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I find this fascinating.

You may not find this fascinating. It involves Greek music of the 40s.

I’ve been listening to Dalaras’ 1980 recording of wartime rebetika. I realised that one of the songs, Haidari, I had already heard before, and loved it. It’s a chilling song about someone about to be executed, in the Haidari concentration camp in Athens. Its lyrics and its music both have an astonishing urgency, with the music careening between panic and sorrow.

You could argue Dalaras’ 1980 recording is overproduced, too smooth. But it’s also oracular the way Dalaras manages. And it’s the version I’ve known and loved.

stixoi.info: Chaidari

Run mother, fast as you can,
run and save me,
and free me, mother,
from Haidari.

For I am about to die
and I am condemned.
A seventeen year old boy
locked up in irons.

They take me from Sekeris St
[where the Sicherheitsdienst HQ was]
to Haidari
and hour by hour I wait
for Death to take me.

Now, it’s a miracle that the Wartime Rebetiko songs were recorded at all. They were not recorded during the war. With many of them pro-communist and most of them suspect, they were not recorded after the war. And that extended to this song, too, which was written in 1943 by the Master of Rebetiko, the Great Markos Vamvakaris.

And with the songs not recorded during the war, or after the war, an inconvenient truth surfaced about Haidari. Noone in 1980 was sure what the tune was. There were multiple tunes in circulation, and what Markos himself had set it to was unknown; Markos himself had died in 1972. All anyone knew was the characteristically curt description in Markos’ autobiography:

[Blog article]

Then [after the war] I went back to perform at Amphissa nightclub. We’d play all my pre-war songs there. I’d written a few new songs in the meantime. One that went quite well was Haidari. A zeibekikos in the niavendi (Nahawand) scale. I didn’t record it. I sang it in parks [clubs].

According to Markos’ son Stelios, Markos himself barely remembered the song, and the recording went ahead with music that Stelios wrote.

It’s an amazing tune, like I said. But it’s no zeibekikos; the article above describes it as a tsifteteli. It’s not in Nahawand scale. And if you think about it (and know the styles), there’s nothing ’40s about it: it’s a setting that wouldn’t make sense before 1960.

What happens if you find Bach’s completion to his last fugue? Or Schubert’s completion of his Unfinished Symphony? Or a Requiem that Mozart finished all on his own, without Süssmayr? Would it be what you expected? Would you want to risk disappointment?

And how much more of a risk would it be, if it was like this song, where the music wasn’t even the original?

Well, I found out today that Markos had remembered the original tune just fine, and a recording surfaced a couple of years ago from 1966.

That blog article was: Το αυθεντικό ‘Χαιδάρι’ του Μάρκου Βαμβακάρη από χαμένη ηχογράφηση του 1966

The audio is abominable, and Markos was never a great singer, but…

… The striking thing about the original Haidari: it’s exactly what you’d expect from Markos in 1943. It follows the path he’d laid out in his 1930s Peiraeus style. It’s jaunty, not desperate (outside of the wavering of Markos’ out-of-tune tenor: the desperation is very subtle). It’s ordered, not impassioned, with all the familiar tropes and Mozartian symmetry of the 30s. It thumps along at a fast pace. It’s not as imaginative and soaring as his son’s setting: after all, his son had benefitted from 40 years of broadening of the bouzouki repertoire. And its tone, ultimately, is all fatalism and little panic.

And it has three more stanzas, one of which is heard in the recording (and all of which had been published in 1947):

You should see Death’s sword,
mother, how it changes things,
oh, and how it will take way
mother, everyone’s life.

And when you see me dead, mother,
tell the other mothers—
for they too have ached
with even greater sorrow—

That I have seen their children
bound in chains,
dressed in the uniform of the condemned,
and unjustly slain.

… I think the new version is greater, it dares more, it feels more. Yet the understated, ordered, fatalistic original, numbly wrapped up in the familiar old tropes and symmetries, is probably truer to how Markos felt, as he saw Jews and resistance fighters being dragged off to Haidari.

Ah, Desmond. I am a philosophy dolt, and I take no pride in that. But I have dreaded death since I associated Alice Cooper with the Boogeyman when I was 6, and I’ve had different responses to it. Fear, denial, self-aggrandisement. (That was my twenties: “I’ll write the definitive grammar of mediaeval Greek”, “I’ll get all my papers laminated and sent to Spitzbergen.”)

In my forties, I have reverted to a verse I wrote in my teens, in Esperanto, about what the apocalypse might look like, and which features here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to If Earth were to explode in 10 hours, what would you do?

Ni iris — laborejen. Malkontraŭ la malbeno.
We went — to the office. Un-against the un-blessing.

I won’t fight Death. And I won’t allow Death the victory of overawing me, or paralysing me, or making me have one last riotous spree, or doing any goddamned thing differently. I will go about my business.

