Nick on Quora

Not mutually intelligible. At all.

The bizarre thing with Tsakonian is: the non-core vocabulary, you can understand, because it’s pretty much the non-core vocabulary of Greek. Except you’ve got some quite massive regular sound changes to deal with, which were regularly applied even to modern loans. [ɣramatici] for example, “grammar”, ends up as [ɣramacitɕi].

But the grammar is massively simplified (it’s actually a lot like English); and the core vocabulary, in between Doric survivals, archaic vernacular words, and massive sound changes, is unrecognisable.

I’ve found a Tsakonian Berlitz online. I’m bolding the words that a Modern Greek speaker would understand without effort (and italicising the words they would recognise as archaic). I anticipate people saying “but I recognise X! or Y!” Not conversationally and without prior exposure, you wouldn’t. Although I suspect by the end of the passage, readers will have worked out the main sound changes.

The writer btw ignored the aspirated stops. I’ve put them back in.

Φράσεις στα τσακώνικα

Τσ’ έσ’ ποίου;
How are you?

Εζού κά έννι, αφεγκία ντι.
I’m fine, how about yourself?

Καούρ εκάνατε καμπζία.
Welcome children. [No, that’s not “you do”. You recognised εκάνατε wrong.]

Καούρ ερέκαμε νιούμου.
Well have we found you.

Καούρ εμαζούμαΐ.
Well have we gathered. [OK, that word has something to do with μαζί, “together”, I’ll give you that.]

Που ντ’ έν’ αούντε;
What’s your name?

Μ’εν’αούντε Αλέξαντρε.
My name is Alexander. [Finally!]

Τσούνερ έσι;
Whose [child] are you?

Εζού έννι τα μάτη μι, τ’αφεγκη μι τσαί του παπού μι εγγόνι.
I’m my mothers, my father’s, and my grandfather’s grandchild.

Καλημέρα μαμού, τσ’ εσ’ ποία; Εσ’ θέα να ντι ποίου κανένα θέλημα;
Good morning grandmother, how are you? Do you want me to do you any bidding? [Hopefully by now you’ve worked out they’re using the ancient word for “do”]

Καώς το, το καλέ καμπζί, όνι θέα τσίπτα καμάρζι μι.
Welcome, such a fine child! I want nothing, my pride. [You might have even worked out that they’re deleting all their lambdas before back vowels.]

Έα όρκο μι, να ντι δίου κάτσι.
Come my oath [darling], I’ll give you something.

Χάγγε τθο καλέ, να έσι κά.
Go to the good, be well. [That’s not a vocative! o > e after coronals]

Ευχαριστού πάσου, καλέ να ’χερε.
Thank you very much, may you have goodness.

Ούρα κά, άι α πορεία ντι.
A happy hour, may your road be smooth as oil.

Να ζάρε τθο καλέ, τθαν ευτζή του Χρζιστού τσαί τα Δεσποίνη.
May you go to the good, to the blessing of Christ and Our Lady.

Αγακητέ μουσαφίρη καούρ εκάνερε τθα χώρα νάμου.
Dear guest, welcome to our village.

Οι τσακώνοι είνοι περήφανοι αθροίποι.
Tsakonians are proud people.

Είνοι αγαπούντε του γραφτοί τσαί τουρ άγραφτοι νόμοι.
They love written and unwritten laws. [As soon as we go into speech making, the words are recognisable.]

Έσι καοδεχούμενε σου χωρζίς να ντι κολαντσέγγωι.
You are welcome by them without them flattering you.

Είνοι αγαπούντε πρεσσού τα πάστρα.
They love cleanliness a lot.

Άμα τθα πορεία ντι θα ρέσερε βρωμίλε ούνοι έχουντε σι ποιτέ Τσακώνοι.
If on your road you find filth, Tsakonians have not done it.

Κά να περάρε εκιού τσαί οι κολέγοι ντι, για να μόλετε ταν άβα χρονία κίσου.
Have a good time, you and your friends, and come back next year again.

… So. Greek-speaking Quorans. How did you go?

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Update, cc Dimitra Triantafyllidou Lara Novakov Dimitris Sotiropoulos

You know what the very definition of badass is?

Let me tell you what the very definition of badass is.

Maxim L. Kisilier. Born in Russia. Bred in Russia. Learned Ancient Greek in Uni. Lecturer in Greek at St Petersburg State University. Has done some fieldwork oin Tsakonia.

Seen here, delivering the welcoming address to the Annual Tsakonian conference in 2013. With lots of grammatical examples.

IN TSAKONIAN.

For twelve minutes straight. (He then has to summarise in standard Greek.)

And, incidentally, with a Russian accent.

This man is badass.

