Month: October 2016

What do I know about Çamëria/Τσαμουριά? Less than Dimitris Almyrantis, but still, I assume, more than most Greeks: I looked into the ethnic mix of the Balkans for my thesis in dialectology, since I needed to know where Greek was natively spoken.

I’ll add a couple of curios:

• The Tsamiko is one of the major dances of the Greek mainland; it merely means “the Çam dance”. Wikipedia points out the Çams didn’t actually dance it.
• There is a split in the ethnic Albanians of Greece, between the Arvanites (Arbëror) in southern Greece, who moved there in the 14th–16th century, and the Shqipëtars living across the border from Albania. The Arvanites speak an archaic version of Albanian that is clearly distinct from modern Tosk. The Shqipëtars in Greece speak variants of modern Tosk.
• Collections of songs or stories in Arvanitika done by Greeks (Arvanites) include Shqipëtar material, which is how I found out about them. (The main collection I used was Michail-Dede’s.) That, presumably, reflects Arvanites not eager to differentiate Shqipëtars as “more Albanian” than Arvanites. But grammatically, the two versions of Albanian are clearly different.
• Μιχαήλ-Δέδε, Μ. 1978–81. Αρβανίτικα Τραγούδια. 2 vols. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης.
• The Shqipëtars in Greece includes the Çams, who were Muslim. It also includes Christian Albanian-speakers, who have remained in place; for example, Lechovo (Florina prefecture), or Kimisi, in the municipality of Irakleia, Serres (migrated from Gjirokastër to European Turkey in Ottoman times, moved to Serres through the population exchanges with Turkey).
• People moved within the empire. That’s how Bulgarians ended up in Kızderbent in Bithynia (and now Polypetro in Chalkidiki).
• The ethnic Albanians, Shqipëtars and Arvanite, are of course distinct from the Albanian migrants of the past few decades, that Dimitris alludes to.
• The anecdote I’ve heard from accounts of ethnic Albanians in Greece (written by Arvanites) is that the Çams remaining in Thesprotia/Çamëria are down to a dozen; and it was impossible to elicit material in Albanian from them. Albanians here have said it’s more than that.
• Cretans in the 19th century, as Kazantzakis recorded, used the word Liapides Λιάπηδες to refer to the kilt-wearing soldiers of the mainland, the Evzones (tsoliades). I only realised a couple of months ago where the term derived from: it’s the Lab, the Albanian inhabitants of Labëria—right across the border from Çamëria. Most Lab are Bektashi Muslim, but the Greek Orthodox Albanians are Lab; and in those days, all Greek Orthodox mainlanders would have looked the same to Cretans.

So, that’s what I know. More about the Çams’ neighbours, it turns out, than the Çams themselves.

What do I think of the Çam issue?

All ethnic cleansing is repulsive. All ethnic cleansing leaves its country poorer, even if it arguably also leaves it more stable. It’s ancient history, it won’t be undone, and I don’t see any prospect of reparations. It would be good if more Greeks were even aware of it. For all I know, the thaw with Turkey points to a Greece in which more Greeks are aware of it; Dimitris knows, after all.

Then again, Dimitris is in many ways unrepresentative.

I can’t count Esperanto, since I have already been fluent in it. Nor Klingon, ditto. Nor Lojban, ditto.

So let me go through the others, and say why or why not I’d like to learn it, if I was 20 again, back when I had the free time. Ranking from less to more.

• Láadan. Pfft. Hectoring mental straitjackets: not my thing.
• Toki Pona. Meh. Cutesy mental straitjackets: not my thing.
• Basic English: Nah. Disingenuous in its execution: too much English idiom in its phrasal verbs to count as truly minimal. I have a bit more time for its modern descendent, xkcd: Up Goer Five.
• Ido: No. Very close to Esperanto, and where it’s different, I didn’t like it: it was neither fish nor fowl in the schematic/naturalistic debate.
• Loglan: No. One logical language is more than enough.
• Novial: No. Rather more naturalistic than Ido, but never attracted me. Probably too much Germanic.
• Tolkien languages: … Nah. Lots of philological cuteness, but ultimately not enough vocabulary there, and too many gaps to be useable.
• Talossan: Almost yes. In fact, I was approached by King Ben way back to join the community. Given the ensuing shitfight in the micronation, I’m glad I didn’t.
• Dothraki: Almost yes. I tried in fact, but the vocabulary just wasn’t there, either. And the fact it got killed off in Season 2 enraged me against continuing it. (I want NO SPOILERS about Season 6. I watch Game of Thrones on DVD.)
• Volapük: Weak yes, for the cuteness factor of all those moods, especially in its baroque original form, as opposed to the stripped down post-1931 version.
• Occidental: Yes. It was the best of the naturalistic languages, as the closest approximation to the pseudo–Franco-Italian they were ultimately going for. I enjoyed reading through the back issues of Cosmoglotta—although it got nasty towards the end, when they were gloating that Esperanto had been banned by the Nazis, and then got banned themselves.
• Interlingua: Yes. Like Joachim Pense said, all the good bits of Latin. Probably more Peano’s Latino Sine Flexione than Gode’s more Vulgar Latinate version which won out; but I’m delighted on the rare occasion that I use software with an Interlingua interface (Mantis Bug Tracker).
• Interglosa: Yes yes yes. It’s less neat than I remember it from when I first came across it; but its attempt to reduce all verbs to a dozen or so verb valencies plus adverbs make it a thing of beauty. And I rejoice that Xavi Abadia has unearthed the unpublished Interglosa dictionary, and put it online.
• Not to be confused with its epigone Glosa, which takes out much of the good stuff.

