What is not so (E)strange about Greek as a Balkan Language
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/keria.22.2.57-83Keywords:
Balkans, dialects, Greek, language contact, SprachbundAbstract
In a 2013 lecture at Princeton University, distinguished historian Professor Basil Gounaris suggested that in the 19th‒20th centuries there was a “troubled relationship” between Greece and the Balkans, and a process of “estrangement” associated with “the transformation of the Greek-orthodox society itself into a Modern Greek nation”. This is all very well and good as far as the 19th and 20th centuries are concerned, and as far as the cultural and political side of the development of modern Greece are concerned, but there is a longer history of engagement between Greek peoples and the Balkans and other dimensions to that history. In particular, from a linguistic standpoint, the interactions between Greek speakers and speakers of other languages in the Balkans—Albanian, Slavic, Romance, Indic, and Turkish in particular—had profound effects on the Greek language that last to this very day. Accordingly, I present here a side of Greece, namely the Greek language, that is not estranged from the Balkans, and explore the ways in which Greek has been affected by, and has influenced, other Balkan languages and the ways in which it can be considered to be a Balkan language.
Downloads
References
Andriotis, Nikolaos P., and Georgios Kourmoulis. 1968. “Questions de la linguistique balkanique et l’apport de la langage grecque.” In Ivan Gălăbov et al., eds., 21‒30.
Bethin, Christina Y., ed. 2008. American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists, Ohrid, September 2008. Vol. 1, Linguistics. Bloomington, IN: Slavica.
Fielder, Grace E. 2008. “The Status of Discourse Markers as Balkanisms in South Slavic.” In Christina Y. Bethin, ed., 111‒129.
Fielder, Grace E. 2009. “Macedonian Discourse Markers in the Balkan Sprachbund.” STUF ‒ Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 61:97‒176.
Fielder, Grace E. 2015. “Triangulations: Navigating Distance in Interaction.” In Distance in Language: Grounding a Metaphor, edited by Barbara Sonnenhauser and Anastasia Meermann, 215‒242. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Fielder, Grace E. 2019. “A Constellation of Greek Adversative Connectives?” In And Thus You Are Everywhere Honored: Studies Dedicated to Brian D. Joseph, edited by James J. Pennington, Victor A. Friedman, and Lenore A. Grenoble, 85‒104. Bloomington, IN: Slavica.
Friedman, Victor A., and Brian D. Joseph. 2014. “Lessons from Judezmo about the Balkan Sprachbund and Contact Linguistics.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 226:3‒23.
Friedman, Victor A., and Brian D. Joseph. 2021. The Balkan Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gălăbov, Ivan, Vladimir Georgiev, and Jordan Zaimov, eds. 1968. Actes du premier congrès international des études balkaniques et sud-est européens. Vol. 6. Sofia: BAN (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences).
Hamp, Eric P. 1954. Vaccarizzo Albanese Phonology: The Sound-System of a Calabro-Albanian Dialect. PhD diss., Harvard University.
Herzfeld, Michael. 1982. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Horrocks, Geoffrey. 2010. Greek: A History of a Language and its Speakers. London: Longmans. 2nd edition. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Humbert, Jean. 1930. La disparition du datif en grec (du Ier au Xe siècle). Paris: Édouard Champion.
Jannaris, Antonius N. 1897. An Historical Greek Grammar, Chiefly of the Attic Dialect as Written and Spoken from Classical Antiquity down to the Present Time, Founded upon the Ancient Texts, Inscriptions, Papyri and Present Popular Greek. London: Macmillan and Co.
Janse, Mark. 2008. “Clitic Doubling from Ancient to Asia Minor Greek.” In Clitic Doubling in the Balkan Languages, edited by Dalina Kallulli and Liliane Tasmowski, 165‒202. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Joseph, Brian D. 1983. The Synchrony and Diachrony of the Balkan Infinitive: A Study in Areal, General, and Historical Linguistics. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Supplementary Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reissued in paperback, 2009.
Joseph, Brian D. 1985. “European Hellenism and Greek Nationalism: Some Effects on Greek Linguistic Scholarship.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 3:87‒96.