Pity there is no way on earth the locals will accept his proposed orthography…

(I feel badass, myself, for almost understanding three quarters of what he’s saying.)

In Greece: it was very much a mainstream term from Mediaeval times right through to the early 20th century. It was also used to refer to Greek Catholics; hence the classic song Frangosyriani “Catholic girl from Syros” (1932), from Markos Vamvakaris, himself a Catholic boy from Syros. The conflation of Western Catholics and Levantine Catholics makes sense in the context of the Ottoman Millet system.

Nowadays, I’m probably the only person who uses it with any contemporary reference, because I’m an antiquarian like that. Greeks now consider themselves Westerners, and have for a while; so they have no use for a term Othering the Westerners.

But as a historical reference, whether to crusaders, or to the Latin Empire of Constantinople, or to the confused relation between Greeks and Philhellenes during the Greek War of Independence, Greeks will still get it.

Proper nouns in English are not normally qualified by adjectives; the adjective would be taken to be part of the proper noun (This is Lucky Phil).

Some authors do qualify proper nouns with adjectives, although as this discussion notes (Adjective with proper noun), it is stylistically quite marked (“Stylistically, attributively modifying a proper noun isn’t something people do in normal conversation. It strikes me as newspaper-ese”.)

When that does happen, the proper noun is considered to be acting more like a common noun: it’s as if the adjective is being used to narrow down which of the avatars of the person is being considered. (A bewildered Elliot, as opposed to a contented Elliot; The Amazing Mr Fox, as opposed to The Humdrum Mr Fox.) Hence the use of the article.

And to add to Kelsey McLeod’s answer, the notion of decision, choice came first. The notion of surreptitiousness comes later: it’s using your capability of making good decisions, in order not to divulge that much, considering the social factors at play. It’s being discerning (which is in fact the same verb).

From OED, it all happened in Late Latin:

(ii) classical Latin discrētiōn- , discrētiō separation, division, distinction, discrimination, in post-classical Latin also discernment (Vulgate; early 3rd cent. in Tertullian), prudence (5th cent.), caution, circumspection (5th or 6th cent.), as a form of address [“your discretion!”, towards a cleric] (8th cent.; frequently from 12th cent. in British sources) < discrēt– , past participial stem of discernere discern v. + –iō -ion suffix1.

< (i) Anglo-Norman and Middle French discrecion, discretion (French discrétion) discernment, wisdom, sound judgement (c1165 in Old French), freedom to decide as one sees fit (15th cent.), separation, distinction, discontinuity (c1400), in Anglo-Norman also disparity (1139), interval, distance (15th cent.), also used with a possessive adjective as a form of address to a person in authority (15th cent.),

The first really obvious example I see in the OED of “choosing not to speak” and not just “being thoughtful in what you speak” is:

1597 Bacon Ess. f. 3, Discretion of Speech is more than eloquence.

See Punctuation on Wikipedia. David Crystal has a lovely book out on the history of punctuation: Making a Point.

As Adam Mathias Bittlingmayer indicated, there were anticipations of punctuation for a while; the notion of systematically indicating pauses (period, comma) was a Hellenistic Greek invention, which became systematic in the late Empire.

Punctuation as we know it is a mediaeval Latin thing, and it kept evolving up until after the invention of printing; parentheses for example are a 16th century thing. The question mark is 8th century; quote marks as we know them (as opposed to quote marks the way email does them) is 12th century.

But the main written language of Western Europe was Latin up until at least the 16th century, and that’s the language for which most punctuation we are familiar with was introduced

Wiktionary is your friend:

calx is probably from χάλιξ chalix: “pebble”:

Unknown, perhaps Pre-Greek. Probably cognate, ancestor, or descendant of Latin calx ‎(“limestone, chalk”)

χαλκός “copper”:

Uncertain. Has been compared to Proto-Slavic *želězo ‎(“iron”), Latin ferrum, and Hittite [script needed] ‎(ḫapalki-). Perhaps related to κάλχη ‎(kálkhē, “purple”). Ultimately, Proto-Indo-European origin seems unlikely and the word is probably a borrowing.

… So if calx is indeed from Greek, we have a non-Hellenic chalik– stem for “pebble”, and a non-Hellenic chalk– stem for “copper”.

We can’t rule out that they’re related somehow; and copper and limestone are both, um, minerals. But… probably not.

Where are the Seleucid Greeks?

(InB4 Kalash people. We’re pretty sure they’re not Greeks.)

One can only presume, they assimilated. The ruling class would have been Greek for a fair while; royalty certainly was. But there’s no reason to think the majority of Greeks didn’t intermarry. Not that we’d know much about it, because the contemporaries didn’t pay that much attention to ethnic difference. Lucian of Samosata is quite happy to tell us he’s “Assyrian”, and wrote a book on the religious history of Syria; but everything he wrote was firmly enmeshed in Greek literary culture.

