Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T02:17:44.625Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Some Pamphlets on Dead Greek Dialects’: R.M. Dawkins and Modern Greek Dialectology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

Peter Mackridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

After a brief account of the life and personality of R.M. Dawkins (Director of the British School at Athens, 1906–1914), based partly on unpublished material, the author summarizes Dawkins's career as an archaeologist, philologist, and folklorist. There follows a critical account of his work on the Greek dialects of Cappadocia and of other regions in central Asia Minor; Dawkins's magnum opus, Modern Greek in Asia Minor (1916) was the most thorough study ever made of this topic. Mention is made of Dawkins's contribution to the study of Pontic, which he was prevented by events from exploring thoroughly in situ. Apart from his work on individual dialects, his reputation as a dialectologist rests on his accumulation of evidence in support of his hypothesis that there is a fundamental east-west division in the Modern Greek dialects. The limitations of Dawkins's accumulative method are alluded to; he described a corpus rather than formulating rules for the generation of utterances. His contribution to the collection and classification of Greek folk tales – his second most important achievement – is also assessed. Finally mention is made of developments in Modern Greek studies since Dawkins's time.

Type
Articles
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 85 , November 1990 , pp. 201 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Symons, A.J.A., The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (London: Cassell, 1934), 206.Google Scholar

2 Lancaster, O., With an Eye to the Future (London: Murray, 1967), 77–8.Google Scholar

3 There are two versions of this memoir, one dating from 1938, the other from 1950; they are housed in the Dawkins Collection at the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford, under the mark f.Arch.Z.Dawk.6(2) and 6(5). In the notes I refer to them as Dawkins 1938 and Dawkins 1950 respectively. This quotation is from Dawkins 1950, 91.

4 Georgina Buckler's doctoral thesis was entitled ‘The Intellectual and Moral Standards of Anna Comnena’. A version of it was published under the title Anna Comnena: A Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929).

5 From p. v of John Dawkins's introduction to the 1950 version of R.M. Dawkins's memoir (see note 3).

6 Bowra, C.M., Memories 1898–1939 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), 252.Google Scholar

7 John Davenport, in his introduction to Douglas, Norman, Old Calabria (4th ed., London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), xi.Google Scholar

8 Dawkins 1938, 9: characteristically for a philologist, Dawkins types ‘dissimilation’ for ‘dissimulation’.

9 loc. cit.

10 Dawkins, R.M., Norman Douglas (Florence 1933).Google Scholar

11 Dawkins 1938, 3.

12 John Dawkins, op. cit., i.

13 Dawkins 1938, 9.

14 1950, 93.

15 Clogg, R., Times Literary Supplement, 21 August 1987.Google Scholar

16 Dawkins 1938, 21–22.

17 Dawkins 1938, 8.

18 Dawkins 1938, 12–13.

19 ‘Notes from Karpathos,’ Annual of the British School at Athens 10 (1903–4), 83–102.

20 Dawkins 1950, 88. According to Jenkins, R.J.H. (‘Richard MacGillivray Dawkins 1871–1955’, Proceedings of the British Academy 41 (1956), 382)Google Scholar, it was Dawkins's friend F.W. Hasluck who first aroused his interest in folklore.

21 The embroideries were described by Dawkins, and Wace, in the Burlington Fine Arts Club's Catalogue of a Collection of Old Embroideries of the Greek Islands and Turkey (London 1914).Google Scholar Many of these pieces are now illustrated and described by Johnstone, Pauline, A Guide to Greek Island Embroidery (London: H.M.S.O., 1972).Google Scholar

22 The sanctuary was actually discovered by Wace in 1905. Dawkins's report on the excavations was delayed by various circumstances until 1929: The Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta (London: The Hellenic Society, 1929). As Jenkins notes (op. cit., 377–8), this delay meant that by the time they were published the results ‘seemed to be based on old-fashioned criteria’.