Or as that Greek folk song put it (a little less morosely):

Alas I’m forty by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

και από τσι χάρες τση ζωής τσι πλια όμορφες θα πάρω,
να αφήσω αποδιαλέουρα στον κερατά το Χάρο.

I’ll sample all the best life has to give.
The leftovers—that bastard Death can have.

I’ve tried to limit the people I follow to Dunbar’s number of 150, and failed. I’m at 368; I’m very circumspect nowadays about adding more people. But yes, I have lost track, and I doubt anyone with more than 150 hasn’t.

I have kept track of my regulars; they feature on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile in the “I love youse all” series, and they are added to as I go. 60 so far in the series, and there will be more. In fact, I probably have kept track of… oh, I dunno… 150 of the 368? 🙂

Why I followed them? I’m a lot worse at that. I only remember a couple of Why-I-followeds, as opposed to Why-I-keep-followings. I remember well that I followed Dimitra Triantafyllidou, because we started by yelling at each other about the provenance of Greek-speakers in Western Turkey. I know that I followed Sam Murray, because they messaged me first, with a joyfulness that came quite out of nowhere. I vaguely recollect that I noticed Michael Masiello posting about obscure music (Alkan), and I dug his style. Chrys Jordan snared me with his post on the Cryptocracy: Chrys Jordan’s answer to What if Quora were a country?.

But many of them, I just saw around, often as friends of friends, often in topics I focus on, and I liked what they had to say. I’ve been rewarded for it. I’m hazy as to how it started, but I’m glad it’s continued.

Per Monthly Summary: Jan 2017 by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue, I am aware of four un-bans in January 2017, and several through late 2016. So yes, it is possible, and it does happen.

Eg : αὐλέω to αὐλητής, actually. 🙂

For a list of suffixes and how they work in Ancient Greek, see Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges from §833 on for more detail than you’ll ever want on the mechanics. The list starts at §839.

That list is for Ancient Greek; Koine is substantially the same list, and works the same way, but some suffixes did fall out of fashion. For example, -τήρ is Attic, -τής is Attic and Koine.

For accentuation: the rule in Koine remains the rule for Ancient Greek: accent is governed by Mora (linguistics). (It’s terrifying how strongly the rule applies, by analogy, even after vowel length was eliminated in Greek, as it was by the time of the New Testament—and indeed, even in Modern Greek, two millennia later.)

By default, accent is recessive. So if the suffix is unaccented, and ends in a long syllable, then accent will be on the penult. If the suffix is unaccented, and ends in a short syllable, then accent will be on the antepenult. So σημαίνω > σημάν-τωρ; μανθάνω > μαθή-τρια.

Many suffixes bear accent, and that accent overrides the recessive default. αὐλη-τής is one such instance: the agentive -τής is consistently accented.

The only instance where accent makes a meaning distinction is one familiar to students of the Koine from the Paraclete. If you form an adjective in -τος from a prepositional verb, there is meant to be a meaning difference between accenting on the ultima and the antepenult. Accenting on the ultima means the description in the adjective applies as a one-off. Accenting on the antepenult means the description in the adjective applies permanently.

So a παρακλητός is someone you’ve summoned to stand by your side just now. A παράκλητος is someone you summon all the time, a permanent advocate. Which is what the Holy Spirit is supposed to be.

(Given that the instance of παράκλητος in Dio Cassius 46.20 refers to slaves dragooned into a one-off task, that accent distinction turns out to be bogus in practice, and I’ve seen oodles of other instances where it was ignored. Sorry.)

Scottish English? My Scottish personal trainer reports people have difficulty understanding her. I can’t fathom why, and I don’t, but maybe my ear isn’t as tin as I think it is. (FWIW, it’s rare that any Scots creeps in to her speech: cannae only once in a while.)

Northern English? I think highly of it, and I think most Australians do; Freddie Flintoff is an honorary Australian, and the accent hasn’t hurt that.

As OP makes explicit in comments, what he’s actually asking about is Received Pronunciation.

Well, Cultivated Australian used to be the dialect of the Australian elite, and Cultivated Australian was not terribly different from RP. (The main difference was the plural: boxes [boksəz] vs [boksɪz].) If you watch Australian TV shows from the 70s, you’ll notice that all the lawyers and doctors talk like Poms.

Cultivated Australian is still around, but it’s been stigmatised through resurgent Australian nationalism, and no Australian politician will touch it now.

(The last one I remember speaking it is Alexander Downer, of a three-generation political dynasty, now High Commissioner to London like his father before him—and not taken terribly seriously by many Australians. His daughter Georgina is angling for a seat in parliament, and doing radio to get her brand out. And she’s as Ocker-sounding as the rest of our contemporary politicians. Any elocution lessons she’s had are carefully concealed.)

So. If a jumped up local imitation of RP is stigmatised, how do you think actual bona fide RP fares?

Yeah. Suspicion and derision. All the old resentments against Mother England are still there; all the old admiration of Mother England isn’t.