Joseph, Brian D. 1997. “Methodological Issues in the History of the Balkan Lexicon: The Case of Greek vré/ré and its Relatives.” In Neka mu e vechna slavata: Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Zbigniew Golab (19 March 1923‒24 March 1994), edited by Victor Friedman, Masha Belyavski-Frank, Marc Pisaro, and David Testen, Balkanistica 10:255‒277.
Joseph, Brian D. 2009. “Why Greek is one of The World’s Major Languages.” Journal of Greek Linguistics 9:187‒194.
Joseph, Brian D. 2010. “Revisiting the Origin of the Albanian 2PL Verbal Ending –ni.” In Ex Anatolia Lux: Anatolian and Indo-European Studies in Honor of H. Craig Melchert on the Occasion on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Ronald Kim, Norbert Oettinger, Elisabeth Rieken, and Michael Weiss, 180‒183. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press.
Joseph, Brian D. 2020. “Convergence or failure to converge in relative social isolation: Balkan Judezmo.” To appear in Between Separation and Symbiosis, edited by Andrey Sobolev. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton Publishers.
Katičić, Radoslav. 1976. Ancient languages of the Balkans. 2 vols. Trends in Linguistics, State-of-the-Art Report 4, 5. The Hague: Mouton.
Lavidas, Nikolaos, and Ianthi Tsimpli. 2019. “Object Omission in Contact: Object Clitics and Definite Articles in the West Thracian Greek (Evros) Dialect.” Journal of Language Contact 12:141‒190.
Levy, Harry. 1980. “An Anatolian language-trait in Byzantios’ Babylonia and parallel traits on three continents.” MGSA Bulletin 12 (2): 47‒55.
Mertyris, Dionysios. 2014. The Loss of the Genitive in Greek: A Diachronic and Dialectological Analysis. PhD diss., La Trobe University.
Mertyris, Dionysios. 2015. “Dissertation summary: The Loss of the Genitive in Greek; A Diachronic and Dialectological Analysis.” Journal of Greek Linguistics 15 (1): 159‒170.
Messing, Gordon. 1988. A Glossary of Greek Romany as Spoken in Agia Varvara (Athens). Columbus: Slavica Publishers.
Moleas, Wendy. (1989) 2004. The Development of the Greek Language. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. 2nd edition. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.
Newmark, Leonard, Philip Hubbard, and Peter Prifti. 1982. Standard Albanian: A Reference Grammar for Students. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Papadamou, Eleni, and George Papanastassiou. 2013. “The Position of the Northern Dialects of the Prefecture of Kastoria.” In MGDLT 5: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory (University of Ghent, 20‒22 September 2012), edited by Mark Janse, Brian Joseph, Angela Ralli, and Metin Bagriacik, 389‒400. Patras, Greece: University of Patras. http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-4211390.
Pring, J. T. 1975. The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Greek (Greek‒English). Oxford at the Clarendon Press.
Ralli, Angela. 2006. “Syntactic and Morphosyntactic Phenomena in Modern Greek Dialects.” Journal of Greek Linguistics 7:121‒159.
Rasmussen, Jens Elmegård. 1985. “Miscellaneous Morphological Problems in Indo-European Languages (I‒II).” Lingua Posnaniensis 28:27‒62.
Sandfeld, Kristian. 1926. Balkanfilologien: En oversigt over dens resultater og problemer. København: Bianco Lunos Bogtrykkeri.
Sandfeld, Kristian. 1930. Linguistique balkanique. Paris: Klincksieck.
Thavoris, Antonis. 1977. “Μορφολογικά μερικών ιδιωμάτων της δυτικής Μακεδονίας.” In Α’ Συμπόσιο Γλωσσολογίας του βορειοελλαδικού χώρου, edited by P. Kavakopoulos, 75‒95. Thessaloniki: IMXA (Institute for Balkan Studies).
Tonnet, Henri. 1993. Histoire du grec moderne. Paris: L’Asiathèque.
Tzartzanos, Akhilleas. 1909. Περί της συγχρόνου Θεσσαλικής διαλέκτου. Athens.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2020 Brian Daniel Joseph
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors are confirming that they are the authors of the submitting article, which will be published (print and online) in Keria by Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia). Author’s name will be evident in the article in journal. All decisions regarding layout and distribution of the work are in hands of the publisher.
- Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
