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So, when I was gathering materials for my PhD in Greek dialectology, I noticed that Greeks collecting texts would transcribe them in the Greek alphabet (natch), but foreigners in the 20th century usually used a Roman-based phonetic alphabet. Not the IPA, that would be way too sensible; typically some adaptation of a God-awful French or German dialectological alphabet.

Such as Hubert Pernot’s classic on Tsakonian. Or August Heisenberg (Werner’s dad) and his work with Greek POWs in World War I. Or Louis Roussel, and his collection of fairy tales, collected in 1910, and published in 1929.

Contes de Mycono : par Louis Roussel.

The blurb for the recent Greek reprint (and transliteration back into Greek) has it as:

Fairy Tales of Mykonos reveals the other side [of] Mykonos, far from summer scenes and tourist attractions. It is a journey into the past, guided by a French Hellenist and a Myconian folklorist. Panagiotios Kousathanas offers Greek and foreign readers a forgotten book. These lively fairy tales were written in 1910-11, and published in France in 1929. Some appeared in I Mikioniatiki newspaper around 15 years ago. The book is an opportunity to learn about the everyday customs, beliefs and fears of an age-old island population. Three storytellers told Roussel tales of lords and priests; dancing, festivities, and feasts; of girls transformed into birds by wicked witches and of lovers and spouses who incur suspicion. Related to the Greek demotic tradition and to Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, Myconian fairy tales are full of laughter, pain and passion for everything in life: birth, love, marriage, work, the family and death.

Well, that’s the poetic way of putting it. Leafing through it, I saw it reflected a clearly hardscrabble existence, with donkeys and fishing and strict islander morality, and a world not much wider than the Aegean.

My reaction: “So Mykonos used to be a real place…”

Modern Greek:

[ˈθa.ʎi.a]. If it was a truly vernacular name it would end up in two syllables as  [ˈθa.ʎa], but it isn’t.

That’s Thaglia, with the gli pronounced as in Italian (palatal l).

Ancient Greek, which you didn’t ask for:

[ tʰáleːa]

What Yossi Aharon said. The word is Ancient, but I think there are some indications it survived rather than being revived, despite being a horrible no good third declension noun.

A word no longer heard for “forest” is the Turkish loan word ρουμάνι < orman.

The <ğ> used to be pronounced, as a [ɣ]. It has dropped out in Modern Standard Turkish, though it survives in Turkish dialect, and in Greek loanwords from Turkish. So yoğurt used to be [joɣurt], which was transliterated as yoghurt. The /g/ is pronounced in that transliteration, because that’s the default thing to do in languages that don’t have a [ɣ].

I just said that Greek keeps [ɣ] in Turkish loans; so ağa = αγάς, bağlama = μπαγλαμάς. But in the case of yoghurt, the Greek form is γιαούρτι, which corresponds directly to yaourt, and has no <ğ> in sight.

The Triantafyllidis dictionary’s explanation (Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής) is that the  yaourt variant has dropped the <ğ> earlier than standard Turkish did, either because it was Balkan Turkish, or because the <ğ> was dropped in Aromanian—for which their evidence is Bulgarian yagurt vs Romanian yaurt.

Does the Iron Man and helps out with the CFA, does he? How do those small-scale acts of civic virtue qualify you for running a party and a country?

Or, in Half-Term Tony’s case, delegate running the party to your chief of staff, and running your country through arrays of flagpoles?

For the rest, I defer to the majority of other respondents.

Whereas in Ancient Greek, it’s εἰ, pronounced /ei/ in Homeric Greek, /eː/ in Attic Greek, and /i/ in Koine and Byzantine.

Modern αν is Ancient ἄν, which was a modal particle accompanying εἰ (if… would…, who-ever); it ended up replacing it.

Not to my knowledge. The closest was Maximus Planudes’ translations, which included Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Jocular answer:

When I was spending three years in the wilds of Orange County, US, I was hankering for the culinary variety of Old Melbourne Town. I kept telling anyone who would listen (and that wasn’t many) about how when I’d go back, eat at my favourite Malay-Chinese restaurant on Lygon St, and swim on a sea of latte.

When I got back after three years, I headed straight to the now sadly defunct Nyonya’s, had a satifsying noodle dish, and topped it off with my then favourite dessert of lychees and vanilla ice cream.

My biggest surprise when I came back: how god-awful Australian ice cream is.

(2001, it’s gotten better since.)

Somewhat more serious answer:

After six months in Greece: how standoffish and undemonstrative Australians are. I was actually surprised my thesis supervisor didn’t hug me to welcome me back.

More generally: reverse culture shock. It makes sense that the foreign culture is exotic. It doesn’t make sense when you’re alienated from your home culture.

Inertia. The standards are already there, and presumably will have already made massive inroads against the local dialects. It’s very difficult to change your standard language if you already have one, and build a new standard. It’s much easier to just rebadge your existing standard with some tweaks.

So it’s easier to keep standard Croatian Štokavian, than to run around the wilds of Dalmatia and find the most distant Ijekavian dialect possible. It’s easier to keep the Serbian standard and rebadge it as Montenegrin, than to start adding new letters for a newly devised Montenegrin standard. (Bosnian I don’t know as much about.)

Convenience wins here over purity. It’s very important for the local identities that the standards be distinct; but the speakers don’t need the standards to be mutually unintelligible and linguistically impeccable. They need to be just different enough. You could get away with finding the most distant dialects possible in Norway in the 19th century, or Macedonia in the 20th, and enshrining them as the new norm against frigging Oslo Danish or goddamn Varna Bulgarian. But in 21st century former Yugoslavia,  Standard Croatian Štokavian was already in place, and it was distant enough from Standard Serbian Štokavian to fit the bill as a distinct Croatian language.

One of the frustrations linguists found when they were helping Australian Aboriginal communities revive their languages was that the linguists were more interested in the linguistics than the community. The linguists wanted to revive a language as close as possible to the pre-invasion language. Some communities were content to just have their local variant of Aboriginal English embellished with a dozen words from their original language. That was enough for them to have a distinct symbol to rally around.

Disclaimer: I may not actually know what I’m talking about.

This is a mythological rather than factual answer, but:

The Hmong people were illiterate, but they lived at the crossroads of a bunch of literate cultures—the Chinese, the Thai, the Vietnamese, the Laotians. The Hmong noticed. And they figured that they must not always have been the downtrodden illiterates that they were: surely they too used to have writing.

The legend was that, when they were literate, they were migrating across a river, and as they did, their horses ate their books.

Any resemblance to “the dog ate my homework” is fortuitous.

This meant that the Hmong invested much messianic expectation in the restoration of literacy. Which explains the enthusiasm with which the Hmong embraced the Romanized Popular Alphabet, promulgated by missionaries such as William Smalley. It also explains the curious history of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pa… script—and the messianic cult around its martyred originator, Shong Lue Yang, the “Mother of Writing”.  

Smalley cowrote the biography of Yang, Mother of Writing, with Yang’s chief disciple. It is touchingly respectful.