Mark Janse

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Linguistics

Despite ongoing discussions regarding the relevance of Latin in modern education, this language still holds a prominent role in European secondary school curricula. While studying Latin is commonly believed to yield cognitive and linguistic benefits, this argument primarily relies on dated research that often uses methodologies that do not allow to...

The value of classical language education is subject to a fierce dispute, waged continuously and internationally. While some dismiss Classics as useless or elitist, others herald its extraordinary formative value and the many benefits that await pupils. This article aims to give a novel overview of the public debate regarding classical language edu...

Studying Latin in secondary education is still widespread in Europe and believed to result in cognitive benefits, even beyond the linguistic domain. In this study we explored the relation between such study and later academic achievement in higher education (N = 1,898). First, we demonstrated that Latin students exhibit increased levels of study ac...

Psychology is one of the seven hub sciences, which involves great responsibility for psychologists but also great opportunities for both psychologists and other scholars; that was the theme of the 17th European Congress of Psychology organized by the Slovenian Psychologists’ Association. This article contains a detailed example of how psychology fu...

My contribution presents a lexicographical analysis of one of the most dramatic and harrowing narratives written by Apostolos Pavlidis from the Cretan village Axos Mylotopotamou, one of the last native speakers of Axenítika, a Central Cappadocian dialect closely related to Mišótika. As the author himself acknowledges in his second contribution to t...

This article argues that ἡμεροσκόπος at Lys . 849 constitutes a pun based on iotacism, a well-known feature of female speech in fifth-century Athens aptly illustrated by Socrates in Plato's Cratylus . By describing herself as ἡμεροσκόπος ‘day watch’ pronounced as ἱμεροσκόπος ‘lust watch’, Lysistrata perverts the military term associated with the oc...

Kapadokija je starodavna pokrajina v osrednji Anatoliji (gl. Zemljevid 1). 1 Zgodovini področja lahko sledimo vse do drugega tisočletja pr. Kr., ko so ve-čjemu delu Male Azije od začetkov 16. st. pr. Kr. pa do propada Hetitskega kraljestva okrog leta 1180 pr. Kr. vladali Hetiti. Med železno dobo je v jugo-vzhodni Mali Aziji in v severni Siriji vzni...

This article argues that the particle που in Agamemnon’s διάπειρα is not used as a logically superfluous “variable”, as is often the case in the Homeric poems, but as an attitudinal particle which is deliberately used to underline the tragic irony of Agamemnon’s reference to the Greeks’ wives sitting around at home waiting for their husbands to ret...

Greek grammarians distinguished five gender classes: masculine, feminine, neuter, common and epicene nouns. Common nouns denote sexed beings and differentiate them accordingly, e.g. ὁ παῖς ‘the boy’ ~ ἡ παῖς ‘the girl’. Epicene nouns denote sexed beings as well but do not differentiate them according to sex, e.g. ὁ ἀετός ‘the (male / female) eagle’...

Of all the Cappadocian dialects, Ulağaç Cappadocian is considered the most ‘corrupt’ by Dawkins: “Nowhere is the vocabulary so filled with Turkish words or the syntax so Turkish” (1916: 18). Kesisoglou singles out the following as being characteristic: the loss of grammatical gender distinctions and the resulting neuterisation of nouns, including t...

This paper is about the relation between natural and grammatical gender in Greek and the ways in which the twain are matched or mismatched. A variety of topics is discussed, including the relation between grammatical gender and declension, the resolution of gender clashes in epicene nouns and the marking of natural gender in common nouns. Particula...

Jelen tanulmány átdolgozott változata a híres ELTE Eötvös József Collegiumban 2016. február 16-án elhangzott előadásomnak, melyet lehetőségem volt Görögország akkori magyar nagykövete, Dimitris Yannakakis jelenlétében megtartani. Szeretném hálás köszönetemet kifejezni Horváth László tanár úrnak a meghívásért és a lehetőségért, hogy magyarul is megj...

This chapter draws attention to the importance of studying not only linguistic variation in language, but also the patterned heterogeneity that can be related to it – in other words, linguistic varieties. Whereas the presence of varieties such as foreigner talk, female speech, colloquial language, etc. in the Classical period has received considera...

Cappadocian is an East Asia Minor Greek variety most closely related to Pharasiot and Pontic. Having been cut off from the rest of the Greek-speaking world after the defeat of the Byzantine army by the Seljuk Turks in the battle at Manzikert (1071), Cappadocian was increasingly Turkicized, but the Greek component preserved its essentially Late Medi...

Članek oriše jezikovno in socialno-kulturno zgodovino Kapadokije in Kapadočanov od časov Hetitskega kraljestva v pozni bronasti dobi do izmenjave prebivalstva med Grčijo in Turčijo v letih 1923‒1924. Po izmenjavi prebivalstva so bili Kapadočani diskriminirani zaradi svojega videza, še prav posebej pa zaradi jezika, kar je povzročilo, da so bili vse...

