'Some Pamphlets on Dead Greek Dialects': R.M.

Dawkins and Modern Greek Dialectology Author(s): Peter Mackridge Source: The Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 85 (1990), pp. 201-212 Published by: British School at Athens Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30102847 . Accessed: 23/04/2013 06:03
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'SOME PAMPHLETS ON DEAD GREEK DIALECTS': R.M. DAWKINS AND MODERN GREEK DIALECTOLOGY*

Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871-1955)

was chiefly known, at least during his years as

the first Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford, for his eccentricities. The untidiness, clumsiness, cryptic handwriting, and erratic typing of the man whom the notorious Frederick Rolfe, otherwise known as Baron Corvo, author of HadriantheSeventh, called the 'blubber-lipped Professor of were The two Greek',' pen-and-ink sketches, one visual, the other verbal, that proverbial. Osbert Lancaster did of 'that great and good man, [...] the late R.M. Dawkins', present him at his quaintest. 'Ginger-moustached, myopic, stooping,' wrote Lancaster, 'clad in one of a succession of very thick black suits which he ordered by postcard from the general store of a small village in Northern Ireland, he always betrayed his whereabouts by a cackling laugh of great carrying power. (Once when passing alongside the high wall of Exeter, startled by the extraordinary sound, I looked up and saw the Professor happily perched in the higher branches of a large chestnut tree hooting like a demented macaw.) [. . .] Of his powers as a lecturer,' Lancaster continues, 'it was difficult to judge as he had managed over the years successfully to discourage anyone from reading modern Greek. When, very occasionally, some misguided female student, despite every obstacle he could devise, inscribed herself for the course, his first, and last, lecture of the academic year was always of such shattering indecency that the unfortunate young woman immediately decided to take up Icelandic.'2 Dawkins himself, in an unpublished memoir dating from 1950, had no illusions about the success of his teaching. 'Of my work as a professor there is very little to be said. During the whole twenty years only three candidates presented themselves for the schools: each of them took a second class. Through lack of audiences I was obliged to substitute for formal lectures - they would have been delivered to empty benches - informal instruction in the language, for the most part to undergraduates intending to visit Greece. Of serious students of the language I had, I think, none.'3 He omits to say whether any of his three honours students was female; nor does he mention research students - even Georgina Buckler, who was perhaps the only one.4
* A version of this paper was first given at a symposium entitled 'The Medieval and Modern Greek Worlds' held in March 1988 to mark the retirement of Donald Nicol from the Korafs Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College, London.
1 in AJ.A. Symons, The Questfor Corvo:An Experiment (London: Cassell, 1934), 206. Biography 2 0O. Lancaster, With an Eye to the Future (London: Murray, 1967), 77-8. 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 195o,

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 Comnnena: A Study(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929).

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PETER MACKRIDGE

Anyone who was associated personally with Dawkins or who has worked on his archives is familiar with the difficulties of decipherment presented by his handwriting and typing. His brother John, who taught Arabic at Oxford and was therefore presumably something of a palaeographer, said about his handwriting that it was what 'was known usually as "classical", to be solved as a problem of epigraphy',5 while Maurice Bowra wrote that 'his letters were written on an archaic typewriter, and in each line the words soared up and down like a musical score'.6 Dawkins was undoubtedly a renowned misogynist; whether he was also, as his friend Norman Douglas was somewhat pretentiously said by one of his editors to be, a ~tatirEqulg,7 I am unable to judge. It is said that his extensive travels in distant lands offered him the opportunity to indulge discreetly and inexpensively in activities that he would not have risked in Oxford; but these rumours may well have been due solely to prurient imaginations. There is no doubt, however, that behind the amusing high-table raconteur there lay an intensely secretive personality. He writes bitterly about his time at Marlborough, where he was constantly bullied for being red-haired, left-handed, and useless at games, and where he learned two qualities, namely 'cowardice and dissimulation'.8 'I left school,' he says, 'with an incapacity even to make acquaintances';9 but subsequently his close friends included some who were renowned for their outrageous views and behaviour, and whose peculiarly English brand of aestheticism combined homosexuality with a fascination for Italy and the Roman Catholic Church, such as Ronald Firbank, Baron Corvo, and Norman Douglas, about the last of whom Dawkins wrote a small book.'0 I am inclined to think, though, that the words which he wrote about his father were equally applicable to himself: 'He was a man of a naturally melancholy temperament, with what commonly goes with it, a great desire and gift for the happiness of genial social intercourse'." Dawkins's reticence was remarkable; John Dawkins notes that 'my brother seems to have left no record of his life or opinions and - I think rather oddly - hardly a copy of any letter he ever wrote on the subject'."2He appears to have kept his private, scholarly, and social lives rigidly compartmentalized, and we find in his academic work little of the wit and the forthright opinions for which his conversation was famous. Although 'muscularly weak',13 he seems to have had a physiological need for constant movement; he was an inveterate traveller in the Mediterranean world, in which he spent a considerable part of every year from 1902 to 1939; but hardly ever does he attempt to describe his experiences or the atmosphere of the places he visited. Despite his twelve years attached to the British School at Athens, for instance, I can find not a single sentence about life in the Greek capital before the First World War; he does not express any view on the outcome of the Balkan Wars; nor, in his publications on the Greek dialects of Asia Minor, does he ever mention how he journeyed to those remote areas, or remark on the flora and fauna of the region; he makes few references to the activities of the inhabitants, and indeed no personal observations. He himself was fully conscious of his inhibitions about committing himself
5 From p. v of John Dawkins's introduction to the 1950 version of R.M. Dawkins's memoir (see note 3)6 C.M. Bowra, Memories 1898-Ig39 (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson, 1966), 252.

