having Markos talking about Chi-men is, the Organisation was still ostensibly formed to resist the German occupation, and it was formed in 1941. Barring an undocumented talent for soothsaying, Markos is unlikely to have been singing about dispatching Chi-men in 1935. The only other likely match for /xitis/ is χύτης, a pourer—in particular, someone who works in a foundry (where metal is poured out).

So speculated by Aris in post #4. Now χύτης is a learnèd word, κκ's response to Aris betrays the anti-diglossic romanticism that haunts all Modern Greeks:

Even if Markos really did mean a foundry worker, I imagine he'd use πασπαλιστής "smearer", καρούλιας "reeler", or some street word—not the kind of vocabulary you'd find in the Statistical Classification of Branches of Economic Acitivity or the Ministry of Finance.

… A learnèd word like έφεση "appeal" or ραδιουργία "intrigue", you mean. True, it's more of a surprise for how Markos names the victim in the song; but this is hardly the song to expect Markos' Demotic to be pure and unsullied from officialdom.

There's another suggestion on a forum that χύτης is short for χυτοσίδερο, "cast (poured) iron", referring to prison bars. That would bring us back to μπουζούριασα meaning "imprisoned", but grammatically it doesn't stand.

But we're supposed to be talking about hiatus.

Vernacular phonology, we have seen, avoids hiatus; and vernacular metrics reflects vernacular phonology. If your vernacular verse has a vowel next to another vowel, they are supposed to be slurred together into the one syllable; to have a metrical break between two vowels is poor versifying. Verse textbooks inveigh against it, but they inveigh against it because vernacular verse itself—in folksong, in the Cretan Renaissance, in the Heptanesian School—all avoided it. Thus the national anthem of Greece written by Dionysios Solomos, to pull up the first example I could think of, starts:

Σε γνωρίζω από την κόψη
του σπαθιού την τρομερή
σε γνωρίζω από την όψη
που με βια μετράει τη γη.
se ɣno|ˈrizo a|ˈpo tin| ˈkopsi
tu spa|θiˈu tin| trome|ˈri
se ɣno|ˈrizo a|ˈpo tin| ˈopsi
pu me| ˈvia me|ˈtrai ti| ɣi

The metre is trochaic tetrameter: Dumdee Dumdee Dumdee Dumdee, Dumdee Dumdee Dumdee Dum. Eight and seven syllables to the line. If you take all the /i/s in the IPA at face value—with all hiatus—you're going to have several syllables left over.

For the metre to work, μετράει is two syllables, /me.ˈtraj/ rather than /me.ˈtra.i/: perfectly vernacular, and that's how the word is still pronounced. βια is also vernacular, reduced to one syllable; the word has now been displaced by the learnàd βία, in two syllables.

(At this point I could get sidetracked by the debate over whether Solomos used the word with its vernacular meaning of "haste" or its learnèd meaning of "violence"—a debate held in Greek parliament no less. I won't get sidetracked this time, but I think it's clearly the latter, which would make Solomos deliberately vernacularised the word, and consistently did so to avoid hiatus, as he actually wrote down in his notes on metre. The irony is, Solomos' native dialect of Zante actually *has* hiatus; so he pronounced both "haste" and "violence" as /vi.a/, but followed standard Greek in versifying both as /vja/. Cornaro before him may have also vernacularised the word βια—though I think Erotokritos II 215 still refers to haste, even if in reference to a lion.)

The slurring of a vowel before another vowel (synezesis) also applies across word boundaries; so γνωρίζω από /ɣnorizo apo/ is pronounced as four syllables, [ɣno.ri.zw a.po].

And that slurring is regular in vernacular verse. Versifiers nowadays offend against it, because the language itself, tempered by Puristic, no longer finds hiatus offensive. But hiatus still sounds wrong in verse (if your ear is suitably trained), because verse as a tradition is aloof from the phonological mess of the spoken tongue.

Now Vamvakaris, it has to be said, was not much of a versifier. He does hiatus without good reason, and he does occasionally add or miss a syllable. So it's not that we can draw ironclad conclusions from the hiatus in his verse. Still, we can see an informative pattern with respect to learnèd words.

