Το λεξιλόγιο του Μακρυγιάννη, ή πώς μιλούσαν οι 'Ελληνες, προτού βιαστεί η γλώσσα μας από την καθαρεύουσα (review)

222 Reviews together with three poems apparently unpublished in Greek ("Gain and Loss in an Aegean Metamorphosis" and two "New Poems"). They are a representative and valuable selection of the work of this unusual Greek poet, translated with the sensitivity and urbanity which we have learnt to expect from the most prolific translator of modern Greek poetry. The volume also includes a thirty-page introduction , an abridged version of an interview with the poet by Marjorie Keyishian, biographical notes, brief explicatory notes on the poems and a bibliography of Decavalles' principal publications in Greek and English. Roderick Beaton King's College London N. I. Kyriazidis with I. N. Kazazis and J. Brèhier. To λεξιλόγιο του Μακϕυγιάννη, ή πώς μιλοϕσαν οι Έλληνες, πϕοτοϕ βιαστεί η γλώσσα μας από την καθαϕεϕουσα. 3 vols. Athens: Ermis, 1983. Pp. 56 + 90, vi + 542, vi + 772. $30. In 1829, at the age of 35, General Makriyannis took writing lessons and began composing his memoirs, which he wrote in phonetic spelling. This voluminous work was published, in a painstaking transcription, by Vlahoyannis in 1907. Because of his lack of education and of his desire to record his memories in as direct a manner as possible, Makriyannis wrote more or less as he spoke, with the minimum of interference from katharevousa ; thus the Memoirs are a valuable source of information on the spoken language of Greece during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With this in mind, Nikos Kyriazidis, assisted by a team of linguists led by I. N. Kazazis and by the computer programmer J. Brèhier, has produced a complete alphabetical word-index of Makriyannis' Memoirs, in which each word is categorized according to part of speech and has a full list of reference to its use in the text. As Kyriazidis puts it in his introduction, "This work isn't just a linguistic study; it's the fruit of the researches of a militant demoticist " (18). The title of his book is significant: "The Vocabulary of Makriyannis, or How the Greeks spoke before our language was violated by katharevousa' '. Conscious of the linguistic confusion prevailing in Greece today, Kyriazidis clearly hankers after a pristine demotic, which he believes he has found in Makriyannis' writing. For "our language" is obviously demotic, a once-pure linguistic me- Reviews 223 dium that has been "violated" (or "raped") by katharevousa. I shall not comment, however, on Kyriazidis' desire to turn the clock back and return to a former stage of the Greek language; instead I shall proceed to an account of his methods and their results. First the text of the Memoirs was marked up with code numbers designating parts of speech against each word. Then the marked-up text was entered on to punched tape which was processed by the computer to produce a strictly alphabetical list of all the forms. Next, the forms had to be arranged (by hand) in such a way that all the inflectional forms of a single word (lexeme) were grouped together (e.g., anthrópu with ánthropos and ipa with lego). Finally the computer processed these data again, producing two outputs: first, an alphabetical list of lexemes (together with their inflectional variants) for each part of speech and, second, an alphabetical index of lexemes indicating, for each one, the page of the first list on which it can be found and the number of its occurrences in the Memoirs. The first finding that becomes obvious from Kyriazidis' project is the richness of Makriyannis' vocabulary. The 142,687 words ("tokens ") that make up the text of the Memoirs comprise 14,845 different word-forms ("types") which can be reduced to 5,295 lexemes (entry-words). Makriyannis' vocabulary of well over 5,000 words is remarkably rich for one who was illiterate until the age of 35. Of these words over a third are nouns and almost a fifth are verbs; adjectives , which constitute the third largest category, account for less than 8 percent of the total. The statistics thus confirm one's intuitions about the vividness and sparseness of Makriyannis' style. With Kyriazidis' Vocabulary one can now find at a glance not only all the words used by Makriyannis, with their page references in the text, but also all the morphological forms of the inflected words...