Page 280 - Beholding Liberty!

Letter of A. Vokos,
Ioan. Voulgaris and L. Lalechos to the notables of the island
of Hydra about the burning
of the Turkish flagship at Chios (Psara, 7 June 1822)
Archives of the Greek Regeneration, vol, 1, no 551 [p. 551]
Library of the Hellenic Parliament
[cat. no ΙΙ.3.10]
30. For the etymologies see, Sarantakos 2020.
31. Bilinguals, such as Markos Botsaris, form a special case.
32. For translanguaging see, García 2016.
sometimes γαρδακόστες < guardacosta, ‘exploratory or patrol vessels’), τρασπόρτα (< trasporto ‘transport ship or carrier’), σαλούπες (and τζαλούπες, < Ital. scialuppa or Venetian salupa ‘large boat, which is also used as landing vessel’), ριτσεβούτα (< ricevuta ‘payment receipts’), αριβάρο/αρίβο (< arrivo ‘arrive’) and ντετάλιο (< det- taglio ‘detail’), but also of French origin, as δελίνια (ντελίνι, δελίνι or τελίνι < (vaisseau) de ligne ‘warship of the line’; warships that were arrayed in battle line and confronted the opponent with their guns) etc. This is the live, everyday vocabulary, which till then had not yet been archaisized.30
Finally, frequent is the use of Italian words for administrative offices (μινίστρος/ minister) and the ranks of army hierarchy: i.e. in the AGR document, vol. 9, p. 326, we come across the hypernym term οφφικιάλιοι (οφικιάλος or οφιτσιάλος ‘officer of a European force, land or naval one’; derived from the Byzantine οφφικιάλιος, that goes back to the Latin officialis, or loan from the Italian officiale), which, as Sarantakos (2020: 172) comments, is rarely used for locals, but often appears in payroll ledgers of foreign officers, as in the present case. There follow the hyponym μαγιόρος (or μαγκιόρος < maggiore ‘major’) and αγιουτάντες (or αγιουτάντης < aiutante ‘as- sistant, adjutant’). Finally, from the French language derive the terms λιετνάντ (< lieutenant) and υπολιετνάντες ‘sub-lieutenants’.
At a later stage and under the influence of archaistic tendencies, the above loans-wordings were replaced through internal loans, by semantically equivalent learned types (i.e. μινίστρος-υπουργός/minister, μαγιόρος- ταγματάρχης/major, αγιουτάντης-υπασπιστής/adjutant, λιετνάντ-λοχαγός/lieutenant etc.) or by corresponding translation loans (i.e. βαρδακόστα-ακτοφυλακή/coast guard, δελίνι-πλοίο της γραμμής/ship of the line etc.).
Summing up, through this selective overview of linguistc material from the AGR, a picture of diversity emerg- es, with co-occurrence of different registers, since apart from the dominant learned language, several el- ements from the spoken one turn up, as much in morpho-phonology (unaugmented verb types, participle endings -οντας/-ώντας), as in the vocabulary (loanwords). Indeed, we could possibly risk the anachronistic application of the term «translanguaging» in this corpus, implying the linguistic strategy of diglossic speak- ers/recorders (mainly of social diglossia in the present case),31 within which advantage is taken of their entire linguistic repertoire, learned and not learned, without attachment to social or political limitations that the ‘named languages’, namely the dominant, ideologically recognized ones, impose.32 In that sense, in texts that are not strictly insitutional, in which the written language reflects, as it would be expected, the inexorable norm of the formal/administrative discourse of the time, the speakers/recorders create, more or less con- sciously, fractures in the narrative of linguistic homogeneity, letting elements of the spoken language tran- spire through them. All in all, given that the present essay is not exhaustive, the claim under discussion needs further investigation, based on a broader set of data.
280 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!