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

8 Dawkins 1938, 9: characteristically for a philologist, Dawkins types 'dissimilation' for 'dissimulation'. 9 loc. cit. 10 R.M. Dawkins, NormanDouglas (Florence I933). " Dawkins 1938, 3. '2John Dawkins, op. cit., i.
13

Dawkins 1938, 9.

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to writing on both personal and general issues: 'My love of accumulation and spadework,' he wrote, 'and a certain reluctance I have to formulate wider ideas have always made the production of short papers, which may I hope prove useful to people of wider powers of flight, more congenial to me than anything else'.'4 I shall return later to the metaphor of spadework, which connects his philological pursuits with his career as an archaeologist and his hobby as a botanist and a gardener. I want now to proceed to an evaluation of his scholarly work. The title of my paper I owe to Richard Clogg, whose own spade uncovered a remark made to John Mavrogordato in 1939 by Dimitrios Caclamanos, a former Greek minister in London, who expressed his delight at the imminent departure of Dawkins from the Oxford professorship, 'complaining that his incumbency had reduced the chair to "a mere fiction". All he had published were some pamphlets on dead Greek dialects in which no one had the slightest interest.'15 My purpose in the rest of this paper is to assess the justice of Caclamanos's words. Dawkins was the first to admit that chance played an extraordinarily significant part in his career,16 which was definitely not guided by any single-minded ambition. After Marlborough he went to King's College, London, to read electrical engineering, because that was the career for which his father had destined him: 'I was myself too much battered to have any ideas of what I could or might do in the world,' he wrote."7It was during this period of his undergraduate studies, which failed to engross his mind, that he set about acquiring books and teaching himself the principles of comparative philology. ('I began buying books in secret; but living in secret was what I was accustomed to,' he reminisces;'8 and indeed his scholarly work continued ever after to be carried out more or less in isolation.) At Marlborough he had already picked up a good deal of Latin and Greek, but also French and some Italian; he now spent his evenings in his student lodgings learning Sanskrit and Icelandic. These private studies continued after he dropped out of King's after two years and became apprenticed to a firm of electrical engineers at Chelmsford; he went on to master Middle Irish, but also moved beyond Indo-European and taught himself Finnish, Egyptian, and Hebrew. Then the deaths of his father and mother both relieved him of the tyranny of paternal expectations and afforded him sufficient financial independence to enter Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to read Classics at the age of twenty-seven. On gaining a double First, he was awarded a Craven scholarship to the British School at Athens in I902. From this point on, Dawkins's scholarly career can be divided into three overlapping stages: archaeology, philology, and folklore. His spare-time activities during the period 1902 to I914, when he was working as an archaeologist, prepared the ground for the later stages, for as early as 1903 he visited Karpathos in order to collect dialect material for comparison with the East Cretan he had learned while digging at the Minoan palace of Palaikastro; the results of this expedition appeared in his first philological article,19which remains today the most reliable record of the phonology of the Karpathos dialect. It was during his years as Director of the British School from 1906 to that he made his three I9I4 field trips to Cappadocia, which bore fruit in the greatest monument to his dialectological work, ModernGreekin Asia Minor (1916); by then he had added a thorough knowledge of
1950, 93. 15 R. Clogg, TimesLiterary Supplement, 2I 16 Dawkins 1938, 21-22.
14

August 1987.

'7 Dawkins 1938, 8.

'8 Dawkins 1938, 12-13. 19 'Notes from Karpathos,' Annual of the British Schoolat Athens io (1903-4), 83-1o2.

