Category: Uncategorized

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.

They are indeed real people, who interview for the privilege, rather than professional actors. The whole point, after all, is that “real people” are cheaper.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they are media innocents, of course, and I’m quite happy when I find they are not. There are people who have done repeat appearances in various reality shows. There are also bizarre outbursts of outrage in Australia, when participants on The Bachelor or Married At First Sight or The Block turn out to have been strippers or to have acted in ads. I’m actually relieved the latest Bachelorette in Australia was a former news anchor.

Modern Greek?

In terms of vocabulary, Italian (including Venetian), but not by much; toss-up between Italian and Turkish. Then Latin, then French, then English.

In terms of grammar, any significant influence was through the Balkan Sprachbund. A lot of the Sprachbund features originated in Greek (and we can tell through the history of Greek and Old Church Slavonic); but not all of it. It’s very hard to disentangle Albanian and Macedonian–Bulgarian as influences, so I won’t.

A2A by Rahul. Ah, Rahul. This hurts. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it like to be a kabeinto? What was it like to leave Esperantujo?

But, you asked.

The lingua franca? Of course not, not any more. There might have been a brief window with the League of Nations, maybe even the UN, but that’s long gone.

It’s a lingua franca, but as the Rauma school (Raumism) have taken to calling it, it’s really more a self-selected diaspora language by now.

Let me turn this on its head though. When the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language met in 1907 to decide which the right auxiliary language would be, Zamenhof was prepared to go along with what they decided. He was on the record more than once saying that he was not an Esperanto chauvinist: he was in it for an international language to enable peace in the world, and he didn’t mind whose language it was.

But the rank and file didn’t go along with that—especially once de Beaufront’s double cross was found out. And really, the only way Esperanto would be adopted as the lingua franca now, is if some group like the Delegation was able to impose it on a One World Government, and they’d certainly want to make that conditional on a bucket of reforms and tweaks.

Esperantists are now Esperanto chauvinists, because we’re involved in the language not so much for Zamenhof’s dream of a world language, but for the reality of the culture that has grown around the language. I wouldn’t give up the Esperanto as I know it, in exchange for an Esperanto Mark #2 being the lingua franca. I’m curious how many would.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does an equivalent of cursive exist in other alphabets?

Greek: there was a cursive modelled after Western cursive in the 19th/20th century. It fell out of use long before computers (I was never taught it in school); I have seen it in letters from the 50s.

The main differences to what you might expect: kappa looking like a <u>; pi as an omega with a loop (ϖ); tau as a tall slash; psi looking like a <y>.

Translating your surname into Latin was in fashion in the 16th through 18th centuries for many Germans and Swedes; Linnaeus (von Linné), for example, or Neander (as in Neanderthal; Neumann).

EDIT: Philip Newton points out Neander is Greek. True dat. OK, try Faber (surname), Latin for “Smith”. Or Schmidt.

Sometimes, it has stuck around. I’m assuming Oscar Pistorius is also an instance of Afrikaaners doing this.

See Why are some old German surnames Latin?

I can think of other examples of Latin surnames in Germany, such as Michael Praetorius. There was even a good footballer in the 80’s named Holger Hieronymus.

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.)