Day: April 23, 2017

To expand on Fey Lepoura’s answer to Is Greece a multicultural multiethnic country?

Historically, Greece contained a large number of ethnicities, and a large number of distinct cultures to go with those ethnicities:

• Greek
• Orthodox
• Catholic
• Muslim
• Turkish
• Arvanite
• Albanian (in the Northwest, mostly Muslim, but also Christian)
• Aromanian
• Megleno-Romanian
• Macedonian (Slavonic)
• Bulgarian
• Christian
• Muslim (Pomak)
• Roma
• Armenian
• Jewish
• Romaniote
• Sephardic
• Italkian

Of those ethnicities and cultures, the Muslims left most of Greece in 1923, the Jews were mostly extirpated through the Holocaust, and the Christians were mostly assimilated to the Greek culture.

I think you can still legitimately claim that Greece is multiethnic, and that Arvanites, Aromanians, Slavophones, Pomaks, Turks, Roma, and Sephardic Jews are distinct ethnicities that are still identifiable in Greece. (That’s not to mention the substantial number of immigrants to Greece since the 1990s.)

But multicultural has come to mean something more. Multicultural has come to mean that, even if there is a dominant culture in the country, the state will not pressure its population to assimilate to that culture, and will accept the coexistence of different cultures in the country as an asset.

For better or worse, the Greek state has never been multicultural in that way.

Dictionary Typology

This presentation offers the following typology of dictionaries:

• Bilingual/Multilingual (translating one language into another)
• Monolingual
• Synchronic (contemporary usage)
• Limited (a particular field, e.g. medical; a particular register, e.g. slang)
• General: Comprehensive (all of the language, multi-volume) or Standard (single volume, mostly for paedagogical use)
• Diachronic
• Historical (the historical paths that words have taken in their usage and forms)
• Etymological (the origins of words)

Dictionaries often combine several categories. The Oxford English Dictionary is all of Historical, Etymological, and Comprehensive. There are dictionaries that are purely etymological, though historical dictionaries almost always are also etymological. You can also have bilingual dictionaries that are not just translations, but etymological or historical (the big dictionaries of Classical languages fall in that category), or synchronic and limited (e.g. Greek–English medical dictionary).

This is contentious, and ideological.

I’ll just give my answer, as a middle-aged white cis het male.

I have judgement. I have opinions. I am not disenfranchised from having opinions or judgement, simply by accident of what privilege I have inherited. I am entitled to discuss those opinions, and so long as I do so openly and receptively and respectfully, that is a good thing.

That said: I am privileged, which means that I have a hegemonic* perspective. The kinds of perspectives that I naturally align to get heard a lot, and are familiar to me and to my interlocutors. The kinds of perspectives that my less privileged interlocutors may have are not necessarily as familiar to me.

Which means that while my judgement and opinion is as valid as any other’s, I readily concede that I have more to learn from the less-privileged than they from me, about the realities they confront. And being open to learning means that, a lot of the time, I withhold judgement, and I don’t interrupt, and I just listen. And because my privilege is the kind of privilege that drowns out others’ voices, I don’t pipe up with my opinion and judgement until it’s appropriate to: it’s not all about me.

Is the reflex cry of mansplaining and whitesplaining good citizenship and good alliance-building? No, because reflex cries are not discourse, they are turf-guarding. But if the less-privileged have carved out a space to speak to their lack of privilege, then the more-privileged are in that space as guests; and it is courteous to act like it. Offer your opinion, but offer it courteously, and with a bit of deference.

If they keep shouting you down, and you are honestly speaking in good faith with them—why then, there’s no discussion to be had; shake the dust off your shoes, and move on. But do make sure you’ve been listening, and trying to learn.

*If Sam Morningstar’s Tourette’s syndrome involves saying “neo-Marxism”, mine is saying “hegemony”.

For the past blessed week, I have not seen featured comments.

Malayalam has been written in Arabic script (Arabi Malayalam) and Syriac script (Suriyani Malayalam), with significant extensions to both to deal with the large number of phonemes. The large number of phonemes means any Romanisation is going to involve either diacritics or digraphs; but there’s no intrinsic reason why Malayalam, or any other language, cannot be romanised; and Romanization of Malayalam – Wikipedia lists two ASCII and two scholarly romanisations.