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Turkish to his list of languages. At the time the purpose of his collection of folk tales in Cappadocia was purely philological, and he was so indifferent to their content that he got his friend, the ancient historian and folklorist W.R. Halliday, to contribute a long chapter on this subject to his book; it was only later that he began to realize that, despite himself, he had been amassing a considerable knowledge of Greek folk tales, a knowledge that formed the foundation for his third scholarly manifestation, as a folklorist.20It was during these same years that Dawkins was engaged in another important activity: the purchasing of Greek folk embroideries, in particular during a tour of the Cyclades in the summer of 1907 with his friend A.J.B. Wace, who went on to succeed him as Director of the British School. In 1950 Dawkins donated this rich material to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it makes up two thirds of the items in its collection of Greek embroidery.21 Although he also worked at Phylakopi (Melos), Sikinos, as well as the Kamares Cave and Plati (both in Crete), Dawkins's reputation as an archaeologist rests chiefly upon his direction of the excavation of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta in 19o6-9.22 Romilly Jenkins wrote that Dawkins's excavation at Sparta 'was for those times a masterpiece of technical skill. [...] The inexhaustible supply of Laconian pottery, bronzes, ivories, terracottas, and lead figurines revolutionized all previous conceptions of Sparta's place in the artistic history of Greece during the archaic period'.23 I like to think that Dawkins's spectacular findings provided some of the inspiration for Angelos to Life) and his other poems Sikelianos's 'Hymn to Artemis Orthia' (a section of Prologue with a Spartan setting.24 It is, however, his work on the modern Cappadocian dialects of Greek that constitutes Dawkins's most significant and enduring scholarly endeavour. In the summers of 1909, 1910, and 9II (accompanied on the last of these expeditions by W.R. Halliday) he visited almost all the Greek-speaking settlements in the centre of Asia Minor, some of them so remote that the League of Nations Refugee Commission, directed by the Norwegian polar explorer Nansen, was unable to evacuate the Orthodox Christian inhabitants until two years after the population exchange agreement between Greece and Turkey was signed under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The sense of urgency that spurred Dawkins to amass his wealth of Cappadocian linguistic material was inspired by his observation that the Greek dialects were being pervaded by Turkish elements, 'even to the point of
20 Dawkins 1950, 88. According to R.J.H. Jenkins ('Richard MacGillivray Dawkins 1871-1955', Proceedings of the British Academy41 (1956), 382), it was Dawkins's friend F.W. Hasluck who first aroused his interest in folklore. 21The embroideries were described by Dawkins and Wace in the Burlington Fine Arts Club's Catalogueof a Collection of the GreekIslands and Turkey of Old Embroideries (London 1914). Many of these pieces are now illustrated Island and described by Pauline Johnstone, A Guideto Greek (London: H.M.S.O., 1972). Embroidery 22 The sanctuary was actually discovered by Wace in I905. Dawkins's report on the excavations was delayed by various circumstances until 1929: The Sanctuary of Artemis Orthiaat Sparta (London: The Hellenic Society, I929). 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'. 23Jenkins, op. cit., 376-7. More recently, anthropologists have shown especial interest in the terracotta masks found

at the sanctuary; see, for example, A.D. Napier, Masks, and paradox (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: transformation, University of California Press, 1986), 45 & 48-9. I am indebted to Dr Charles Stewart for bringing this to my attention. 24 'Y~VOg o;nv O0C1a AQrit&ta' forms part of 'H ovvEi6rlbTpT trlg pvilqg ov', in HId6oyog arTr owr4, published 1915-17. See also the four sonnets, written by Sikelianos between about 1914 and 1920, in Avgtxd6 f/iog (ed. G.P. Savidis), vol. 2 (Athens: Ikaros, I965), 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 section V, written 1917) Crete in Sikelianos (Mjrrlv OEov, and Kazantzakis (Od6oueta, I938); also Hellenistic Egypt in Cavafy (e.g. 'KaLotQIov', 1918) and Mycenaean Asine in Seferis's 'O urlgAoalvg' (written 1938-40) and pItaotldg 'EyxwCox' (written 1953).

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crowding the dialect out of existence altogether'.25 The influence of Turkish syntax, in particular, led him to observe ruefully of these dialects that 'the body has remained Greek, but the soul has become Turkish'.26His words have a tragically ironical poignancy for us, who are aware of the destiny that was being inexorably prepared for these dialects and their speakers at the very moment that his book was being published. There were perhaps further east in the Taurus mountains, and about the same number in villages of the town ofPhtrasa Silli near Konya. I do not know how many reached Greece, but a considerable proportion of those who survived the hardships of the journey were cut down by malaria and other diseases and deprivations in the unhealthy parts of Greece in which they were settled. Being such a small number of people, speaking quite markedly disparate dialects, and scattered in various parts of Greece, the Cappadocian refugees were never able to create a group identity in their new homeland, unlike the far more numerous and cohesive Pontians, who have managed to record and keep alive their dialect until this day. Anyone who attempts to find the Greek villages of Cappadocia today, either on the map or on the ground, is first faced by the problem that their names have been obliterated, a chauvinistic practice not only prevalent in modern Turkey, but bewailed by Dawkins with regard to Greece as well.27 Visitors to the so-called 'underground cities' at Kaymakli and Derinkuyu have difficulty in ascertaining that until 1923 they were called Anakii and Malakop( respectively (the latter being the Macaxonat1a of Theophanes).28 Once located, however, these villages bear obvious traces of their Greek Christian past in the shape of sizeable churches (some of which have been converted into mosques and are therefore well preserved, but with their frescoes covered with whitewash), and a number of rather elegant houses, whose Greekness is betrayed only by the initials and dates (usually about ten years before the exchange of populations) inscribed over their entrances, for the particularly Cappadocian decorative motifs have little that is familiar from other parts of the Greek world. Dawkins's study of the dialects of Cappadocia, Phirasa, and Silli was based on his transcription of almost one hundred folk tales from a total of sixteen different villages, supplemented by information provided by local schoolmasters. His concern was to record as far as possible the authentic Greek dialect, which to him meant neither the everyday speech of the people, who were often bilingual and switched readily between Greek and Turkish, nor the language of the Greek folk songs, in which the exigencies of the metre might tend to distort the normal forms, but the dialect employed in the telling of folk tales, which seemed to him to display a certain conservatism borne of the traditional nature of the activity of story-telling. While previous studies had been confined almost exclusively to works on individual villages by local antiquarians, Dawkins, on the basis of this corpus, was able to present a complete overview of the dialects, identifying for the first time both the common characteristics and the differences among the various local forms of speech, and establishing a tripartite division into the dialects of Silli, Cappadocia, and Phirasa, as
Christians in the twenty villages of Cappadocia proper, just over 2,00ooo in the six 30,00ooo