Let's try to jam his lyric to its metre—politikos stichos, iambic heptameter, the default Greek metre of the past millennium: ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ // ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ ˘ ˊ ˘

sti fi|laki| me kli|sane || isov|ia| ɣja se|na
tetjo| meɣa|lone| kajmo || epo|tises| eme|na
esi| se eti|a tu| kaku || ɣja na| me ti|ranu|ne
i pi|kres ke| ta va|sana || na me| strifo|ɣirnu|ne

tora| θa ka|no e|fesi || mipos| me vɣa|lun o|kso
kakur|ɣa ðo|lofo|nisa || ɣja na| se pe|tsoko|pso
na su| xina| petre|leo || ki iste|ra na| se ka|pso
ke mes| sto kse|ropi|ɣaðo || na pa| na se| peta|kso

efta| fores| iso|via || tote| na me| ðika|sun
ke sti| krema|la t a|naplju || eki| na me| krema|sun
psinis| enor|kus ði|kastes || tus pla|nepse i e|morfja| su
ke me| ðika|zun iso|via || ɣja na| ɣeni i| karðja| su

me ti| raði|urɣi|a su || buzu|rjasa| to xi|ti
ðixos| na θe|lo m e|kanes || na ɣi|no i|sovi|tis
tetja| meɣa|li ekði|kisi || an ti|ne kse|buka|ro
opws| ton e|ktora o ax|ilefs || ton e|surne| to ka|ro

A bit busy; let me explain.

• A foot is delimited by | : there should be two syllables per foot, but for the last.
  
• || is the caesura, the midverse break; synezesis, contracting two syllables into one across the break, is not allowed in traditional versification.
  
• Learnèd words are in italics.
  
• /j/ is used where synezesis has happened within a word, consistent with vernacular phonology. No learnèd words have a /j/.
  
• Blue is synezesis across a word boundary, consistent with vernacular metrics.
  
• Orange is an extrametrical syllable not explained by hiatus.
  
• Red is hiatus within a word.
  
• Magenta is hiatus across a word boundary.

Markos has hiatus at the caesura; since the break at the caesura is so strong, such hiatus can be ignored, and can't be held up as a major fault of his versification. The extra syllable in ke me| ðika|zun iso|via, on the other hand, is a pretty basic blunder.

And in μεγάλονε /meɣalone/ "big", Markos has added an -e to the nu movable, the liaison consonant. The vernacular allows this for pronouns, as the song shows: αν την-ε ξεμπουκάρω "if I unclog her" = "If I get out of jail". But for nominals like μεγάλονε, it's a sign the versifier has given up, and is begging for an extra syllable. It's an old poetic license—instances turn up in Early Modern Greek; but they're limited to verse. By my aesthetic, that makes it bad verse.

The thing is, if you discount caesuras, hiatus is limited to learnèd words. Admittedly, that's a circular argument, since hiatus is characteristic of learnèd words anyway. But notice that we have several instances of learnèd words starting with a vowel—etia, efesi, isovia, isovitis—which trigger hiatus with the preceding word, rather than synezesis. The vernacular words don't do that; in fact, we have a synezesis of three syllables mooshed into one in the vernacular pla|nepse i e|morfja| su [planepsj emorfja su].

Hiatus before a vernacular word happens only with a caesura, which doesn't count. Hiatus is allowed before a learnèd word, caesura or not: the force field of Puristic can block the word from cosying up to its predecessor—kano| efe|si, ɣino| iso|vitis—just as it blocks hiatus within the word. But such hiatus it is not compulsory: esi se eti|a has hiatus within learnèd /etia/, but not in front of it. meɣa|li ekði|kisi also skips hiatus separating it from the preceding word.

The reason why I picked this song is its startling last verse. In that last verse, the Homeric names don't trigger hiatus across word boundaries, just like ekðikisi didn't. Or maybe Vamvakaris did sing a hiatus after all. Then again, maybe that wasn't hiatus that Vamvakaris was singing.

It's open to some question what Vamvakaris is actually doing phonetically with the last verse. But I've run enough over length in this post, to defer discussion till the next. ...Read more

The hiatus of διαζύγιο "divorce"

Eighty year old recordings of popular music should tell you, for a normal language, how that language has changed in the interim. And so it is for Greek, as I'm finding by listening to the collected recordings of Markos Vamvakaris, 1933–1937. The catch is, diglossia has meant Greek is not a normal language; and the artificial influence of Puristic has meant that 80-year-old Greek is in some words more archaic, and in some words less archaic, than the modern Standard.

This is not the first time someone has thought of mining rebetika recordings for linguistic evidence, btw; Amalia Arvaniti & Brian Joseph have published a study of what old recordings tells us about the shift in Athens fron [mb] to [b]—another shift which the hand of Puristic has weighed heavy on. Whether this has been looked at as well—well, I'm behind in my reading.

The phenomenon noticable in Vamvakaris, as an intrusion of Puristic, is hiatus (χασμωδία). Hiatus is the phenomenon of a vowel next to another vowel counting as two syllables; for example, συκέα /si.ˈke.a/ "fig tree" or Τουρκία /tur.ˈki.a/ "Turkey" being three syllables. Hiatus is something the Modern vernacular does not do.

In fact, hiatus was something that Attic Greek wasn't comfortable with either— which is why a lot of vowel pairs and triples in Homeric Greek ended up reduced in Attic, in various forms of contraction and elision. The more vernacular the Attic, the more reduction in vowels; that's why only in Aristophanes, our most vernacular of Attic authors, do we get contractions like πρωὐδᾶν [prɔːudân] from προαυδᾶν [proaudân] "to decalre beforehand".

The modern vernacular went further in getting rid of hiatus than the ancient vernacular. In particular, the modern vernacular reduces vowels next to other vowels, making them non-syllabic. So while the medieval form for "fig tree" is συκέα /si.ˈke.a/, the modern form is συκιά /si.ˈkja/, and just two syllables long. Likewise, διαβάζω "I read" is pronounced /ðja.ˈva.zo/, not /ði.a.ˈva.zo/. In fact, it's a universal rule of the vernacular (outside of some archaic dialects, notably Zante and Mani), that /e/ or /i/ before another vowel, stressed or not, turns into [j]. In phonetic notation, e, i > j /_V.

(The Attic form of "fig tree", incidentally, was not συκέα /sykéaː/, but συκῆ /sykɛ́ː/. Attic used vowel contraction as its own way to address hiatus.)

The universal rule e, i > j /_V means that the vernacular form of "Turkey" should be not Τουρκία /tur.ˈki.a/, but Τουρκιά /tur.ˈkja/. Tell that to a Greek now, and they'll guffaw: calling Turkey Τουρκιά has the prerequisite of the speaker wearing a kilt and brandishing a musket. (That is to say, people now only know of the form Τουρκιά from folksong.) Tell that to a Greek two hundred years ago, when people were wearing kilts and brandishing muskets—and they'd agree that Turks indeed came from Τουρκιά. That was the word for Turkey back then, and it followed the normal development of Greek vowels.

So why has the modern standard gone backward? What has changed in the past two hundred years to make the language evolve backwards? Puristic, of course; that's the kind of thing Puristic does.

Puristic pronounced words as they were spelled in Ancient Greek (though it conveniently ignored the fact that the pronunciation of the letters had changed, which made several spelling pronunciations awkward). Iota was a vowel, so in written Greek it should not be pronounced as anything but a vowel: it couldn't be pronounced as a [j]. When in fact people did start writing down the vernacular in the 19th century, under the shade of Puristic, the vernacular's [j] were such a nuisance for how Puristic treated spelling, that they got a diacritic added to them, as I have written up elsewhere: vernacular δι̯αβάζω /ðja.ˈva.zo/ vs. learnèd διαβάζω /ði.a.ˈva.zo/. As Yannis Haralambopoulos has astutely pointed out, the vernacular wasn't so much written down in the 19th century, as transcribed.

So if a word was vernacular, it had /j/'s; if a word was learnèd, it had /i/'s. Even if was exactly the same word, the pronunciation difference means Standard Modern Greek now has minimal pairs to distinguish the two.

• άδεια as a vernacular word, "empty", has two syllables, [ˈa.ðja]; the selfsame άδεια as a learnèd word, meaning "leave of absence" (an "empty" day), has three syllables [ˈa.ði.a].
  
• βιάζω in its vernacular sense of "hasten" is two syllables, /ˈvja.zo/; the verb originally meant "to force", and its learnèd meaning of "rape", it has three syllables, /vi.ˈa.zo/. (The vernacular word for "rape" is bound to the society that used it before Puristic: ατιμάζω "dishonour", so it no longer has the same connotations as βιάζω.)
  
• Ancient παιδία /pai.dí.a/ "children" has survived in the vernacular as παιδιά /pe.ˈðja/. Ancient πεδία /pe.dí.a/ "fields" has been revived in Puristic (denoting fields of expertise, or force fields); being learnèd, it is pronounced /pe.ˈði.a/.

And because the modern linguistic standard is a messy mixture of Puristic and vernacular, the two phonological systems coexist: some registers, and some words, follow the rule e, i > j /_V, some do not.

Having two phonological systems coexist is workable; in fact, that's how Standard Modern Greek works. To a contemporary speaker of Greek, it is inconceivable that "fig tree" should be anything but /si.ˈkja/, and it's just as inconceivable that "Turkey" should be anything but /tur.ˈki.a/. To a neogrammarian like Psichari, adamant on the Exceptionlessness of sound change, this jumble was unacceptable: the language of Greece should be the vernacular, and it should follow vernacular rules. It's what makes linguistic sense.

In a Greece not under the shadow of Puristic, linguistic sense could have prevailed. Vincenzo Cornaro, three centuries before Psichari, managed to slot into his Erotokritos a few learnèd words in the vernacular garb Psichari called for: μοιότη /ˈmjo.ti/ "similarity" (V 126), as an updating of ὁμοιότης /o.mi.ˈo.tis/, is pure Psichari, and βέβαιο "certain" in IV 1599 is clearly meant to be two syllables, /ˈve.vjo/ (ό,τι γενή σ' αυτούς τσι δυο βέβαιο να το κρατούσι).

But the 1880s wasn't the 1590s; Psichari's call for consistency was dismissed as extremist, not least when the Demotic was finally enshrined as the official language of Greece, as "a Demotic without dialect features or extremism" (άνευ ιδιωματισμών και ακροτήτων). The words now are βέβαιο /ˈve.ve.o/, and ομοιότητα /ˈo.mi.ˈo.ti.ta/: the inflection is vernacular. but the phonology isn't. What has been enshrined, not just by the state but also by the people, was the compromised language Psichari abhorred.

Not just Psichari abhorred it, either. Compromises don't just offend against neogrammarian linguistics, they also offend against literary aesthetics. Cornaro is renowned for avoiding hiatus studiously. But not completely: learnèd words have always been a perturbance in the vernacular. Even in the seeming Eden of Erotokritos, some of the learnèd loans were still too much under the shadow of antiquity to escape hiatus: the 1590s wasn't really the 1590s either.

• Cornaro's εβεβαίωσεν "he assured" IV 1512 is the same stem as βέβαιο, but here is clearly /e.ve.ˈve.o.sen/.
• Cornaro uses περικεφαλαία "helmet" three times, each with hiatus as /pe.ri.ke.fa.ˈle.a/.
• As Nikos Sarantakos has written, Georgios Souris mocked the Psicharist Alexandros Pallis' περικεφαλιά /pe.ri.ke.fa.ˈlja/ in Pallis' translation of the Iliad, which modernised the word Cornaro didn't dare modernise. But even Pallis vacillated between hiatus and non-hiatus for this stubborn learnèd word. In the modern standard, it has remained with a hiatus.

So when Demotic started being manumitted as a literary language, authors started hankering after an uncontaminated, pure Demotic. As Peter Mackridge likes to argue, literary Demotic is itself an artificial, puristic code. And Greeks have been looking since for a holy grail of untutored, internally consistent vernacular, clean and plain-spoken. Like Cornaro's Erotokritos (if you ignore his hiatus—and he really does not have much of it.) Like Makriyannis' Memoirs (so long as you concentrate on his vibrantly oral syntax, and don't notice the telltale final /n/s that Makriyannis took in from the Puristic he heard every day.)

Or just like the song lyrics of Markos Vamvakaris, the abbatoir's apprentice and hashish addict who begat a new style of music. The world of street thugs and addicts he depicted was as common as dirt; surely it should be as vernacular as common dirt, too.

But of course, Markos was not brought up in cotton wool in Arcadia; he went to school in Puristic, and interacted with officialdom in Puristic, not least in his brushes with the law. His baseline is vernacular, of course; but Puristic words do show up in the lyrics, and their phonology stands out all the more because the baseline is more consistently vernacular than the contemporary language is.

