Month: December 2015

Because /j/ (English y) is a palatal phoneme, and palatals are historically unstable. (See for example Nick Nicholas’ answer to Linguistics: In Indo-European languages using a Latin alphabet, what’s up with these two letters “ch” that are pronounced (phonetics) so differently?)

Rob Kerr’s answer is correct in principle, but the variation between German, English, French, and Spanish can all be traced to language change after the initial letter was assigned.

<j> started life as the Latin variant of <i> before vowels, which makes it [j] (English y). That’s the value it continues to have in German, and other Germanic and Slavic languages. So: [j]

/j/ underwent Fortition in Old French, and ended up pronounced as /dʒ/. So Jacobus in Latin (/jakobus/, from Hebrew Ya’aqov) was Jacques in Old French, which was pronounced /dʒakəs/, something like Jahkuss in English. And in fact, <j> is still pronounced that way in English, keeping the value that was introduced with the Normans. So: English [dʒ]

In Middle French, /dʒ/ changed to /ʒ/, but the spelling remained the same. Hence Jacques is now pronounced /ʒak/, Zhak. So: French [ʒ]

In Old Spanish, <j> was also pronounced /dʒ/, and also ultimately derives from Latin /j/. In the 16th century, Spanish went through a involved sequence of changes in their coronals (Phonological history of Spanish coronal fricatives), at the end of which <j> ended up pronounced as /x/, via /ʒ/ and /ʃ/.

So filius in Latin, “son”, went through the changes /filius/ > /filjo/ > /fiʎo/ > /fijo/, to end up as Old Spanish fijo, /fidʒo/. Then in Middle Spanish, it went /hidʒo/ > /hiʒo/ > /hiʃo/ > /hixo/ > /ixo/. So: Spanish [x]. (And an explanation for any <j> as /ʃ/ you might find.)

Same gender (feminine), same function (forming abstract nouns); and in fact, same suffix, –sis. The –ē– and –ō– comes from the verb stem, not the suffix.

So phy-ō “grow” > phy-sis “nature”. kine-ō “move” > kinē-sis “movement”. psycho-ō “to animate” > psychō-sis.

Kudos to Achilleas for his comprehensive answer, and for pointing out something unfamiliar to the contemporary Anglosphere: plenty of musical traditions, like Greece, don’t require singers to be songwriters for them to have credibility. In fact, not only songwriters, but  lyricists distinct from songwriters have a high profile—something I find cool, but which went out of fashion in the Anglosphere with Tin Pan Alley.

It took me a long time to warm to Kazantzidis, just as it took me a long time to tolerate Mozart. Both require a different kind of emotional maturity.

My favourite happens to be Η ζωή μου όλη:

My whole life’s a burden:
it takes it all, gives nothing.
My whole life’s a chimney:
I’ve fallen in, I’m burning.

My whole life’s a nonsense,
and my sole possession.
My whole life’s a offering
with no aim or meaning.

My whole life’s a ciggy:
hate it, but still smoke it.
Reaper Man can have it
when it’s time to  scarper.

Actually, that’s not a good translation of the last verse, I just settled on it for the metre. It’s combination of slang, contempt, and fatalism is very Greek, and very arresting…

And yes, the lyricist ended up honour-killing his daughter’s boyfriend. (Άκης Πάνου – Βικιπαίδεια) But the lyric isn’t his, it’s the world’s.

A major characteristic of Cavafy which does *not* come across in the most popular translation (Sherrard & Keeley’s) is the linguistic eclectisism, which adds to the overall feeling of restraint and detachment. Especially when everyone else writing in Greek at the time was idolising the Volkisch ideal of Demotic, his playful alternation of contemporary slang and classicising rhetoric placed him very far from the mainstream; and with the era dominated by the Greek Language Question, language matters a lot in Greek poetry.

Sherrard & Keeley sacrificed that element to make his poetry approachable in English; I think they had to.

Crete and Greek Macedonia in 1923, by the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Done by expulsions of the kind currently frowned upon (Ethnic cleansing), but which happened quite a bit after both WWI and WWII. On the Greek side, at least, the process appears to have been relatively orderly. Well, as orderly as that kind of thing can be…

EDIT: I forgot: yes, 1923 was orderly; the 1890s in Crete were not, and sectarian violence forced many of the Muslim population to leave by 1900: Cretan Turks. The Muslim population had already fallen from half the island to a third from 1800.

Crete has the distinction of being de-islamised twice. The previous occasion was the Emirate of Crete in the 9th century, which had a reconquista by the Byzantines in 961. Byzantine chroniclers boasted that the entire population was massacred and repopulated from Cappadocia; but of course Nicephoras Phocas was not Reinhard Heydrich, and it’s unlikely that the entire population was converted to Islam to begin with. The remainder of the de-islamisation would have been carried out by Byzantine missionaries.

Greek linguists at the time mostly did German, and some did French. Of the main antagonists, Psichari only wrote in French—but then again, he lived in France. Hatzidakis mostly wrote in German, though he could write in French if he had to.

When I was studying in Greece, I heard distant echoes of a “German school” and “French school” of linguists: you picked your main language and aligned yourself to it. English was used, but not by Greeks; as a language of Greek linguistics it was marginal before WWII—about the same ranking as Italian. (They were distant echoes, because that era had ended by the ’60s. The linguist I heard the echoes from, Δικαίος Βαγιακάκος – Βικιπαίδεια, was born in 1917.)

I have seen instances of Dutch linguists working on Greek (Hesseling) translating their stuff into French to get it read. Sandfeld’s Linguistique Balkanique was ignored until he translated it from Danish to French. So yes, getting your stuff translated was a must if it wasn’t originally in French or German (or, OK, English and Italian). The only language I noted in my reading other than those was Russian, and there wasn’t much of that. (A bit more in Byzantine studies.)

Cutting to the chase:

The default answer is that English words are spelled differently because they used to be pronounced differently, just before English spelling was fixed in aspic with the invention of printing (inconveniently timed to partway through the Great English Vowel Shift).

In Late Middle English, there was [ðeːɹ], which is not a million miles away from its current pronunciation; but their was [ðæiɹ]. (Or at least, that’s what squinting at Middle English phonology for ten minutes tells me.) <ei> in their was written as a diphthong, because it used to be a diphthong, all the way back to Old Norse þeirra. And <e> in there was written as a long vowel (through the final <e>) because it used to be a long vowel, all the way back to Old English thǣr.

In Early Modern English, diphthongs did all sorts of crazy things, one of which was to have some instances of <ei> sound the same as long <e>. (And some others sound like <ei>, and some others sound like <ai>.) So there and their accidentally ended up sounding the same.

If the two words had happened to have ended up sounding the same before, rather than after, spelling was standardised, they likely would have been spelled the same. That’s unless the ambiguity was so intolerable that one of them would end up changing into a different word anyway; but languages are remarkably tolerant of homophony.

For example, Old English has a verb lætan meaning “permit”, and a verb lettan meaning “prevent”. They ended up sounding the same at a time when English spelling was reset (no continuity between Old and Middle English spelling). And in fact let in Middle English did mean both “permit” and “prevent”; it was only more recently that the “prevent” meaning of let (as in “without let or hindrance”) became obsolete.

It takes a Norman Invasion or an Atatürk to reset the spelling of a language so completely. If that hadn’t happened, you’d have likely seen laet and let pronounced identically and spelled differently, to keep continuity with Old English, and not just Middle English. But that kind of reset is the exception, not the rule. And I’m talking about wholesale resetting of the orthography, not the gradualist, consensus-seeking projects listed in much of the Spelling reform article.

Malbin’s the maos livable ciddy n the world (we keep broibin the Economist tuh sigh that), an that’s the wigh we loik it. Tüü roight! We love the pahks, we love the fooddy, we’re all füüdies n coffee snobs, an we’re praodly multikulchrul. Even bogans av picked up on the café kulcha down ere. Yeahr it gets muggy sometoimes an the weathuh cn get  derro, bud a leas’ it’s not Synney—or Gawd elp me, Brizzie! An we daon tawk funny, loik the Poms Oi seen wroitin ere. Mite, zat wot youse cawl the Queen’s English?

(God forgive me, I really am supposed to know better than that.)

Greece Greeks about Greek Cypriots:

* They talk funny.
* They drive on the wrong side of the road.
* They forget to mention them a lot of the time. (I’ve done that myself in a Quora answer.) See America–Canada, Australia–N.Z., etc.

Greek Cypriots about Greece Greeks:

* They talk like penpushers. (Because they speak standard Greek. In fact that’s their nickname for them: καλαμαρά(δ)ες. Or if they’re feeling particularly aggrieved, πουshτοκαλαμαράες, “faggot penpushers”.)

Someone else who currently lives in the area, please jump in.

This graphic from Varieties of Modern Greek has been used around here before:

The main difference is phonological. It’s one difference, but it’s a doozy (purple line): unstressed /e, o/ are raised to /i, u/, and unstressed /i, u/ are deleted. That makes Northern Greek sound at best silly to Southern Greeks (though their attempts to imitate are as unsuccessful as you’d expect). If you add some more phonological changes on top, you get something like Samothracian Greek, which is not comprehensible at all.

Some morphological differences: Northern Greek avoids the genitive much more, and has some different inflections. Not much in the way of lexical differences.

The Northern/Southern distinction is the oldest distinction made between Greek dialects, introduced by Georgios Hatzidakis in the 18mumbleties. (1880s?)  I hold with Kontosopoulos’ proposal in 1983, that the really important distinction in Greek dialect is Western and Eastern—or to use terms Greeks might be more familiar with, Mainland and Islander.