25 Modern Greek in Asia Minor:A Studyof theDialectsof Silli, and Phdrasawith Grammar, and Texts, Translations Cappadocia on the SubjectGlossary by R.M. Dawkins [. . .] with a Chapter matterof the Folk-talesby W.R. Halliday [.. .] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 9Ig6),I97. 26op. cit., 198.

27 'The Place-names of later Greece', Transactions of the Philological Society, 933, 20. Paris ed., p. 407, quoted by Dawkins, 28 Chronographia, MGAM, 25. At least Derinkuyu means 'deep well'; I cannot, however, see any rationale for KaymaklL ('creamy').

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well as a rough categorization of the Cappadocian dialects themselves into two broad groups (north and south). He constantly notes similarities between all these dialects and those of Pontus to the north-east and of Livisi and Mikri29 on the Lycian coast to the south-west; but equally constantly does he express his frustration at the scant knowledge of the Pontic dialects that was at that time available. Accordingly, after completing his book on Cappadocia, he set off in the summer of 19I4 on a field-trip to the Pontus; this time, however, chance was against him, since he was forced to break off his task at the beginning of the Great War. 'When I was caught by the outbreak of the war in 1914,' he later wrote, 'I was beginning what I hoped to be a series of visits to Pontos for the purpose of a similar book on Pontic; it has always been a deep regret to me that this was made impossible'.30 Nevertheless, he did collect some folk tales and other linguistic material, which he was able to make use of later; much of this material was from the valleys of Sofirmena and Ophis, which happen to be areas whose particularly interesting dialects have received comparatively little attention.31 His article, 'The Pontic Dialect of Modern Greek in Asia Minor and Russia', published in 1937,32 made use of this material to produce what is still the best introduction to the study of Pontic; he also incorporated material based on his study of Soviet publications written in the Pontic dialect of Rostov-on-Don and the altogether different Greek dialect of Mariupol (now Zhdanov) sent to him by his correspondent Professor Anatol Semenov of Rostov, which now form one of the most complete collections of these curious documents in the world. In this article Dawkins puts forward rigorous linguistic arguments to demonstrate that the Greek-speakers of Rostov had for the most part migrated from the Chaldia (Argyroupolis) region of the Pontus. The Greek linguist G.N. Hadzidakis had divided the Modern Greek dialects into two chief groups, northern and southern, according to whether the unstressed vowels underwent modification. Although he was an admirer and follower of Hadzidakis, Dawkins perceived early in his philological career that there was a more fundamental division to be made between western and eastern Greek, a division that both considerably pre-dated the north-south divide and displayed differences of a more fundamental kind. Dawkins was not alone in proposing this hypothesis,33 which posited the existence of an eastern koin6 as far back as Hellenistic times, but he contributed more than anyone to the

collection of data in its support. This homogeneous eastern koin6,he argued, was split in
two by the Seljuk incursions of the eleventh century, with the result that the Cappadocian and Pontic dialects remained cut off to the east of this Turkish wedge, while those of Livisi and Bythinia, together with Cyprus and the islands of the south-eastern Aegean, remained to its west and in continuing contact with the western half of the Greek-speaking world. Several of his publications return to this topic, particularly the summing-up of his views in his important and useful article 'The Dialects of Modern Greek', published in I94o0,34and
29 Livisi is now called Kaya; its port, Mikri, is now the resort of Fethiye. 30Dawkins I1938,3 31These are the eastern Pontic 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 Soirmena and Ophis of the ancient negative ou rather than the general Pontic ki. Dawkins published some of these stories in AgQedov II6vrov 3 (1931), 79-122; his archives contain further, unpublished, tales from Ophis and Sofirmena, as well as

from the villages of Santa and Imera in the region of Chaldia. 32 Transactions of the Philological Society,1937, I5-52. Dawkins nowhere mentions the Pontic-speakers of Soviet Georgia, whose dialect still remains to be studied. s It was also proposed by Albert Thumb in The Classical 8 (1914), 199. Quarterly Philological Society,1940o,1-38.

