Category: Language

If you do an extreme zoom, you will notice a sign with a cedar tree. That is as much as I could get while zooming past of the Maronite precinct of Nicosia. The Maronites are Arabic speaking Catholics who mostly live in Lebanon, but a group of them have been living in Cyprus for centuries, […]

My business in Athens, aside from continuing to work for my employer and visiting my kin, was to visit the Research Centre for Modern Greek Dialects in the Academy of Athens, publishers of the Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek. My friend Io Manolessou is now director of the centre, and my friend Dion Mertyris has […]

I’m going to conclude with something silly. Except it isn’t. Like many Greeks of my age, I was brought up with the televised shadow puppetry of Karagiozis, as performed (for colour TV!) by Evgenios Spatharis; in fact, one of the few Greek recordings of anything my parents had in Tasmania was a recording of Karagiozis. […]

I don’t like the poetry of Andreas Kalvos. I don’t like it, because I find his archaic Greek stanzas stiff, and lifeless, and bombastic. Especially compared to the vigour and passion of his contemporary, Dionysis Solomos. I may well continue to hold that judgement, but there is yet another bias behind it; the legacy of […]

Kasos is a sleepy, small place, with fishermen, old timers drinking beer, women running general stores, a couple of elderly Dutch tourists, and a few soldiers. Linguistically very heterogeneous: I did hear one local with a strong accent, as I walked past, drop a delta (ξα(δ)έρφια)—a local feature which make the local name of dolmadhes […]

I decided to visit Karpathos on my first holiday trip, for fairly trivial reasons. Karpathos is renowned in Greek linguistics for its archaism and its diversity of dialects. I had written a paper on the dialects of the Dodecanese, in which Karpathos had played a starring role (Nicholas, N. 2004a. Η γεωγραφική ιστορία του «ίντα […]