After all that preamble, I'll give just one example here; I have a more extensive example next post. First, Markos dedicates a song to his divorce in 1936, and the word for divorce, διαζύγιο, turns up twice in the song (0:25, 2:57).


The word διαζύγιο is learnèd, as you would expect of the Modern Greek legal system; the vernacular has a verb for divorcing, χωρίζω "to separate", but the noun χωρισμός "separation" is generic enough to mean "parting". Being a learnèd word, διαζύγιο has learnèd phonology; so it has five, Puristically-correct syllables: /ði.a.ˈzi.ɣi.o/. That is how Vamvakaris sings it, both times in the song. The hiatus is completely out of place against Vamvakaris' vernacular.

The hiatus is also out of place, it turns out, against the standard of 2010, because the word for "divorce" is now familiar enough to yield a syllable. In a concession to vernacular phonology, διαζύγιο now has four syllables: /ðja.ˈzi.ɣi.o/. Its first syllable follows the vernacular rule, like διαβάζω. Its last syllable does not.

Admittedly, the Triantaphyllidis dictionary keeps the old pronunciation, and gives it as [δiazíjio] (i.e. [ði.a.ˈzi.ʝi.o]). But a longitudinal study of YouTube says differently:

Πέτρος Κυριάκος: Η γραμματική του μάγκα (1932) (1:30: 5 syllables)

Μητσάκης-Τατασόπουλος: Το Διαζύγιο (Να πας) (1953) (2:26: 5 syllables)

Κώστας Βίρβος, performed by Βαγγέλης Περπινιάδης: Διαζύγιο Θα Πάρω, (1950s?) (0:15: 5 syllables)

Πάνος Γαβαλάς: Διαζύγιο (1950s?) (0:46: 5 syllables)

Γρηγόρης Μπιθικώτσης: Τι τραβάω (1963) (2:31: 5 syllables)

Γιώργος Ζαμπέτας: Ο Πιτσιρικάς. (1966) (1:04: 5 syllables)

Θέμης Ανδρεάδης - Νατάσσα Γερασιμίδου: Το διαζύγιο (1977) (2:36: 5 syllables)

Παπαδοπουλος-Δημητριου: Το διαζύγιο (1991). (0:26: 4 syllables)

ΣΥΓΑΠΑ ΦΑΚΕΛΟΣ "ΔΙΑΖΥΓΙΟ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΙΔΙ" Νο 1 (2009) (0:12: 4 syllables)

Conn-x And the star is you- Θέλω διαζύγιο. (2010) (0:12: 4 syllables)

Το διαζύγιο της Μιμής Ντενίση. (2010) (1:03: 4 syllables)

Getting dates for some of the tracks was not possible; and because songs get rerecorded in Greece a lot more than in the Anglosphere, there was a high margin of confusion. Before I found Mitaskis' 1953 song, for example, I found Glykeria's 1993 cover—which of course used the same number of syllables for διαζύγιο (2:26), by now anachronistically:


Still, there seems to be a story here. Before the abolition of Puristic, διαζύγιο is sung like in Puristic; by the 1990s, it loses its first syllable. What I'm missing is songs from the period when the transition must have happened, looks like between 1977 and 1991. In other words, the '80s, when Demotic was enshrined as the state language, and the fervour of the socialist government to do away with Puristic swept away several formerly accepted shibboleths—such as the archaic first declension vocatives like καθηγητά.

This doesn't mean Psichari has had his revenge. In fact, what has happened rather messier linguistically, though unsurprising sociolinguistically. Instead of two phonological systems, one Puristic and one vernacular, we now have a spectrum between the two systems, and words of learnèd origin are adrift between the two rules. So διαζύγιο now starts vernacular, and ends learnèd: /ðja.ˈzi.ɣi.o/, not /ði.a.ˈzi.ɣi.o/ or /ðja.ˈzi.ɣjo/. διάβρωση "erosion" can lose its hiatus (1:22, 2:25, /ˈðja.vro.si/):

or keep it (0:04, 0:13, /ði.ˈa.vro.si/):

The speaker at 2:50 in the first video does not use the word διάβρωση, but he is overloading on hiatus anyway, in a rather pompous kind of public speaking. So hiatus is now clearly a register feature—and unpredictable: it's a sociolinguistic variable, rather than a purely linguistic variable. ...Read more

Trakatroukika on YouTube

First up, thank you again to Butcher of Yore—and now Stazybo Horn as well—for sending me links continuously about Kızderbent. There is a lot to go through and assimilate, so this blog is going to turn into Kızderbent Central for the next week or so.