34'The Dialects of Modern Greek', Transactions of the

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he adduced a large number of convincing similarities between all the dialects of Asia Minor and of what is now known as the south-eastern group, i.e. those of Cyprus and the Dodecanese. Dawkins observed that the north-south division applies almost exclusively to the western half of the Greek world alone and is therefore of lesser importance; his to Modern Greek arguments were repeated by Triandaphyllidis in his Historical Introduction further been and have by recently given Contossopoulos.36 support grammar,35 Dawkins did indeed suggest that more work needed to be done on the specific nature of the western Greek dialects; but he did not feel inclined to carry out such a study himself. 'There was in the middle ages,' he wrote, 'a western popular Greek as well as an eastern; [...] the former forms the base of the general common Greek of to-day, and had a progressive tendency very likely due to the great influx of strangers into the Greek mainland, whilst the eastern Greek of mediaeval times has retained more of its old character, perhaps again due to the greater purity of Greek blood in the east.'37 Dawkins never seems to have felt at home in continental Greece. There was a certain racism in this attitude, such as Cyril Mango has pointed to in the work of Romilly Jenkins. He appears to have been uneasy about the effect of Slav, Albanian, and Turkish incursions into the mainland, and the occasional errors in his referencesto mainland demotic betray his comparative indifference to these varieties of Modern Greek. He was attracted far more by the Herodotean world of Oriental legends than by Thucydidean rationalism. He makes no mention of the spoken Greek of contemporary Athens and other urban centres, and during his stay in the Greek capital he seems to have deliberately sought out recently settled islanders, ignoring the Athenian intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. (He appears not to have favoured any kind of establishment, which may explain his lack of interest in the Byzantine Empire.) Instead he preferred the Greek of the islanders (particularly the Dodecanesians), whom he felt to be racially purer,38and that of the Asian Greeks, whose archaic speech, he believed, was only comparatively recently succumbing to Turkish domination. Most of Dawkins's linguistic field-work was conducted in areas which were in the Ottoman Empire, where as a foreigner he could travel with perhaps greater ease than a Greek researcher; again, as a foreigner, as he was wont to stress, he felt that he was free from any excessive national bias for or against the Greeks, which tended to distort the findings of less disinterested writers. In fact, he was the only non-native (with the to publish the results of dialectological field-work in exception of Henri goire) Cappadocia and the nearby areas. I cannot help thinking, however, that Dawkins's especial interest in the eastern portion of Hellenism is a reflection of a certain 'Orientalism' on his part; that, even though, unlike Byron or Forster, Dawkins was never depicted wearing oriental native costume, he found in the more exotic areas of the Greek world an atmosphere that appealed to him because it was so different from the homeland in which he felt so curiously uncomfortable. But Said's book on 'Orientalism'39might lead us to pose the question of Dawkins's political motives for exploring that part of the Greek-speaking world which still remained under the domination of an Oriental despo5 M. Triandaphyllidis, Neoe2r17vtxj yeapouartux. A: Iraootx4 eetaywy)4 (Athens 1938), 66-8. 36 N. Contossopoulos, 'La Grace d'inda et la Grace de ti', Glossologia2-3 (1983-4), 149-62. 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 thePhilological Society, 1925-30, 320-I. 38 'The Dialects of Modern Greek', 7. 39E. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, I978).

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tism, and in which many felt Britain should have some future stake, just as other British and French scholars had been studying the language, life, and culture of those peoples who had been or were likely to be incorporated into the great European empires; by contrast, the kingdom of Greece held out no such promise. Dawkins brought no innovations to the theoretical or practical study of dialects, and his work is decidedly pre-Saussurean. But his principal concern was the historical development of the Greek language, and the history of spoken Greek can be nothing other than the history of its dialects. He constructed the grammar and word-stock of Cappadocian Greek on the basis of his recordings on paper of a number of folk-tales; although (unlike Pernot in Chios) he lacked the benefit of sound-recording equipment, and was famous for having no ear for music, the accuracy of his transcriptions has hardly been faulted by subsequent researchers. He seemed to view a language as if it were the site of some great city that had been occupied by successive communities; much of its past was clearly visible on the surface, while other features were concealed beneath recent innovations. He was fond of using geological or archaeological metaphors in his philological writings. He illustrates his oft-quoted dictum from Grimm, 'Unsere Sprache ist auch unsere Geschichte', by pointing to the way in which a language records the cultural history of its speakers: 'in a fixed sample of language,' he writes, referring of course to a text recorded in writing, 'lies embedded much of the history of the people who spoke it'.40 Elsewhere, ci the successive names given to Mount Hymettus by the Athenians over the centuries, propos he talks of 'the strata of nomenclature'.41By digging down through the strata he was able to point to the alluvial deposits left by successive waves of civilization and successive tides of conquest. The dialects that interested him most were those that preserved, in their present form, features belonging to earlier stages of the common language. His folk-tale texts, then, constituted a corpus whose constituent parts he proceeded to dissect, analyse, and classify. Although he recorded his corpus from living informants, there was no suggestion that he should interact with them, eliciting specific linguistic information by asking them, for instance, to substitute words or phrases for others in a sentence, or testing sentences of his own invention to ascertain whether they were acceptable to the native speaker. He would often write that, e.g., 'the accusative plural of such nouns is not recorded', which means simply that such forms did not happen to appear in his corpus. The corpus, then, was practically a corpse on which he carried out an autopsy, a finite body of inert manner rather than a living, developing organism capable of generating new utterances. The development of linguistics has been marked by an ever increasing realization of language as a system, which has been accompanied by an increasing abstraction. Whereas Dawkins first presents his grammatical account of each group of dialects, and only then proceeds to some tentative conclusions, a linguist today would no doubt present a more tendentious account of dialectology in general and the particular dialects in question, using the data he had amassed in order to test and illustrate the model he had formulated rather than as material with any intrinsic interest. Dawkins's work represented a considerable advance on the work of previous Greek dialectologists, in that he was far more aware of the systematic nature of the dialects than they were. Nevertheless, without the advances in linguistics that have taken place since his day, he was unable to reach the
40 'The vocabulary of the mediaeval Cypriot Chronicle of Leontios Makhairas', 329. 41 'The Place-names of later Greece', 35.