What did they leave behind? The architecture of places like Palmyra. The tradition of human-looking statues in India, including statues of the Buddha. A Greco-Bactrian letter in Unicode: Sho (letter). Awe of Greek learning, inherited by the Arabs. Lucian himself. The koine of the New Testament (although the vehicle of Eastern Orthodoxy was Syriac, not Greek). And lots of stories about Alexander, including those involving Dhul-Qarnayn.

There’s a lot of Franks here with unimpressive, scrawled, beginner Arabic writing.

Like me.

Inspired by Pegah Esmaili’s answer to What does your Greek handwriting look like?

• The allusions. Which are much more obvious in Ancient Greek, because it had several quite distinct literary dialects. If you want to allude to Homer, or to the tragedians, you can easily choose a word that occurs only in Homer, or a grammatical inflection that is antiquated. And literate Ancient Greeks were meant to be across all the canonical texts; so one adjective can invoke an entire myth. (It’s no different in our contemporary cultures; we just have different canons.)
• The convoluted syntactic structures: how, at its best, a prose sentence is a poised, beautiful construct, with lots of nesting and embedding and qualifications and rhetorical contrasts. And at its worst, it’s a rambling, ugly jumble, with lots of nesting and embedding and qualifications and rhetorical contrasts. We don’t write like that any more, and more and more, we don’t read like that any more. Not necessarily a bad thing, just different.
• The subtlety of free word order; something I miss in translation from Modern Greek as well. Free word order isn’t just an excuse to put syntax in the blender (at least, it isn’t in prose); it’s a way of making nice, understated distinctions in emphasis, or contrast, or in topic vs comment structures in the sentence. English does that as well, of course, but with different means: there’s a reason plaintext English still feels it needs to use all caps or asterisks for emphasis, and Greek doesn’t.
• The kind of primitive way Classical Greek deals with abstractions: it’s not Goodness, it’s The Good; not Equality, but The Equal. In fact, old technical Greek seems to make do with some surprisingly sparse resources.

All the answers posted are very good, and a more substantial contribution than I will make. I agree that in all likelihood, by the time the Seljuks came to town, the indigenous Anatolian languages were long gone, and it was all about the retreat of Greek and Armenian. But I was A2A’d.

So I’ll talk about Greek.

What do I know? I’ll draw on the survey in Modern Greek in Asia Minor; a study of the dialects of Siĺli, Cappadocia and Phárasa, with grammar, texts, translations and glossary : Dawkins, R. M. (Richard McGillivray), 1871-1955.

• The collapse of Greek language and Christianity in Western Asia Minor in the 13th century appears to have been quite rapid: a matter of generations.
• Though I haven’t seen solid evidence for this, it seems that the substantial Greek populations in the Western Asia Minor coast date from Ottoman times, with Greeks settling the coast from the nearby islands. The dialects of the coast are certainly close to those of the Aegean islands. Dawkins concurs, speaking of both settlement from the islands, and a wave of migration out of Greece in the 18th century.
• We know that Bithynia was resettled by both Greeks and Bulgarians in the 1500s–1600s. In fact, there was even a Tsakonian colony on the mouth of the Gönen river, which probably dates from the 1700s.
• I think the Greek population in European Turkey was continuous.
• The Greek population in the Pontus was continuous, and if anything expanded, with mining colonies reaching far into the Black Sea hinterland: Ak Dağ, Buğa Maden, Bereketli Maden, Nevşehir, Ürgüp, Keban Maden, and around Şebinkarahisar.
• There were two distinct regions where Cappadocian Greeks lived: 6 villages around Pharasa, and 20 villages in Western Cappadocia. The language had substantially retreated by the time Dawkins surveyed them in situ; most Christians in the region already spoke Turkish, and particularly in South Western Cappadocia (e.g. Ulağaç), the Greek spoken was heavily influenced by Turkish.
• There was isolated Greek-speaking communities in Livisi (Kayaköy near Fethiye), the town of Sille near Konya, and a dialect that had died out by 1900 in Gölde of Lydia (near Kula, Manisa).

So, tl;dr:

Greek was vibrant in the Pontus; retreating in Cappadocia (and anecdotally the other remaining old settlements as well, with the possible exception of Livisi); and wiped out everywhere else in Anatolia though Turkification; the substantial Greek-speaking population in Western Asia Minor was the result of later resettlement.

I’m pretty sure this map from Wikipedia (File:Anatolian Greek dialects.png) is overstated for both Cappadocian and Mainstream Greek, but it’s a start: