3rd International Conference on Greek Etymology: Greek and Balkan Etymology
November 4th-5th, 2022
Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation, A.U.Th., Thessaloniki, and via Internet
The Institute of Modern Greek Studies [Manolis Triandafyllidis Foundation] of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, within the framework of the annual international conferences on the study of the Greek language in all its historical and geographical range, organized the “3rd International Conference on Greek and Balkan Etymology”, on November 4-5, 2022, in Thessaloniki. The Conference was organized in a hybrid way, i.e. both in person and via internet.
The Conference examined issues related to the etymology of the Greek language, covering all historical periods and aspects, whether dialectal or not. The Conference was organized, among others, around the following thematic areas: (a) theoretical aspects of Greek and Balkan etymology, (b) etymological suggestions regarding specific words, (c) etymology and dialectology, (d) etymology and language contact, (e) etymology and philology (text reconstruction, pre-scientific etymology), and (f) etymology and education.
Keynote speakers:
Professor Alain Blanc (University of Rouen Normandy, France) and
Professor Michael Meier-Brügger (Free University of Berlin, Germany).
It is common knowledge that enhancing the quality of etymological dictionaries presupposes the upgrading of etymological studies. This upgrading will be facilitated, among other things, by the development of a more productive relationship between etymology, on the one hand, and other linguistic fields and cutting-edge theories on the other. Besides the well-known dialectic relationship between etymology and historical linguistics, and the former’s dependence on (mostly historical) phonology, morphology and semantics, a more constructive dialogue needs to be established with linguistic fields such as dialectology, language typology, the linguistics of language contact, as well as with specific theoretical approaches (e.g., Grammaticalization and Optimality Theory).
The purpose of co-addressing etymological issues related to three periods of the Greek language (ancient, medieval and modern) is threefold: (1) to emphasize the need to highlight the historical depth and geographical scope of the data, which is usually restricted to simple reference of the presence of individual words in particular historical periods, (2) to reinforce the feeling that there is one history of words, and that this cannot be artificially segmented into individual historical periods (though, unarguably, influenced by them), and (3) to point out the similarities, but also the particularities of the etymological issues related to each period (cf. the significance of the Laryngeal and the Pelasgian Theories for ancient Greek).
The Greek language is an Indo-European, European and Balkan language, and all these dimensions emerge as a distinct issue in the compilation of etymological dictionaries. It is well known that the quality of the etymological dictionaries of individual Balkan languages is directly related to the quality of the etymological studies of the borrowing languages. The discussion as to the best way to study lexical Balkanisms is usually reflected in the dilemma: individual monographs on the Greek, Turkish, Slavic, Romance and Albanian elements as well as the lexical Balkanisms of unknown and doubtful origin, or a collective dictionary of Balkanisms? The former option, as has been pointed out, despite the difficulties it presents (to the adventures of the great Miklosich we can add the difficulties encountered by the compilers of the Dictionary of Greek elements in the Balkan languages) seems, at least for the time being, to be the only feasible solution.
This conference is the seventh one in the series of annual international conferences on the study of the Greek language in all its historical and geographical range organized by the Institute of Modern Greek Studies, and are alternately devoted to (a) Greek Etymology (2015, 2018, 2022), (b) Language Contact in the Balkans and Asia Minor (2016, 2019), and (c) Koine, koines and the formation of Standard Modern Greek (2017, 2021).