Supplemental to the other answers:

David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democratic Party (Australia) is the most prominent voice of overt libertarianism in Australia, the way Americans would recognise it. He gets to be that by virtue of getting a Senate seat (through people confusing his party name with the Liberals, as he has cheerfully admitted).

Libertarianism is not mainstream in Australia, which rather likes Big Government. In fact, my realisation that I’m sympathetic to prioritising more individual liberties puts me out of sync with the Australian mainstream. (And in sync with groups I’d rather not be in sync with.)

Of the other parties David Caune mentions, I’d have thought (though I haven’t particularly researched it) that social conservative religiously driven parties are palaeocon, and not visibly libertarian. That includes Democratic Labour Party, Rise Up Australia, Family First, and the Shooters and Fishers Party. The populists of One Nation and the erstwhile Palmer United Party don’t count either. The Sex Party are socially liberal (including pro-euthanasia). I don’t know how libertarian they actually are, even though they are the default recipients of my protest vote.

But beyond that, as David Caune has pointed out, the Institute of Public Affairs think-tank has yielded significant influence in the Liberal party, and its rhetoric is libertarian. A recent book on the whole Abbott debacle, Battleground, was a moment when the scales fell from my eyes: explaining the ideological split within the Liberal Party, Peter van Onselen pointed out that the best way to describe the Liberal moderates was a word that never had occurred to me: libertarian.

All of a sudden, a lot about George Brandis (attorney-general) and Christopher Pyne (education minister, defence minister) made sense.

Like Vasilios Danias said, archery would have died out in Crete when rifles came to town; the point of archery, after all, was hunting. And Cretans sure love their rifles now, as Dimitra Triantafyllidou illustrates.

But there’s ample evidence of archery used in hunting during Venetian rule, when guns were but new (and presumably not very sportsmanlike), and Crete was still full of deer. In the Erotokritos, the culminating poem of the period, Charidimos the Cretan shoots his new wife with an arrow accidentally while hunting. Panoria, in the pastoral drama named after her, is a huntress who speaks of her bow and arrow. So archery was still a thing in the 17th century.

The celebratory gunfire thing is already reminisced about in the Cretan War of Marino Zane Bounialis (Pugnali), which recounts the Ottoman conquest; so it makes sense that archery died out in Crete at around that time, when rifles became universal.

1960 in the question certainly alludes to Istanbul Greeks.

There has been minimal attention paid to the dialect of Constantinople/Istanbul, because it was an urban dialect, and historical linguists were interested in the countryside, as more archaic material: Constantinople itself had all unstressed vowels, like Southern Greece, and unlike the villagers of Thrace, who reduced unstressed vowels—as Northern Greece does.

I’ve just discovered that Valentina Fedchenko of St Petersburg State University has written a paper on the language of Constantinopolitan Greeks in Athens, in 2007: Les Grecs de Constantinople à Athènes: perception d’une langue étrangère. (For any Greek linguists reading: yes, she’s one of Maxim Kisilier’s students. Looks like Fedchenko is now working on Yiddish.)

The shibboleths of Constantinopolitan, which I already knew about, and which (as far as I know) it shares with Thracian dialect are:

• Use of που rather than πως as a complementiser.
• Use of διω rather than δω as the subjunctive aorist for ‘see’.
• Use of accusative rather than genitive indirect objects (common with Macedonian and Thessalian Greek)

I’ll summarising what I’m seeing in Fedchenko’s paper:

• Lots of codeswitching into Turkish, even to the extent of putting Turkish inflections on Greek words
• Lots of French words—and dismay that Athenians are too unsophisticated to use those French words. (They should have been around a century ago.) Examples, to freak Greek readers out: mentalité, civilisé, dîner, cure-dent, quartier, vendeuse, politesse, garçon, demande.
• Resistance to assimilating linguistically, with some use of dialect to avoid being understood, but also much pride in their variant as more correct than the Athenian standard.
• Particular relish for dialectal archaisms (such as απίδι rather than αχλάδι for ‘pear’), which to them elevate the status of their variant.
• Continuing cultivation of katharevousa.
• There have been some recent dictionaries of the variant; I’m annoyed that I hadn’t heard of them.