23 Jenkins, op. cit., 376–7. More recently, anthropologists have shown especial interest in the terracotta masks found at the sanctuary; see, for example, Napier, A.D., Masks, transformation, and paradox (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1986), 45 & 48–9.Google Scholar I am indebted to Dr Charles Stewart for bringing this to my attention.

24 ‘´Yμνος στην Ορθία Αρτέμιδα’ forms part of ‘Η συνείδηση της φυλής μου’, in Πρόλογος στη ζωή, published 1915–17. See also the four sonnets, written by Sikelianos between about 1914 and 1920, in Λνριϰός βοίπς (ed. G.P. Savidis), vol. 2 (Athens: Ikaros, 1965), 79–82. The role of archaeological inspiration in modern Greek poetry would make an interesting topic of study: I note here at random the appearances of Pharaonic Egypt and Minoan Crete in Sikelianos (Μήτηρ Θεού,section V, written 1917) and Kazantzakis(Οδύσεια 1938); also Hellenistic Egypt in Cavafy (e.g.‘Καισαρίων’, 1918) and Mycenaean Asine in Seferis's ‘Ο βασιλιάς της Ασίνης’(written 1938–40) and Ἕγϰωμη’ (written 1953).

25 Modern Greek in Asia Minor: A Study of the Dialects of Sílli, Cappadocia and Phárasa with Grammar, Texts, Translations and Glossary by R.M. Dawkins […] with a Chapter on the Subject-matter of the Folk-tales by W.R. Halliday […] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), 197.

26 op. cit., 198.

27 ‘The Place-names of later Greece’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1933, 20.

28 Chronographia, Paris ed., p. 407, quoted by Dawkins, MGAM, 25. At least Derinkuyu means ‘deep well’; I cannot, however, see any rationale for Kaymaklι (‘creamy’).

29 Livísi is now called Kaya; its port, Mákri, is now the resort of Fethiye.

30 Dawkins 1938, 31.

31 These are the eastern Pontie dialects that make up what I am tempted to call the ‘Langue d'ou’, in contrast to the ‘Langue de ki’, after the use at Soúrmena and Ophis of the ancient negative ou rather than the general Pontic ki. Dawkins published some of these stories in Αρχείον Πόντου3 (1931), 79–122; his archives contain further, unpublished, tales from Ophis and Soúrmena, as well as from the villages of Santa and Imera in the region of Chaldía.

32 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1937, 15–52. Dawkins nowhere mentions the Pontic-speakers of Soviet Georgia, whose dialect still remains to be studied.

33 It was also proposed by Thumb, Albert in The Classical Quarterly 8 (1914), 199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 ‘The Dialects of Modern Greek’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1940, 1–38.

35 Triandaphyllidis, M., Νεοελληνιϰη γϱαμματιϰή. Α: Ιστοϱιϰη εισαγωγή (Athens 1938), 66–8.Google Scholar

36 Contossopoulos, N., ‘La Grèce d'índa et la Grèce de ti’, Glossologia 2–3 (1983–1984), 149–62.Google Scholar Curiously, Contossopoulos does not attribute the east–west division to anyone but Triandaphyllidis (p. 149). See Dawkins's assessment of Triandaphyllidis's division, with suggested refinements, in ‘The Dialects of Modern Greek’, 21–3.

37 ‘The vocabulary of the mediaeval Cypriot Chronicle of Leontios Makhairas’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1925–30, 320–1.

38 ‘The Dialects of Modern Greek’, 7.

39 Said, E., Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978).Google Scholar

40 ‘The vocabulary of the mediaeval Cypriot Chronicle of Leontios Makhairas’, 329.

41 ‘The Place-names of later Greece’, 35.

42 Newton, B., The Generative Approach to Dialect: a Study of Modern Greek Phonology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).Google Scholar Newton does not deal with the Asia Minor dialects, which he seems to see as belonging to a rather different system.

43 Trudgill, P., On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).Google Scholar

44 Andriotis, N.P., Το γλωσσιϰό ιδίωμα των Φαϱάσων (Athens: Institut Français d'Athènes, 1948), 9.Google Scholar

45 Mavrokalyvidis, G. and Kesisoglou, I.I., Το γλωσσιϰό ιδίωμα της Αξού (Athens: Institut Français d'Athènes, 1960), ix.Google Scholar

46 ibid., x.

