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All Balkan languages have borrowed substantial Turkish vocabulary, and all Balkan languages have borrowed some Turkish affixes.

However, the Balkan Sprachbund is defined through the convergence of grammars, rather than just their borrowings from a common source. It is defined by shared morphological categories and syntactic constructions: a convergence such that, if you replace a Greek sentence with Albanian, word for word and suffix for suffix, the results will more or less make sense.

In that regard, the contribution of Turkish has been marginal. The “supposedly” suffix of Turkish, –miş, counts as a new morphological category, and has found favour in at least one dialect of Aromanian. That instance aside, the morphology and syntax of Turkish have remained quite distinct from that of the Balkan languages. (What happened to Greek in Anatolia was a different story, but it does not count as Balkan.)

Another data point:

• Routinely served to tourists, as an exotic offering. Like crocodile is.
• Available in gourmet restaurants on occasion, as an exotic offering.
• I’ve had it two or three times. The last time, in an Ethiopian tagine.
• Available in supermarkets, but not plentiful in supermarkets.
• Very plentiful as pet food.
• Very lean meat, so very easy to overcook.
• Has not captured the people’s imagination, it must be said. Australians have changed their staple meats (from rabbit to chicken), and Australians pride themselves on being foodies; but there has not been a groundswell of enthusiasm about roo meat.

Our guesses for Ancient Greek are that it was /u/ in most ancient dialects of Greek, and /y/ (German ü) in Attic.

Upsilon was the last letter to change pronunciation in Modern Greek, to /i/. <oi> had also come to be pronounced as /y/ in late Antiquity (they are routinely confused, only with each other, in the proto-Bulgarian inscriptions); it too went to /i/.

• We have a poem from 1030 AD making fun of the new pronunciation (Michael the Grammarian’s irony about hypsilon: a step towards reconstructing byzantine pronunciation): a rustic priest is ridiculed for pronouncing <xylon> the modern way.
• We have evidence from placenames indicating the old pronunciation was around in the 1100s and 1200s (Koryfoi > Old French Corfu, Oinoe > Turkish Ünye).
• We have archaic dialects of Greek—Old Athenian, Tsakonian—in which the reflex of upsilon is [ju], just as French /y/ went to English [ju] (pure).
• And most sensationally, Nikos Pantelidis has recently published a paper unearthing evidence he finds persuasive, that the /y/ pronunciation survived in Old Athenian (the original dialect of Athens, before it was overwhelmed by Peloponnesian settlers in the new Greek state) until the 1840s: https://www.researchgate.net/pub…

Constantly. I take pride in them, and reread them, and I get some measure of satisfaction out of them.

Yeah, maybe I should get out more…

Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller from Spain, visited Greece around 1170, when the Jews of Greece were all Romaniotes (Greek-speaking). Benjamin’s fellow Sephardic Jews only moved to Greece when they were expelled from Spain, three hundred years later. So whatever was going on, it was not because of any linguistic kinship between the Vlachs’ Aromanian language and any Greek Jews’ Ladino language.

Might it have been an appeal to Benjamin’s Ladino? No; language does not come up at all. The sum total of what Benjamin writes about them is:

From there it is a day’s journey to Sinon Potamo, where there are about fifty Jews, at their head being R. Solomon and R. Jacob. The city is situated at the foot of the hills of Wallachia. The nation called Wallachians live in those mountains. They are as swift as hinds, and they sweep down from the mountains to despoil and ravage the land of Greece. No man can go up and do battle against them, and no king can rule over them. They do not hold fast to the faith of the Nazarenes, but give themselves Jewish names. p.18Some people say that they are Jews, and, in fact, they call the Jews their brethren, and when they meet with them, though they rob them, they refrain from killing them as they kill the Greeks. They are altogether lawless. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Itinerary Of Benjamin Of Tudela

Wherever Sinon Potamo is, it is two days walk from Gardiki, Trikala; so Benjamin was in Thessaly, where there is a substantial Vlach population.

As you can well imagine, historians have found this intriguing. That doesn’t mean it’s true; Benjamin of Tudela also claimed a Jewish Kingdom in Ethiopia, which recent scholarship is sceptical about (Desperately seeking the Jewish Kingdom of Ethiopia: Benjamin of Tudela and the Horn of Africa (twelfth century)).

The Vlachs in the area openly rebelled against Byzantium two decades later, and may not have been willing to accept Byzantine religious suzerainty, so Greek priests may have been in short supply in Vlach Thessaly. While most Greeks don’t use Old Testament given names, Cypriots do, Bulgarians did, and maybe Vlachs did too; a credulous Benjamin could well have run with that as evidence of something.

I think what’s likeliest is, the Thessaly Vlachs welcomed Benjamin as a non-Greek, were intrigued by his background, and told him some tall tales to impress him.

Lee Mason

I am going to take a break starting in a couple days and for the duration of 5 days to a week. I need to get off my phone and go outside for the beginning of summer, so that is what I’m doing.

If you want to go digging about this kind of thing, go digging in a German grammar. Dig in something that spends 300 pages on the different variants of verb ending.

Kühner–Blass, §213.5.

The original Pluperfect Active endings in the singular were -ea, -eas, -ee(n), which contract in Attic regularly to –ē, -ēs, -ein.

The variants –ein, -eis, -ein involved remodelling of the 1sg and 2sg endings after the 3sg ending –ein, and the middle aorist –ēn, -ēs, -ē. This first shows up in Isocrates and Demosthenes—so during the Classical period in Attic; that’s why you’re seeing both taught in grammars. The –ei– diphthong spreads to the Plural in “later” authors (that is, in the Koine: Aristotle, Plutarch); those are the endings you hesitate to consider “dubious” in details.

It’s hard for me to say which should be considered standard. A historically-oriented approach will go with the older endings, so those with the etas. And grammars of Classical languages tend to be historically-oriented. That’s what Smyth lists in its summary table (§383); the variant endings in Demosthenes are mentioned in passing in §701. For that matter, I’d be surprised if the teaching of Koine features the plurals in –ei– prominently.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the most unforgettable food that you have eaten in a foreign country?

Because, for better or worse, damn is what God does, and condemn is what a judge does. So damn picked up the religious and then blasphemous connotations which condemn never had, which made it much more eligible as a profanity. Profanity is all about the current taboos in society.

There is one major similarity between the Old Cyrillic and Greek alphabets: originally, both were (mostly) phonemic, but several of the distinct sounds represented by different letters merged later on, so that there was two or more ways of representing the same phoneme with different letters. So the letter Yat seems to have originally represented /æ/; its sound merged with /e/ in Russian, so that /e/ was written as both <Ѣ> and <е>.

In the same way, Greek for instance, used to have different pronunciations for <ω> and <ο>, /ɔː/ and /o/; Greek lost its quantity and quality distinctions, so to this day there are two ways of writing /o/: <ω> and <ο>.

On the other hand, the two different ways of writing /i/ in Old Cyrillic, <и> and <і>, were not comparable to Greek—they were inherited from Greek, where <η> and <ι> had already merged in pronunciation. Old Russian orthography had worked out rules for when to use one and when to use the other (Dotted I (Cyrillic) – Wikipedia); but those rules were artificial:

In the early Cyrillic alphabet, there was little or no distinction between the Cyrillic letter i (И и), derived from the Greek letter eta, and the soft-dotted letter i. They both remained in the alphabetical repertoire since they represented different numbers in the Cyrillic numeral system, eight and ten, respectively. They are, therefore, sometimes referred to as octal I and decimal I.