I think I get your question. Is the etymology of etymology subject to the Etymological fallacy?

The etymological fallacy is a genetic fallacy that holds that the present-day meaning of a word or phrase should necessarily be similar to its historical meaning. This is a linguistic misconception, and is sometimes used as a basis for linguistic prescription. An argument constitutes an etymological fallacy if it makes a claim about the present meaning of a word based exclusively on its etymology. This does not, however, show that etymology is irrelevant in any way, nor does it attempt to prove such.

And the answer is, of course it is. Etymon is from the Greek for “true”. Not “true origin”, just “true”—as in “true meaning”. As in, the truth of the word is to be found in its origin.

That’s your etymological fallacy right there.

This is a more general question: why would linguistic Olympiads and competitions in general use for their puzzles real, non-obscure languages, which someone among the the contestants may already know?

I know nothing about NACLO in particular, and I will offer some speculation which I still think relevant.

• Oversight: “meh, noone will know Turkish”. Which of course is pretty lazy. And that’s why fieldwork linguists pick their own language of interest, which they can be reasonably sure noone will know. I was never a fieldworker, but when I set assignments, I’d make a point of using Tsakonian. I’ve seen a fair few Australian Aboriginal languages in assignments. I’ve also seen Klingon, although I don’ t think that’s nowadays a more obscure choice than Hungarian.
• On the other hand, if the puzzle or quiz is not just about “work out what this means, and give a one sentence answer” but “give an analysis of this data”, then the choice of language doesn’t matter in most cases. Maybe 0.5% of the people sitting the Olympiad know Turkish or Hungarian. The number of people able to come up with a cogent linguistic analysis under exam conditions will be a smaller proportion: native speakers aren’t linguists out of the box. Admittedly, not massively smaller.
• And if you’re going to write a non-trivial question, making up a toy language is not going to cut it. You’ll want a language whose mechanics have been worked out, so that you can ask intelligent questions around it. But honestly, if you’re picking Hungarian or Turkish over, I dunno, Lakota or Mandinka, I go back to point #1. Pretty lazy.

As other respondents have said, (a) it depends, and (b) they do. Reflecting on the Asian Australians I’ve known in the past thirty years:

• People who’ve come off the boat naturally aren’t going to have an Aussie accent. Duh. Although I’ve spoken of a counterexample here: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who are some people you know who became fluent in a foreign language as an adult?
• Second generation Asian Australians will, by default, have an Aussie accent. Of course. I haven’t noticed someone who doesn’t.
• In fact, I contrast second generation Asian Australians with second generation Greek Australians. There is a distinctive Greek-Australian accent that I can pick out in 40 year old and 50 year old 2nd gen Greeks: it’s not Greek at all, it’s overcentralised, and a little overenunciated. I don’t recall something similar with Asian Australians. But as I keep protesting, I do have a tin ear.
• Some Asian Australian schoolfriends and acquaintances have been on the Cultivated Australian/Vaguely British side. That correlates with Taiwan (not sure how), and with Hong Kong (a bit more obvious how).
• On the other hand, my fellow engineering student from Shepparton in rural Victoria, predictably, had one of the more ocker accents I’ve ever heard. Mate.

Remember when Dennis Miller was commentating the NFL, and peppering his commentary with obscurity after obscurity, and a panoply of blogs popped up to offer exegesis to the befuddled masses?

This here blog may be that for the Magister, and I don’t want the Magister to start getting all self-conscious about his recondite lexis.

Don’t think that’s a likely outcome though.

irrefragable is another word from the Magister that is new to me:

Michael Masiello’s answer to If a lie must be told to accomplish a moral imperative, is that lie virtuous? Is honesty immoral in that circumstance?

Aristotle makes a version of this point — an unruly, inconvenient, irrefragable truth

Michael Masiello’s answer to Is there any neutral source where I can learn about Donald Trump and his politics?

There is no “view from nowhere”; subjectivity is irrefragable and ineluctable

Definition of IRREFRAGABLE

impossible to refute <irrefragable arguments>

impossible to break or alter <irrefragable rules>

So why is it different from irrefutable? Because it’s got the etymology of “unopposable, irresistable”

Since at least 1533, irrefragable has been used as an English adjective modifying things (such as arguments or data) that are impossible to refute. It derives from the Late Latin adjective irrefragabilis (of approximately the same meaning), which is itself derived from the Latin verb refragari, meaning “to oppose or resist.” Irrefragable rather quickly developed a second sense referring to things (such as rules, laws, and even objects) that cannot be broken or changed. There was once also a third sense that applied to inflexible or obstinate people.

So, you not only can’t refute it, you can’t stand up to it and resist it; and the “it” is like a law or a rule, not just an argument someone makes.

Of course, the Magister can himself be pretty irrefragable at times. In whichever of the senses you prefer. (Handy hint: he likes obsolete, archaic senses of words.)