47 Kesisoglou, I.I., Το γλωσσιϰό ιδίωμα του Ουλαγάτς (Athens: Institut Français d'Athènes, 1951), 3 & 131–4.Google Scholar In addition to those already referred to, these monographs, all published in Athens by the Institut Français d'Athènes, are the following: Phosteris, D. and Kesisoglou, I.I., Λεξιλόγιο του Αϱαβανί (1960)Google Scholar, Andriotis, N.P., Το ιδίωμα του Λιβισιού της Λυϰίας (1961)Google Scholar, Costakis, A.P., Le Parler grec d'Anakou (1964)Google Scholar, and Kostakis, Th. P., Το γλωσσιϰό ιδίωμα της Σίλλης (1968).Google Scholar

48 Folklore 76 (1965), 202–12. Of the 121 publications by Dawkins – excluding book reviews – listed by M.A. Alexiadis, ‘Το έϱγο του Dawkins, R.M.: βιβλιογϱαφιϰή συμβουλή (Δελτίο Κένντϱώυ Μιϰϱασιατιϰών Σπουδών 5 (1984–1985), 361–91)Google Scholar, the largest number (forty-six) concern folklore, all but eight dating from 1930 onwards; by contrast, during the same years he produced nine out of his 17 philological publications.

49 Makhairas, Leontios, Recital Concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus, Entitled ‘Chronicle’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932).Google Scholar A similar philological and folkloric motivation lay behind his posthumous edition of Boustronios: The Chronicle of George Boustronios 1456–1489 (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Cyprus Expedition, 1964).

50 Forty-Five Stories from the Dodekanese. Edited and translated from the mss. of Jacob Zarraftis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). These tales were recorded by Zarraftis some time before 1912.

51 1950, 97.

52 Modern Greek Folktales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953).

53 op. cit., xxii.

54 More Greek Folktales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).

55 Alexiadis, M., ‘O. Richard M. Dawkins ϰαι η δωδεϰανησιαϰή λαογϱαφία’, Δωδώνη (1985), 17.Google Scholar

56 Modern Greek Folktales, v.

57 Clogg, R., ‘Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraës Chair’ (a special issue of Middle Eastern Studies vol. 21, no. 4 (October 1985)), 28.Google Scholar

58 ‘The place-names of later Greece’, 45.

59 This paper is to be found in the Dawkins Collection, Taylor Institution Library, Oxford (f.Arch.Z.Dawk. 10(2)). The same folder contains what he called a ‘boil down’ of this article, sent to Hellas, a new Greek paper to be published in London, in January 1942; this shorter version was to have been accompanied by some translations by John Mavrogordato. Dawkins had earlier sprung to Cavafy's defence in his review of Malanos, T., Ο ποιητής Κ.Π. Καβάφης in Journal of Hellenic Studies 54 (1934), 107–8.Google Scholar The Dawkins collection contains three folders of Cavafy's poems (1905–1915, 1916–1918, and 1919–1932) sent to Dawkins by the poet in response to a letter of 13 March 1933 (one month before Cavafy's death) praising his poetry, which Dawkins had previously read in copies lent to him by William Plomer and Alexander Matsas. Cavafy had clearly read Modern Greek in Asia Minor in great detail: see his references in his unpublished review of Pernot, H., Grammaire du grec moderne (1917)Google Scholar, now in Kavafis, K.P., Πεζά (Athens: Phexis, 1963), 195–234.Google Scholar The editor of this volume, G.A. Papoutsakis, reproduces Dawkins's letter on pp. 221–2.

60 ‘Graeco-barbara’, Transactions of the Philological Society 1939, 5.

61 1950. 92.

62 ‘The Greek dialect of Cargese and its disappearance’, Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrbücher 5 (1926), 371–9.

63 ‘Graeco-barbara’, 26.