In the heart of the Mediterranean sea, where sirens still live.
@parthenopehasnograve
Welcome! This blog is dedicated to the plurimillennial south-italian city of Naples, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. ღ
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Random mediterranean basin and italian-centered stuff could also appear here occasionally.
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The famous quote “Parthenope is not dead, Parthenope has no grave; she's been living as a beautiful young woman for five thousand years, running on hills, running on the beach.” by Matilde Serao inspired this tumblog name.
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Blog started on 13th Feb 2017. Feel free to send questions & talk to us ☺
A man dressed as a “Yeros” teases an old lady during the Carnival festivities in the Greek island of Skyros. The island’s carnival celebrations can be traced back to Dionysian rituals and involve dressing up in goat skin and numerous heavy bells for men and traditional dresses for the women, hiding the face entirely with a mask made of goat skin and dancing.
If I had to describe Napoli in one word, it would be energy. Not energetic, but energy itself. There's vitality, there's vigor, there's liveliness filling the streets of Naples, all with some grit but it adds to the spirit of the city.
I wasn't very familiar with the dialects of the Griko community, the Greek minority of Italy, residing mostly in Calabria and Apulia. Once in a travel show I had seen a grandpa speaking in one of them but it was so fast and idiomatic that I could only catch one word or two and I consequently thought the Griko dialects had grown really distant from Greece's or Eastern Greek dialects.
Recently I watched this Griko song performance in Italy and it moved me deeply. First of all, it impressed me how it could seamlessly pass as a Modern Greek music style. Of course, Italy and Greece do share a lot of similar sounds, so it perhaps was to be expected. Even the la-la-le-o-la-la pattern, I have heard it in many familiar Greek urban songs (as in, not folk).
I just read that there are in fact two Italiot Greek dialects, Griko (spoken by ~ 45,000 people) and the smaller one, Grecanico (severely endangered and spoken only by ~ 2,000 people). The latter is believed to have incorporated more Italian influences. According to Wikipedia, there are many similarities with Standard Modern Greek, although linguists assert they evolved independently from either Ancient or Koine Greek. If you ask me, judging from the song, there is no way they evolved independently from Ancient Greek. Not only that but if the linguists did not only examine the Ancient and Koine theories, I would have thought they evolved independently from early Modern or super late Koine at most. This could be explained by an influx of Greeks to Italy as a consequence of the Crusader conquests or the Fall of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire to the Ottoman Turks because - fun fact - the type of Greek spoken during both those periods was Modern Greek. Very early Modern Greek at the times of the Fourth Crusade (1202 - 1204), yet modern nonetheless. So the Greeks that might have fled the Latin and the Ottoman blows to the East Roman Empire may have perhaps influenced the language of the ancient and medieval Greek communities of Italy. Then, this late koine - early modern Greek dialect also got influenced by Latin / Italian, especially in the pronunciation and some of the vocabulary. That’s my theory that’s just on me. Perhaps they indeed developed independently from Koine Greek because the Greek language is pretty conservative after all. But Ancient, as in prior to 200 BC, no fricking the frick way.
The song is in Grecanico of Apulia. The video of this performance had the lyrics in Grecanico (they use the Latin alphabet) and a translation in Standard Modern Greek. I was shocked by how much more I could understand in the slower way they were singing compared to the mumbling grandpa. It was deeply touching so I decided to share the video and I even decided to offer the Standard Modern Greek equivalent version in a Latin transliteration, in case any of you is interested in the study of the evolution between Standard Modern Demotic Greek and the Grecanico of Italy.
Lyrics in Grecanico and Standard Modern Greek (with Latin characters) below the cut:
G: KALINITTA
SMG: KALINICHTA
G: Ti en glicea tusi nifta, ti en ória
SMG: Ti glikiá in' túti i níchta, ti oréa íne
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