A novel with mass readership, not in Greek, where you don’t want to alienate readers unnecessarily, and you care to give readers some notion of what it sounds like? Use transliteration rather than original script. Same as if you were putting Hindi (or whatever your language happens to be) into a non-Hindi (or whatever) novel.
Yes, I write Greek in Greek characters here, and when I don’t, I use IPA. But I’m not writing a novel.
Thx4A2A, Anon. As my fellows have asked, we’ll need more detail on what you’re asking.
I’m going to stab at a related question, which is the legacy of Hellenistic culture. In fact, that might be a good approach to vague questions like this, my fellow respondents: we grab a bit each of the possible answers that we can relate to.
We owe the Hellenistic—under which I’ll conflate Greek culture under the Romans:
Indivisible; literally, uncut. From the verb temnō, to cut; cf. tomē, a cut.
Martin Pickering is right. A somewhat more emphatic response you’ll hear occasionally is Alithos o Kyrios, “truly the Lord has”. (It’s in response to Christos Anesti, “Christ is risen”.)
Zavara Katra Nemia, Greek, 1968.
The songwriter Yannis Markopoulos was routinely subject to censorship during the Greek Junta, as a left winger. So he wrote a song with nonsense lyrics and lots of 5/8 and 11/8 metre, which got past the censors. And everyone assumed it was against the dictatorship anyway.
Zavara katra nemia Zavara katra nemia
Hallelujah HallelujahZavarakatranemia Mercy Mercy
lama lama nama nama nemia
Hallelujah Hallelujah
To my disappointment, I find on the Googles that the songwriter himself has provided an explanation of the seeming nonsense lyrics, which turns out to be a call for revolt against the dictatorship. Whether or not it’s past facto, it’s plausible-looking: (Zavara = lavara, katra = katrami, nemia = anemisan, lama “blade”, nama = mana)
Pitch-black banners waving, pitch-black banners waving
Consequence ConsequencePitch-black banners wave Mercy Mercy
Blade blade Mother Mother Waving
Consequence Consequence
And I have to say, it’s still disjoint enough to be not that much closer to lucidity. Everyone who quotes his explanation says sagely how obvious it is that he’s calling for a popular uprising. Maybe in Greek it is…
Doesn’t matter. The combination of the oracular music and Nikos Xilouris’ even more oracular vocals are meaning enough.
Partly, source morphology. Partly, mediation via Latin. Partly, particularity of English.
Remember first that Classical names in English came in via Latin most of the time. Hence Plato rather than Platon, and Hercules for Heracles.
Second, not all final -ns are the same. So there’s no contradiction about Latin keeping the final -n in Xenophon and not in Plato.
Third, English chops off more final inflections in Latin names, though less than French and (sometimes) German. That I don’t know as much about, but it’s partly to do with how the languages developed (French), and partly just random change.
So English avoids final –anus, and so does French (where English got the names from). So the names have the same ending as the corresponding adjectives, which have the same original suffix in Latin: Octavian, Vespasian, just like Christian < Christianus, quotidian < quotidianus. English and French have done the same with Latin names ending in –alis: we say Martial and martial, both of which are Martialis ~ martialis in Latin.
German does the same with –tus names, changing them to –t: German Herodot, French Herodote, English Herodotus. English does this with Theodoret, but not generally.
Whenever a Greek wants to nod sagely about the mess that is and ever has been the Balkans (and to admit that they too are stuck in the mess), they’ll mutter Εδώ είναι Βαλκάνια δεν είναι παίξε–γέλασε. “This is no Fun and Games, this is the Balkans!”
I was going to cite the bon mot, and I’ve just sought to trace where the bon mot comes from. And I realise that I have am missing some critical context (like a Bachelor of Arts in Greece, or growing up in Greece in the 70s instead of the 80s) to get it. So partly, this is a plea for help. (As we say in Greek, “what is the poet trying to say?”)
The phrase originated in a poem by the Greek Surrealist poet Nikos Engonopoulos. Engonopoulos was unique for being a surrealist in a country full of magic realism. He was also unique for writing in Katharevousa, decades after Katharevousa was discredited as a literary language: he was opting out of the literary consensus.
The poem… I think I get one tenor of the poem (nationalism is bullshit), and it’s pretty daring for a poem written in 1946, right as the Greek Civil War was making the Balkans too close for comfort. But it’s surrealist, and I’m missing a lot.
Language register always matters in Modern Greek, and this poem vacillates between the detachment and ersatz classicism of Katharevousa, and the Volkisch diction and heroics of folk song. It’s like Cavafy, only more.
The bon mot was popularised in a quotation in the 1971 song Ballos (a couples dance) by Dionysis Savvopoulos. I guess the Wikipedia article hits it on the head: he’s a Greek Frank Zappa, relapsing into Greek folk instead of Doo Wop. Because Savvopoulos required a bit of sophistication to understand, I paid him no attention when I was in Greece and 8 years old, and I’m not sure I can understand him now.
I’m going to translate the song, and then the poem, for my Balkan peeps, especially Lara Novakov, Aziz Dida, and Dimitra Triantafyllidou. Who knows. They live there, they may get more out of it than I can.
stixoi.info: Μπάλλος. Dionysis Savvopoulos: Ballos. 1971.
IV. In these here Balkans. (14m20 in YouTube vid)
In these here Balkans, in this here age,
I met my friends one winter night.
They sat all silent on some rocks;
their eyes bulged as they saw me coming.
For all this time they thought me dead,
and drank sweet wine and wheaten bread.
They welcomed me; they tired of me;
they worked out my joke on them, and they denied me.
“Drop your miracles, throw off your mask.
This is the Balkans, this is no fun and games.”
I share my bread, I give you my flask.
I look you in the eyes, and I sing a song.
And the song says that I’ll take the blame,
that I’ll be the leader in this festival.
Εγγονόπουλος – Ορνεο 1748. Nikos Engonopoulos. Vulture 1748. 1946.
Vulture 1748. (Interpretation of the painters.)
Was it a yearning good or ill that has led
the gloaming of the young shield-bearers
onto the untrod forests of the night,
amidst the wild woods of Orthodoxy,
the thick clumps of cypress trees of panic,
the moral projection
of a harsh Fate through colonnades of daybreak and lethargy?
Who might have been the frontman
of the rebellion?
Of the rumour?
Of the lust?
The orator?
Were they faithful to the demands of—
who else?—the demanders:
fine parricides and pedophiles,
with only the syllabary of necrophilia
to justify them
against the successive, incredibly fierce attacks
of eulogists?
Might perchance the metaphysical city—as you hearken, O ye youths—
of the industrious painters lie hidden in the hanged paintings?
And as the warlike adzes
fall upon heads,
and the ravines buzz
with the ruin of war
and the hymns
of warrior saints,
a voice is head.
“Kral Mirko, what do you want?
This is no fun and games:
This is the Balkans.”
I think you’re asking the wrong question.
Historical Dictionary of Tennis:
One interesting aspect of the international quality of the sport is the fact that most of its top players are bilingual as a minimum and often multilingual. Serbian Novak Djoković, for example, upon winning a tournament in Italy, addressed the crowd in fluent Italian and then switched to near-perfect English for a television interview. Djoković, in addition to his native Serbian, is also fluent in German and Croatian. In fact, virtually the only players who are not multilingual are the American and British native-English speakers.
Emphasis added. With extreme prejudice.
Djoka the polyglot:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bMfJqLoUeSI
Djoka en Français:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=q-g22UD01jw
Djoka auf Deutsch:
Djoka en Español:
The following poster for tram safety in Melbourne includes a suite of languages.
I had nothing to do with the entry on the second column, third row.
… which is Klingon: qIm.
As others have said, Australian regional variation is nowhere near as great as even the US, let alone Britain.
(You mean Canada has regional accents?)
The main variation in Australia historically has been class-based (Cultivated, General, Broad), with less well-studied variation between rural and urban, and with an interesting in-group variant among 2nd generation immigrants (Barbara Horvath had studied it in the 80s (Variation in Australian English), and a bunch of Greek-Australian comedians made a career of it in the 90s; impressionistically, it was more about centralisation of vowels than nasalisation.)
People keep saying there is a Queenslander accent (a drawl), but I don’t hang around enough Queenslanders to know if that is something different from the urban–rural split, ay.
(OK, that was a joke: the “ay” is a Queenslander thing, but it’s not an accent thing.)
There *is* a regional phonetic difference that has crept up in the past twenty years: Victoria has a celery–salary merger, although you’ll find no Victorian admitting that New Zealand had it first. So celery here is pronounced /sæləri/, and Melbourne is pronounced /mælbɪn/. Bizarrely when linguists noticed it, they called it Melbourne raising, even though it’s always sounded to me like the /ɛ/ lowering, not the /æ/ raising.