Για μια ποιητική του ελληνικού δημοτικού τραγουδιού (review)

252 Reviews of Greek influence is probably less than the Hellenist would no doubt want to see, despite the pervasiveness of the effects of Greek on Romani. Also, though, Messing is generally quite cautious and is careful not to attribute more to Greek influence than can be documented. As noted above, the extent of Turkish influence on this dialect of Romani is certainly significant, even if it stems from contact at an earlier period than the contact with Greek. As an example of just how difficult it can therefore be to determine the source of a word or usage in Romani, consider that the Romani word for 'coat' is paltó, as it is in Greek, but that the word could just as easily have entered Romani from contact with Turkish, since palto is also the Turkish word for 'coat'. Similarly, the verb piav, of Indie origin in Romani, means both 'drink' and 'smoke' and thus might make one think of the range of meanings of Greek pino, except that the Turkish verb for 'drink', ig-, also means 'smoke'; thus, the multiple meanings could come from Turkish as easily as from Greek. In some cases, though, Messing probably was being overcautious with his silence; for instance, it would seem that sirdav 'pull, drag' (p. 113) must be based on the aorist stem sir- of Greek sérno (with an added -d- as in spilavlspildav 'push, shove'), and that drom 'road, street, time' (p. 60) must ultimately at least be from Greek drómos. I noticed remarkably few typographical errors and other lapses. Perhaps the only non-self-correcting ones to mention here are as follows: p. 79, under kizméti, the Turkish form given as kizmetli 'lucky' should be kismetli and p. 128, the Turkish form çopcii for 'garbage collector' should be çopçii. Messing intends this book to be one of a series on Agia Varvara Romani, with future volumes to include a detailed grammar and a collection of texts. Whatever the fate of those future works, there is so much of value and of interest in the present book that Messing is to be commended by one and all for having produced it. This volume enriches not only the field of Romani studies but also the field of Modern Greek studies, construed in its broadest sense. Brian D. Joseph The Ohio State University G. M. Sifakis, Για μια ποιητικήτου ελληνικοϕ δημοτικοϕ τϕαγουδιοϕ. Ηϕάκλειο: ΠανεπιστημιακÎ-Ï‚ Εκδόσεις Κϕήτης. 1988. Pp. 236. At the start of this rigorous, closely reasoned book, G. M. Sifakis, Professor of Classics at the University of Thessaloniki, states that his purpose is to formulate and describe the rules and processes of production that enable folk songs to be created. The body of his text is then devoted to the analytical definition, backed by illustrative examples, of a variety of units into which Greek folk songs may be divided. At this level this book is clearly a success. Reviews 253 Whether "the process of production," the cognitive path followed by any particular oral poet in creating a given song, can be inferred from an ultimately subjective series of scholastic divisions is another question. Do poets put songs together the same way that scholars like Sifakis take them apart? It would be hard to know unless a talented singer such as Milman Parry's Yugoslav bard, Avdo Mededovié, could be found and studied in die very act of performance. Our lack of information regarding the social context and function of the songs and our relative ignorance of any accompanying music raise other difficulties that Sifakis acknowledges but then ignores. Nor does he engage in the literary interpretation of individual songs. No poem is cited or analyzed in its entirety. This is stricdy a study of poetics. The disciplines of semiotics and linguistics very much govern the author 's approach to the demotic songs, which he sees as a "semiotic system" (p. 25). Like normal language, the language of popular songs possesses spheres of competence and performance. Poetic language is of course distinct from normal language in its periodicity and, according to Aristode, in the way it addresses the "general" (τα καθόλου) in contradistinction to history, which is concerned with the particular (p. 41). Sifakis draws on the work of the Homerist...