Mango Languages

Travel Tuesday: My Trip to Oxford

When I was a student I thought that, like every decent future teacher of English, I should spend some time in the country where the language I was to teach was spoken. I chose Oxford University in England because I wanted to visit one of the oldest universities. I found a good school and I arranged an accommodation at a house that would allow me to practice my English on a 24-hour basis, seeing as I am Greek. Everything was planned; I would land in Heathrow, then I would take the train to Paddington, from Paddington to Oxford, and thence by taxi to my landlady’s house. My knowledge of the language was very good, or so I thought at the moment. We had done most of the works by Shakespeare, so my vocab was rich, right?

So there I was on the platform at Paddington, with Shakespeare’s books in my suitcase, very confident and happy that I was at a place where I could hear only English and my favorite rock songs around me all the time. Fearless, I saw a sign that the train to Oxford would depart in 5 min., I approached the guard thinking it was the perfect time to start practicing. I asked him if the train went directly to Oxford or if I had to change trains, and to my surprise, I didn’t understand a word of his response. Not even a little word that would give me some sort of clue. Oops! But I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I tried again. “Excuse me, could you repeat please?” In response I got the same rumble of words that still made no sense. Oh my.

I gave up the third time; I had to get on the train anyway. Not a very good start. I arrived at Oxford, exhausted, worried, and slightly disappointed. I went to the taxi stand and fortunately the taxi driver’s English was more comprehensible. Feeling relieved, I went to sit in the passenger’s seat only to realize that for some reason the wheel was on that side too. I gave a Hugh Grant, “Right!” and moved to the other side.

My landlady was an older lady who welcomed me with a “nice, hot cup o’ tea, dear.”  She told me that her husband had passed away but…”look here” she said, proudly holding a pic she had on the mantle. “Look who he is with!” Her husband was with another older lady with a lovely little hat – but who on earth was she? “Oh,” I said “He is with the…?” “Yes, right! With the Queen!” Phew! Well, at least I knew Queen Elizabeth, the one from Shakespeare’s time.

She showed me to my room, a lovely little space. She said that she would be hosting another student who had arrived before me and so he took the bigger room and the bigger bathroom. Besides, he was an Earl. Poor me, I would never get a big room. Conclusion: before you go to England, learn a few things about the royal family. Also, look into your family tree. If you are distantly related to royalty, you will get big rooms.

And before we said goodnight, she asked, “How would you like your breakfast, love?” How would I like my breakfast? It dawned on me that in England they have English breakfast which keeps you going till the evening. But what does it consist of? “I’ll have what Jan (the Earl) will have.” That proved to be a good idea since we had orange juice, eggs with sausages, milk with cereal, toasted bread with marmalade (not jam), and coffee. I was now ready for everything.

I had no more adventures, unfortunately. Once, I went with my friend to a pub for lunch and would still be sitting there to this day unless a guy with many tattoos told us that in pubs you need to order at the counter. You live and you learn.

I have only fond memories of this trip. I didn’t mind the blunders, at least in retrospect. My teacher taught us all the dialects, so after that I was prepared to talk to any train station guard. My landlady took me to the oldest pub in the area, something like the Jamaica Inn. I went to all the colleges, walked in the corridors where so many famous people walked too. I visited the libraries. I made friends with people from other countries. Also, I saw a Shakespearean play in a courtyard of one of the colleges. Of course it rained in the middle of the play, but blankets, umbrellas, and hot cider were provided (for free!) so we were able to continue watching it. I had a great experience in Oxford.

Will you be partaking in the English culture by watching the Royal Wedding this weekend?

Overcoming the Frustration of Language Learning

There comes a time when you are trying to learn a foreign language that you feel you are not making any progress. You still make mistakes; you do not understand what native speakers tell you; you try to speak in the foreign language and they answer in English because they understand you are a novice and do not want to embarrass you, etc. Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever felt that however hard you try there is still a lot to learn? Is there a point that you are utterly confused by the information that you have absorbed and do not know what is correct and what is wrong anymore? At that time you get frustrated and lose momentum; you get discouraged and you start thinking of giving up learning the language, which was maybe the dream of your life. Getting frustrated doesn’t help at all.

Language learning goes through stages or phases. At first you’re very happy and enthusiastic with your new free-time occupation. You are satisfied that you can greet, tell your name and talk a bit about yourself. And people around you start congratulating you on your progress. After that, you start working on more challenging stuff, a bit more grammar is involved too, lots of new words. Around that phase comes the frustration I’m talking about. Beyond the basics, you need to express some more complicated ideas but here your knowledge fails you. You know how to form good sentences; you have acquired a good amount of vocab; but sometimes when you try to construct a new sentence with what you know, it’s wrong because you are missing some new grammar rule or because “that’s not the way we speak.” How come? How many things do you still have to learn?  How many more uses do these Japanese particles have? For how long do you still have to strive?