[You will note btw that I keep saying Macedonian Slavonic instead of Macedonian (or "Skopian"). I hope you appreciate why (see for starters Macedonia (terminology), Macedonian language naming dispute, and the relative numbers agains the flags on the sidebar.) If you don't appreciate why, well, it's my blog, and it's your right; but I have to pick which constituency to offend the least among my readers.]

Because the YouTube video is being asked for, I'm posting it first. The video doesn't have any context, and as I said in comments it has been exploited for interminable online debates about Macedonia; comments on the video are disabled, so I'm translating the Greek forum link to it.

The videos came up in the discussion thread Ένα τραγούδι, πολλές ιστορίες Jovano Jovanke ("one song, many stories: Jovano Jovanke"), about a South Slavic song, and how it is used by a host of speakers of Slavonic languages with different national identities. The original poster, dna, has a good chuckle about the Bulgarian/FYROM argling over the song on YouTube:

Στη συνέχεια στα σχόλια μπινελικώνονται Βούλγαροι και κάτοικοι της ΠΓΔΜ.
- "γιατί τραγουδάτε μακεδονικά τραγούδια αφού δεν μπορείτε να τα πείτε καλά"?
- "έλα ρε, βουλγάρικα είναι, και εσείς βούλγαροι είστε, τι παριστάνετε τώρα"?
- "ουστ αποδώ μογγολοτάταροι, να πάρετε τον πρόγονό σας τον Ασπαρούχ και να πάτε στο Ταταρστάν, εμείς είμαστε
α)γνήσιοι σλάβοι
β) γνήσιοι μακεδόνες
Thereafter, Bulgarians and inhabitants of FYROM start flaming each other:
"Why are you singing Macedonian songs when you can't speak it properly?"
"Oh come on, they're Bulgarian songs, and you're Bulgarian too, stop pretending."
"The hell with you, Mongol Tatars, take your ancestor Asparukh and go back to Tatarstan, we're (a) genuine Slavs and (b) genuine Macedonians."

To my mind, the discussion on the forum quickly degenerates to that level anyway. But by way of rebuttal, poster kukos says the following (my comments in square brackets):

So, friend dna69, the people dancing and singing in this video:

are members of the Kizderventiot Association of Thessalonica. In the next video:

Mr "Christos" [I think he means Sotiris], who was singing, chats to some ladies also descended from the same region of Asia Minor (Kızderbent), and who ARE NOT LOCALS, as is erroneously subtitled. [Subtitled on the YouTube clip—i.e. they are not indigenous speakers of Macedonian Slavonic. "Local" (ντόπια) is the preferred way of referring to Macedonian Slavonic within Greek Macedonia.]
The guy who subtitled it in English is somewhat confused, so he draws wrong conclusions.
The lady speaking the most clearly states, of course, that "… I am Greek". So when she says "our language matches theirs" but "we count in Turkish", she means that the REFUGEE dialect matches the "local" dialect. [i.e. that Trakatroukika is similar to the indigenous Macedonian Slavonic of the village of Polypetro, where these Trakatroukides have settled].
But this local dialect is not used as a main language. The proof: the lady in question does not know how to count over four in "Bulgarian". Whereas I have spent long enough among Yugoslav tourists [who have long been visiting Greece, and Chalkidike in particular], and I can count as much as you want: devet xiliante tsetrista dvananteset (9412)
[Followed by a history of the village of Polypetro in Kilkis, and of Kızderbent, copypasted from elsewhere.]

For my part, I'll comment that no, the lady in question knowing only 1–4 in Slavonic does not prove that Bulgarian wasn't their main language; it proves that their Slavonic was heavily Turkicised. Large numbers as opposed to small are the province of the marketplace rather than the hearth, so it's common for languages to borrow large numbers from the local trade language, which would certainly have been Turkish.