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degree of systematization achieved by Brian Newton's formalization of generative rules in his book on the phonology of the Greek dialects.42 Nor did Dawkins contribute to what is today called geolinguistics (defined by Trudgill as 'sociolinguistic dialect geography'),43 with its emphasis on the synchronic uses of dialect and its examination of such phenomena as 'code-switching', i.e. switching from one dialect or language to another. What Dawkins had to do was to carry out the preliminary spadework, to record as many linguistic facts as possible without allowing himself the luxury of exploiting them in sophisticated ways. We may assess the importance of Dawkins's contribution to the study of the Asia Minor dialects by examining references to it in the work of more recent dialectologists. The renowned linguist N.P. Andriotis, in the introduction to his own study of the Phtrasa dialect based on sound recordings of songs as well as written material, wrote that 'Dawkins's book is the first and sadly the last study of the Cappadocian dialect', and goes on to praise the 'phonetic accuracy' of Dawkins's transcriptions;44throughout his study there are constant footnote references to Dawkins, none of them pointing to any errors. Later, however, Andriotis went further: in his prologue to the study of the Cappadocian dialect of Ax6 by Mavrokalyvidis and Kesisoglou he wrote: 'Systematic on the .research Cappadocian dialects would have been almost non-existent on the eve of the population exchange if good fortune had not turned the attention of the outstanding English Hellenist R. Dawkins to a special study of these dialects, which bore fruit in his famous and admirable book Modern Greekin Asia Minor'.45Dawkins's book, he continued, 'can be likened, without exaggeration, to a concentrating lens that transmuted into a veritable linguistic science the linguistic research into the Greek Orient, which had hitherto been chaotic, uncoordinated, and full of gaps and imperfections'.46With Dawkins's 'synthetic' study behind them, the team of linguists from the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens whose task it was to salvage what remained of the Cappadocian dialects decided to limit themselves to monographs on individual dialects. Nevertheless, I must record a note of dissent in the work on the dialect of Ulagach by Kesisoglou, who, having checked Dawkins's transcriptions of the relevant stories with native speakers, appended a list of inaccuracies; but these are, to my mind, of a minor character.47 I am not competent to assess Dawkins's contribution to the study of Greek folk tales, to the edition, translation, annotation, and codification of which he devoted most of his scholarly efforts during the last twenty-five years of his life, but Robert Georges called him 'one of the giants of folk-tale studies of this century'.48 His edition and translation of
42B. Newton, The Generative to Dialect: a Studyof Approach ModernGreek Phonology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Newton does not deal with the Asia Minor dialects, which he seems to see as belonging to a rather different system. 43 P. Trudgill, On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). 44 N.P. Andriotis, To y)waaunxd d6wLua rwv ~aPdawuv (Athens: Institut Frangais d'Athines, 1948), 9. 45 G. Mavrokalyvidis and I.I. Kesisoglou, To y~owaatxd6 16ia/ua rg A~0o (Athens: Institut Frangais d'Athanes,
1960), ix. 46 ibid., x. (Athens: Institut Frangais d'Athines,

addition to those already referred to, these monographs, all published in Athens by the Institut Frangais d'Athanes, are the following: D. Phosteris and I.I. Kesisoglou, Ae)t26yto rov Aga/3av( (196o), N.P. Andriotis, To ed[wua rov Aqlptutorr7ig Avxiag (1961), A.P. Costakis, Le Parlergrec d'Anakou (1964), and Th.P. Kostakis, To yawuuotxdtLwpUa Tr/ ~i.2lr/g (1968).
48 Folklore 76 (1965),

202-12.

