Από την ιστορία της τσακωνικής διαλέκτου: μια νέα άγνωστη πηγή

Abstract

This paper aims to present for the first time to the academic community a new, hitherto unknown and unpublished early source for the Tsakonian dialect. It is the travel diary, written in French, of a Swedish archaeologist, Johan David Åkerblad (1763-1819), who visited the Peloponnese in the 1790s in search of ancient Greek inscriptions. During his brief stay in Hydra, he encountered Tsakonians settled in the island. He recorded ca. 50 words and phrases in Tsakonian, which provide valuable evidence for the dating of basic innovative phonological and morphological phenomena of the dialect, as well as its internal dialectal diversification. Åkerblad’s material is different from that recorded by his contemporary Villoison (1788), and from the until now considered third earliest source, W.M. Leake (1814). The diary additionally provides the earliest, until now, recorded words of Arvanitika, from the area of Attica-Boeotia.