Historical and comparative grammar of the Cappadocian Greek dialects

This article sketches the linguistic and socio-cultural history of Cappadocia and the Cappadocians from the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923‒1924. It describes the Hellenization of Cappadocia following Alexander's conquest of Asia Minor, including the long period of bilingualism i...

This article sketches the linguistic and socio-cultural history of Cappadocia and the Cappadocians from the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923‒1924. It describes the Hellenization of Cappadocia following Alexander's conquest of Asia Minor, including the long period of bilingualism i...

This study focuses on changes in the vowel system of contemporary Mišótika Cappadocian. It presents an acoustic analysis of the vowels of Mišótika, based on recordings of 16 native speakers from two different Cappadocian communities in Northern Greece. Our analysis shows that the current vowel system diverges significantly from the older one. Moreo...

In this short note I explore the possibility that Lysistrata’s use of the military term ἡμεροσκόπος ‘day watch’ in the introduction to the (in)famous seduction scene between Cinesias and Myrrhine (829-953) is in fact a pun based on a well-documented feature of female speech in 5th-century Attic which must have been easily recognizable as such by th...

This article sketches the linguistic and socio-cultural history of Cappadocia and the Cappadocians from the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923‒1924. It describes the Hellenization of Cappadocia following Alexander's conquest of Asia Minor, including the long period of bilingualism i...

Anyone interested in the colometry or “inner metrics” of the Homeric hexameter is confronted with a wide variety of different approaches, favouring two-, three- or four-colon verses or any combination of these. This article builds on Egbert Bakker’s interpretation of Homeric discourse as a succession of intonation / information units (IUs). Its aim...

Cappadocian is well-known for having two types of agglutinative inflec-tions: (1) mílos ‘mill’, gen. míloz-ju, pl. míloz-ja; (2) néka, pl. néc-es, gen. néc-ez-ju. This chapter shows on the basis of a detailed investigation of the dialectal evidence how these agglutinative inflections originated in the plural of the inherited masculine nouns in -os...

Cappadocian fšáx ‘child’, Pharasiot fšáxi ‘boy’ are traditionally derived from Turkish uşak, assuming a hitherto unexplained fricativization of [u] to [f] and of word-final [k] to [x] after the borrowing process. The latter cannot be attributed to Cappadocian or Pharasiot, however, as it is a common feature of Anatolian Turkish. In order to underst...

Liddell and Scott (LSJ) has always been entitled A Greek-English Lexicon , from the first (1843) through to the ninth edition (1940). Clearly no need was felt to add Ancient to the title, even though LSJ is not and never was intended to be a comprehensive lexicon of the Greek language in its entire history. This chapter asks whether the scope of An...

Words for ‘Child’ in the Cappadocian Kinship System

In this article, we consider whether the form βλήμενος ἦν in Il. 4.211 should be considered lexical or periphrastic. Based on a discussion of the context, an analysis of the usage of the verb βάλλω elsewhere in the Iliad, and an application of some generally accepted criteria of periphrasticity, we conclude that both interpretations are in fact pos...

This article considers the variation in the meters of the ὥσπερ ξένοι epigrams collected in the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (DBBE). In its canonical form, these epigrams follow a dodecasyllabic metrical pattern. The seemingly unmetrical decasyllabic and decatetrasyllabic variants are explained from a cognitive-linguistic perspective as the...

Encyclopedic overview of profane and obscene language in Ancient Greek

Partial reduplication with (quasi-)fixed segmentism in Cappadocian is discussed as a morphological phenomenon induced by contact with Turkish. Ιt is argued that the reduplicant in both languages is a tiered affix whose phonemic melody is not determined and hence is defined by that of the base. This reveals an asymmetry between the source and the re...

Our 2013-14 Center for Hellenic Studies project began as the first steps toward an updating of Albert Thumb’s classic work, Handbuch der neugriechischen Volkssprache, originally published in 1895 (2nd edition, 1910) in German and then translated into English by Samuel Angus and published in 1912 under the title Handbook of the Modern Greek Vernacul...

BILINGUALISM - Torres Guerra (J.B.) (ed.) Vtroque sermone nostro. Bilingüismo social y literario en el imperio de Roma / Social and Literary Bilingualism in the Roman Empire. (Colección Mundo Antiguo 14.) Pp. 164. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra (EUNSA), 2011. Paper, €9. ISBN: 978-84-313-2749-1. - Volume 63 Issue 2 - Mark Janse

The Digenis Akritis is preserved in two important manuscripts: Escorial and Grottaferrata. Whereas the language of the former is traditionally considered vernacular or even vulgar, the scribe of the Grottaferrata manuscript is said to employ an archaizing style. The frequent occurrence of clitic particles like δέ, γάp, μέν and oũν is one of the mor...

Expressions of saying, frequent in the Chronicle, supply a context for the late shift to proclisis, as they are found treated as a whole and rendered proclitic through a reanalysis that made the first word dependent on the second rather than being enclitic on what precedes.