Of the 121 publications

by

47 I.I. Kesisoglou, To yoaatux6 ed6iwuarov Ov)aydrg

i95i), 3 & 131-4. In

Dawkins - excluding book reviews - listed by M.A. Alexiadis, 'To bgyo oyo R.M. Dawkins: aiLktoyLyQpLtxil oypoovkil (Aerio KinvTov MtXgaatartuXovEIrov6tov 5 (1984-85), 361-91), 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.

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PETER MACKRIDGE

Machairas's Chronicle, published in two bulky volumes in I932 (his books tended to be on the massive side), can be seen as a half-way stage between his philological and his folk-tale also interests.49 Edited primarily for the linguistic material which it offered, the Chronicle caught Dawkins's imagination not for its literary interest, nor because of its value as a source for, and commentary on, medieval Cypriot history - historiography held little fascination for him - but because of the popular legends that Machairas related; Dawkins was already interested both in the legends themselves and in popular story-telling techniques. The most significant of his publications on folk tales are the following: Stories from theDodekanese Forty-Five (I950),5o which, as he wrote at the time, 'aims at being a kind of Greek Grimm',5' and in which he was able at last to bring to fruition his insular dialect researches of forty years previously in his illuminating remarks on the language of the stories; ModernGreekFolktales (I953),52 a collection of eighty-four 'type stories'53 in Folktales(published in 1955, the year of his death).54 At English translation; and More Greek Folk Stories and Talesof his death he left the completed typescript of a fourth collection, Greek intended for children and due to appear in 1956 under the imprint of Oxford Wonder, University Press but never published. In his published collections Dawkins constructed a typology of Greek folk-tale motifs according to the Aarne-Thompson model, thus removing them from a narrowly Greek context and integrating them into an internationally recognized system;55his presentation of the stories, with introductions and notes that draw upon a wealth of comparative material, constitutes the richest collection of Greek folk tales now available. Characteristically he maintained that Greek folk tales have less in common with western Europe than with Armenia, the Caucasus, Persia, and even India;56 though this may in part be a consequence of his tending to choose Asia Minor variants as being, in his judgement, the best. Earlier in this paper I quoted Dawkins's own comments on his work as Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford. He was among those considered for the Kora&sChair at King's College, London, in 1918, but asked that his candidature be ruled out.57 A more different personality and scholar from the man who was eventually appointed, Arnold Toynbee, could hardly be imagined, but the Korais Committee might have felt equally let down by Dawkins. No one, however, could have accused him of being pro-Turkish; indeed, he once wrote that from the Turks the Greeks 'had nothing to learn but what has been of harm to them'.58 Indeed, Dawkins was very much of the 'national character' school that saw the Greeks as a progressive force of enlightenment against the background of Oriental obscurantism. In his own comments about his teaching Dawkins characteristically made no mention of literature; indeed, his published works make hardly any reference to Greek written
theSweetLandof Leontios Makhairas, RecitalConcerning Entitled'Chronicle' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932). Cyprus, A similar philological and folkloric motivation lay behind his posthumous edition of Boustronios: The Chronicle of Boustronios 1456-1489(Melbourne: University of MelGeorge bourne Cyprus Expedition, I964). Editedand translated Stories from the Dodekanese. 50 Forty-Five from the mss. of jacob Zarraftis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). These tales were recorded by Zarraftis some time before 1912.
51 1950, 97.

52Modern Greek Folktales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, '953). 53op. cit., xxii. 5 M. Alexiadis, 'O Richard M. Dawkins xat 1 6o6Exavlotaxcl Xaoypacpca', Aw 14 (1985), 17. 56ModernGreek Folktales,v. 57R. Clogg, 'Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Korais Chair' (a special issue of Middle Eastern
Studies vol. 21, no. 4 (October 1985)), 28. 54 More Greek Folktales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).

58 'The place-names of later Greece', 45.

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R.M. DAWKINS AND MODERN GREEK DIALECTOLOGY