Blame Canada!

(And thank you, Gareth Jones, for pinging this in my brain.)

Been reading Geoffrey Blainey’s Shorter History of Australia this week. I have serious gaps in my knowledge of Australian history before… oh, before I was born.

Australia in the 1850s had de facto universal male suffrage, which made it one of the most democratic countries in existence. There was a minimum income constraint in place of £10 a week; but once the gold rush drove inflation through the roof, just about every household in the country made that threshold.

As with much of the boon this country enjoys, Australians didn’t fight for democracy; they got lucky. (There’s a reason the book The Lucky Country was titled the way it was.) Britain had learned its lesson from 1776, and learned it even better in Canada, after the Rebellions of 1837. The Report on the Affairs of British North America that Lord Durham drew up in the aftermath recommended giving the colonials (at least, the white colonials) self rule. Britain sat on its hands about the report for a decade, but then set up legislatures in Canada—and in the Australian colonies. Per Wikipedia,

The general conclusions of the report (Report on the Affairs of British North America) that pertained to self-governance were enacted in Australia and New Zealand and other mostly ethnically British colonies. The report became a sort of Magna Carta for representative self-government even for remote places like Saint Helena. The parallel nature of Government organisation in Australia and Canada to this day is an ongoing proof of the long-enduring effects of the report’s recommendations.

As Blainey winks, there was a revolution to gain Australia democracy, after all. The revolution, though, happened in Canada.

Sofia Mouratidis is right. She’s also right in the formal synonyms, and in one of the informal synonyms.

I’ll add a second informal synonym: συγχαρίκια. Amusingly (to me anyway), the original meaning of συ(γ)χαρίκια is “congratulatory gift”. When you brought someone good news, they were expected to reward you with a synkharikin. In fact, before telling the good news, it became a thing to tease the lucky person with τι θα μου δώσεις για συγχαρίκι, “what’ll you give me as a gift? (for me bringing you the good news)”. As the custom died out, people retained that synkharikin had something to do with good news, and just used the plural as “congratulations!”

But I gotta say, the true colloquial equivalent of “congratulations!” is a simple μπράβο, “bravo!” In Greek, it’s more like “well done! good for you!”

Ryan Guthrie’s is the most correct word.

Another word: ἀπώλεσα. I have lost (something), or, quite felicitously, I have destroyed. Which is why Apollyon, Revelation’s Angel of the Abyss, is not The Loser, but The Destroyer.

Not that absurd a connection. That Modern Greek word, έχασα? Comes from *χαώνω < *χαόω. To turn something into chaos.

Zoef De Haas answered a version of the question involving argē and aretē. OP actually intended archē and aretē; they are still not related.

• ἀρχή: Verbal noun from ἄρχω ‎(árkhō, “I begin”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ergʰ- ‎(“to begin, rule, command”), according to Wiktionary.
• ἀρετή: From Proto-Indo-European *h₂erh₁- ‘plough’ according to Wiktionary; from areskō ‘to like’ or areiōn ‘better’, according to Frisk.

Geoffrey Sampson is a very good scholar in Natural Language Processing. One of my .sigs quotes him.

He’s also a UKIP member who got kicked out of the Tories after saying he was an unashamed racialist. Protests at his university wanted him kicked out, saying no person of colour could comfortably sit his classes. And some protesters cast doubt on his academic record.

For me to consider Sampson a good scientist does not mean I endorse “racialism”.

People are complicated. Caravaggio was a thug and a killer; he also was the first man in the West who made painting an art. Ben Carson, by all accounts, really is a brilliant surgeon, who thinks strange things about pyramids.

The notion that politicians, or sportspeople, or teachers should somehow be moral exemplars is absurd to me. It’s not relevant to their job, and it’s not their job. If racism is bad, it’s bad in everybody, the sanitation worker no more or less than the professor. If people have talents and expertise, those are not diminished by their prejudices, even if we consider that their humanity is.

Some would allow a hypothetical Hawking’s racism to call his work into question, just as they did with Sampson. I won’t. I read Sampson’s books to get a grounding in pronoun resolution, not to learn about the hierarchy of the races. Not, in fact, to engage with Sampson as a person at all. And anything valid I learn about pronoun resolution from his books remains valid, whatever his political opinions.