So, turning to the video itself. Stazybo Horn has done detective work on Google through Wikipedia deletions—a curse on them; and he mailed me about the programme that featured this after I wrote the first draft of this post: it is from «Κάθε τόπος και τραγούδι» "A song from every region", a Sunday programme on ET3 (State TV, Northern Greece), presented by Giorgos Melikis, and this episode was shown on Jan 21, 2007. From Googling, I see Melikis' show does feature other languages of Northern Greece. Butcher of Yore tells me that Κυριακή στο Χωριό "Sunday in the Village", on the same channel, has done so as well. Here's the thread where the YouTube user announces he has posted it on the same day: his posting confirms Kukos' surmise that he didn't realise they were refugees from Turkey.

The video starts with 45 seconds of chat in Trakatroukika. Please God, someone who knows Bulgarian or Macedonian Slavonic, do tell me how Turcisised this sounds.

The English subtitles are pretty much correct, though summary. Sotiris (the man talking to the women at the start) is from Thessalonica: the host Melikis says so at 0:53. I don't know if that means Sotiris is a native speaker of Macedonian Slavonic (in which case it is mutually intelligible with Trakatroukika), or that he is also a Trakatroukis. The Trakatroukides count up to four in "Bulgarian" (notice the chuckle when the B-word is spoken at 1:32); at Sotiris' village they count in Slavonic at least up to six. That, and his initial question, make me suspect Sotiris is not a Trakatroukis.

The woman talking describes their party as Trakatroukides (right at 1:00—"he asked us, how you are here in the village, the Trakatroukides"). She says their languages "*almost* matches" the indigenous Slavonic; and their odam matches "local" vode "water". (Another woman interjects at 1:15 "We talk the same [language]" and "We get along very well"—which suggests Trakatroukika and the Macedonian Slavonic of Polypetro are mutually intelligible anyway.) They explicitly claim Trakatroukika is not mutually intelligible with Turkish, and is partially mutually intelligible with Bulgarian, Serbian, and the Macedonian Slavonic of Gevgelija, on the FYROM side of the border. (Sotiris at 1:52 says, after Serbian is mentioned, "they'd catch the odd word".)

"And one last question" (at 2:00)—"to come back to our songs and dances", because this is a folklore show—but the question is not about songs or dances. "How do you feel inside?" "What, about our language?" one man says. Another realises where this is going, and says: "Our homeland is Greece"—straightforwardly. (It's not like, if they felt differently they could very well say differently on Greek State TV—but Butcher of Yore informs me that has indeed happened, e.g. with a show by Maya Tsokli on villages in Florina, and that has made it to YouTube too.)

"Not just Greece", the host adds expansively. "Greater Greece!" (Μεγάλη Ελλάδα). Um, somewhat unsophisticated of the host, in my opinion (and I'm not looking forward to discussing why I think that). He shouldn't have to solicit proof of loyalty from Greek citizens who happen to speak a Turkicised Slavonic, and the phrasing is reminiscent of the irredentist Megali Idea. But anyway, it's great that we have this document.

If we have to discount Sotiris' language as not Trakatroukika, admittedly we have far less than 45 seconds' worth; and if these Trakatroukides have lived for three generations together with Macedonian Slavonic speakers, their language will be much less Turkicised, and more similar to the local dialect. So it's not pristine Trakatroukika (if it's even meaningful to speak of such a thing). If you're looking to avoid interference from other dialects of Bulgarian or Macedonian Slavonic, your best bet is in fact New Triglia, in Chalkidike.

Or Roditis. Roditis (formerly Proktio) is in Rodopi, 5km from Komotini, and Rodopi also is home to Pomaks, who are Bulgarian-speaking Muslims. But it is unlikely there has been any real contact between the Trakatroukides and the Pomaks. As an acquaintance from Komotini reminds me, the Pomaks were subject to travel restrictions until 1992; as he put it, "the Pomaks this side would come down to market in Komotini every Tuesday; the Pomaks that side would come down to market in Xanthi every Saturday—and that was it." Moreover, as a Christian village Roditis would have had no contact with the Muslim ethnic Turks of the region either; and the village is now a suburb of Komotini.

One last thing: one of Pontus and the Left's (Πόντος και Αριστερά) regular commenters, Partizana, is from the same village of Polypetro. Comment #36 in this thread is about how moved she was to discover her grandmother's language documented elsewhere.
...Read more

The status of Urum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demotic in the Soviet Union

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Remember, υ is /u/, ςς is /ʃ/.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...Read more