21 I

and such study as he made of this earlier literature is devoid literature after the Erotokritos, of any expression of literary judgement. One need not assume that he found Modern Greek literature to be lacking in aesthetic value, but rather that he did not feel that it was his task as a scholar to make pronouncements on matters of personal taste. There is one exception: in 1939 he wrote a paper on the poetry of C.P. Cavafy, containing a number of his own English translations, but characteristically it remained unpublished.59 In his philological articles published during the I930s, at a time when he seems to have acquired sufficient confidence to commit himself to certain generalizations and to write with a certain wit and urbanity, he several times criticized those who have arrogantly complained about 'barbarisms' in Byzantine and post-Byzantine literature. He adopted the sound policy of exempting from censure those deviations from Ancient Greek that are a part of the natural development of the language, reserving the term 'barbarism' for those instances where pretentious writers, in their attempt to archaize beyond their own capabilities, have produced pseudo-classical solecisms (one might call them today hypercorrect forms) that bear no relation either to the ancient or to the modern spoken language. He often emphasized that a thorough knowledge of Modern Greek is indispensible for the Byzantinist, who will otherwise be led into all sorts of misunderstandings and misjudgements of the written material. 'We must [. . .] clear our minds of the idea that language is of its nature fixed to a classical norm,' he wrote, 'and welcome the very opposite concept, that it is naturally in a state of perpetual change and growth'.6UEqually, Ancient Greek is a prerequisite for the proper study of the modern Greek language. In words that could as well have been uttered by George Thomson of Birmingham, Dawkins wrote in 1950: 'The genuine study of a language demands everywhere the historical method, and in no language is this so possible or so delightful as in Greek with its long and continuous development. The ideal learner of Modern Greek would be a man who has had some training in the classical language and by natural vigour of mind grasped that what he has learned is not Greek but a phase in the history of the language. To a man who has learned to regard growth and development as decadence and weakening, how is it possible to teach the natural fluidity of language?'6"' Behind these words there surely lies the bitter experience of the ridicule expressed by his classicist colleagues towards a subject they held in contempt, but also a belief that it is he rather than they who has come to a true understanding of language. There is no doubt that some of Dawkins's philological work is of a rather antiquarian nature: collections of facts without general conclusions being drawn. The ratio of research to publication varies widely: for instance, while a whole (though admittedly slim) pamphlet could be written on the present state of the Maniot dialect of Corsica on the basis of a single night spent at Cargese,62 a single throwaway sentence in 1939 about
59 This paper is to be found in the Dawkins Collection, Taylor Institution Library, Oxford (f.Arch.Z.Dawk.Io(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 T. Malanos, O notrlr4g K.1H. 54 (1934), I07-8. The Kaf6dcplg,in JournalofHellenicStudies 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 ModernGreek in Asia Minor in great detail: see his references in his unpublished review of H. Pernot, Grammaire dugrecmoderne (1917), now in K.P. Kavafis, IeIci (Athens: Phexis, 1963), 195-234. The editor of this volume, G.A. Papoutsakis, reproduces Dawkins's letter on pp. 22 1-2. 60 'Graeco-barbara', Transactions of the Philological Society, 1939, 5.
61 1950, 92.

62 'The Greek dialect of Cargese and its disappearance', Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrblicher 5 (1926), 371-9.

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2 12

PETER MACKRIDGE

hyperdorisms in certain manuscripts of Theocritus,63 conceals the experience of a long tour of Italian libraries undertaken thirty-five years previously with the aim of collating such manuscripts. But I share what would, I am sure, have been Dawkins's attitude to Caclamanos's judgment on him: that for the historical development of the Greek language no dialect is sufficiently dead to be of no interest to the linguist. I have already begun to touch on the lessons that neo-Hellenists can learn from Dawkins. One of these is that we must never neglect the past that lies behind the present and helps to explain it. Another is that modern Greek studies should not confine themselves to the borders of Greece; it is all too easy to take an excessively modern and narrowly Helladocentric view that blocks out the history and culture of the Orthodox Christian populations of Asia Minor and elsewhere. What changes have taken place in Modern Greek studies since Dawkins's retirement from his chair in 1939? The chief of these has undoubtedly been the establishment of Medieval and Modern Greek as a serious academic subject studied by undergraduates and graduates, and with it the greater professionalism of our teaching and research as well as the promotion of literature as the central object of our study, particularly the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth and of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which we tend to view within the context of the great European literary movements as well as that of the development of the local Greek culture. In addition Neohellenists are colonizing late Byzantine vernacular literature (which British Byzantinists have been reluctant to take seriously), and are bringing modern literary approaches to bear on it. Thus the skills of the archaeologist have been superseded by those of the literary critic. Dawkins's comparative folklore has given way to comparative literature; this transition suggests a scholarly attitude according to which Greece has passed from childhood to adulthood and is no longer on a different level of culture from that of the Western observer. But folklore has not been neglected, even though the focus has tended to shift from folk tales to folk songs. Two new branches of Modern Greek studies have been added to these, namely history and social anthropology, the former providing literary scholars with a more detailed political and economic background against which to read their texts, the latter enabling folklorists to examine their material within a wider context of attitudes and values, but also suggesting illuminating new ways of reading any Greek text. But not all changes have been for the better. The drop in interest in philological studies has coincided with the decline of classical Greek in schools. But even this fall is compensated for by the rise in structural and generative linguistics, which have between them enabled us to gain a far clearer understanding of the workings of the contemporary language. At the same time Modern Greece has become less exotic. We and our students are able to visit it frequently, and the general public is acquainted through tourism with a very different Greece from the one, seemingly just emerging from an Ottoman middle ages, which Dawkins knew so intimately and studied so fruitfully.
PETER MACKRIDGE

Addendum. The article on Cavafy (n 59) is to be published in Mok[upo - xov6vho[IEexrjIii s 2 (I1990)

63 'Graeco-barbara', 26.

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