Luke 1:10 has been variously interpreted. In this note we argue that the verbal group must be considered periphrastic, while the construction at the same time has an existential-presenta tive character. The latter allows us to explain the 'odd' position of the genitive του̂ λαου̂, which functions as an 'elaborating' descriptive element, in close co...

This article addresses various issues in the diachrony of gender marking, such as the origin and typology of gender systems, pathways of change and the question of directionality in relation to the Agreement Hierarchy, and the semantic basis of changes in gender systems in relation to the Individuation Hierarchy. It also offers an overview of recen...

Julio Cortázar was extremely well read in ancient literature and philosophy. He collected editions and translations of Heraclitus and based the short story ‘Todos los fuegos el fuego’ (‘All Fires the Fire’) on his philosophy in which Fire steered the Universe. The enigmatic ‘obscure’ style of the Ephesian philosopher, his use of riddles and dark me...

This article addresses various issues in the diachrony of gender marking, such as the origin and typology of gender systems, pathways of change and the question of directionality in relation to the Agreement Hierarchy, and the semantic basis of changes in gender systems in relation to the Individuation Hierarchy. It also offers an overview of recen...

This paper presents some preliminary observations on a Dutch-Greek mixed jargon spoken by three Dutch travel guides who have been living in Greece for more than twenty-five years. All three are fluent in both Standard Modern Dutch and Standard Modern Greek. In informal situations, however, they speak a very low variety of Dutch mixed with Greek wor...

This paper interprets the agglutinative inflection of the copula and passive imperfect in Cappadocian and Bithynian as an adaptation of the Greek to the Turkish inflection on the basis of the third person singular in accordance with Watkins’ Law. The first and second person plural forms of these agglutinative inflections add the corresponding Turki...

Eugenius Marius Uhlenbeck (1913-2003) needs no introduction to readers of this journal. Bob, as many knew him, was editor of the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde from 1949 until 1958. He took up this task after he obtained his PhD for his dissertation on the structure of the Javanese morpheme, and remained as editor until he was appoint...

Eugenius Marius Uhlenbeck – Bob as he was known to his friends – was a multifacited (or many-sided) and multi-talented person. He was an accomplished scholar in the fields of Javanese language and literature and in general linguistics holding the hairs in these disciplines at Leiden University from 1950-1983 and 1958-1979 respectively. In the Nethe...

Proloog: De naam van de Ley In de onlangs ontdekte Vita Cyriandri lezen we hoe Cyriander van Tyana op goddelijk bevel de bijnaam "De Rots" krijgt: σὺ εἶ Κυρίανδρος· σὺ κληθήσῃ Κεφᾶς "jij bent Cyriander; jij zult Cephas genoemd worden" (VCyr. 13.17 ed. Janse). Bijbelvaste lezers zullen hierin onmiddellijk een subtiele verwijzing her-kennen naar het...

In Modern Greek, clitic doubling is a grammatical device that marks clitic doubled object NPs as topics. Clitic doubling involving the fronting of the clitic doubled NP is called topicalization or, if combined with a boundary pause, topic left-dislocation. Topic left-dislocation is obligatory in the presence of a preverbal focused NP. Clitic doubli...

Cappadocian (Asia Minor Greek) is a Greek-Turkish mixed language formerly spoken in Cappadocia (Central Turkey). After the transmigrations between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, Cappadocian speakers were forced to emigrate to Greece, where they were resettled in various locations, especially in Central and Northern Greece. The Cappadocians rapidly...

In Memoriam, Eugenius Marius Uhlenbeck, 1913–2003 Eugenius Marius Uhlenbeck, Bob as he was affectionately known to his friends, died at home on May 27, 2003, two months before his 90th birthday. He was a distinguished scholar, an indefatigable organizer and academic initiator, a gifted and inspiring teacher, a loyal friend and, despite his many act...

This article discusses the relation between animacy, definiteness, and case in Cappadocian and several other Asia Minor Greek dialects. Animacy plays a decisive role in the assignment of Greek and Turkish nouns to the various Cappadocian noun classes. The de­vel­opment of morphological definiteness is due to Turkish interference. Both features are...

Focusing on written texts, this book provides an introduction to the evidence of bilingualism in the ancient Mediterranean world. Language contact intruded into virtually every aspect of ancient life, including literature, philosophy, law, medicine, provincial administration, army, magic and trade, and topics which have been fashionable in sociolin...

Focusing on written texts, this book provides an introduction to the evidence of bilingualism in the ancient Mediterranean world. Language contact intruded into virtually every aspect of ancient life, including literature, philosophy, law, medicine, provincial administration, army, magic and trade, and topics which have been fashionable in sociolin...

This paper is a review article of Drettas (1997), the first non-Greek grammar of Pontic. It discusses the theoretical framework of the grammar and the main features of Pontic. Special attention is given to those features which set Pontic apart from the rest of the Greek dialects. Finally, the question is raised as to whether Pontic is indeed a Gree...