What is the best to do at such moments? Here are some tips:

Re-define your goals: Was your goal to be proficient in a year? This can be possibly achieved if the language you are learning is related to your mother tongue or to another language you are good at or if you learn languages easily, but most of the times this may be far fetched. Language learning takes a lot of time and actually never ends because languages change. Always remember this, because we still learn new words even in our native tongue. I have a friend who teases me on a regular basis by sending me a new word every now and again. At first I thought, “That can’t be true.” But then I thought that it’s only natural.

Try to improve your pronunciation: Try to sound natural. Imitate what you hear and how words and sentences are pronounced. Conquer the difficult sounds. Talk to yourself using the difficult words. Don’t worry if your housemates start thinking you have gone nuts when they see you going from room to room trying to pronounce the Arabic qaf. No native speaker will think of speaking to you in English again!

Listen to a song,  watch a film, or read a book in the language you’re learning: I believe this will boost your morale.  Choose something relatively easy – don’t go straight to the corresponding Shakespeare – and you will see that you understand some things and you can tell more or less what is going on in a song, film, or book. You’ll see how much progress you’ve made. This will keep you motivated.

And of course, Persevere: Our mind needs time to arrange the new information. Once it does, you will experience a real breakthrough. Keep listening and learning; your mind gets all this information, but you do not realize it. When it is ready, you will be able to speak and say whatever you want.

What other tips worked for you when learning a foreign language?

Celebrate Greek Carnival

Halloween and dressing up occurs in October in the United States, but in Europe and South America (Rio) it is in February. So here are some things about how we celebrate it in Greece, including a bit of linguistics, folklore, and religion.

According to one view, the word “carnival” comes from early Italian carve + levare, which means “take away the meat” (carne). The Greek word for it is apokreea (stress on the last -a-), which again means “away from meat.” In both Orthodox and Catholic religions, the focus is on eating what meat is left in the house before Lent (the traditional period of fasting before Easter) starts.

Greek carnival is a combination of religious and pagan festivities. Following the Church, there are three weeks dedicated to gradually reducing the consumption of certain foods up to the beginning of Lent. In these three weeks people should also celebrate and have a good time before starting the fast, a period of repentance. Two are the high points of this season: the Thursday of the first week, which is dedicated to eating meat, is called tseeknopemptee: pemptee is the name of the day (Thursday or the fifth day of the week) and tseekna refers to the smell of charcoaled meat, what you smell at barbecues. On that Thursday night people go out to tavernas to celebrate and drink and have a good time; you can smell tseekna everywhere.

The last of the three weeks is dedicated to the consumption of dairy products and fish and the Monday just after it is called Clean Monday, something like Shrove Monday, which marks the beginning of Lent. On this Monday we should not eat meat or dairy products – we should be “clean” of all that.  Only shellfish is allowed, and people go out to the countryside and have picnics and fly kites since the weather is usually permitting .  During these weeks people dress up and play pranks.  Parades are held in all the cities. Dressing up is a pagan custom that has to do with scaring away the evil winter spirits before spring comes.

How all this is connected to the way people lived:

According to Professor N.S. Margaris, all these traditions are closely related to the way people lived. Sheep and goats usually breed in January. Because there was lots of snow on the ground,  shepherds could not take them out to the pastures and were forced to reduce their number: tsiknopemptee is a relic of this tradition. After that, spring comes and there is plenty of grass; eating meat is thus forbidden up to Easter so that sheep and goats can grow.

Another tidbit:

On two of the Saturdays during this period people honor the dead. In many places in Greece people cook pasta. Now, the food that is given to those who come to wake the dead is called makareea, which means “blessing.” According to one view, the word “macaroni,” a kind of pasta, derives from makareea, or makareea + (e)oni(a) [eon] = “eternal blessing.” And all this time you thought that pasta was Italian?

The Power of Language: Afterthought

In this post I would like to write about some thoughts I had while reading the previous post, The Power of Language. The article mentioned in the blog post “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” was not new to me; I had come across it when it was published, and here is my opinion.

I will start with the assumption that when we talk to other people, we want to be understood as clearly as possible and as fast as possible: we do not spend our time in lengthy exchanges of vague propositions, at least this is what I observe when I see two people talking. Even when our propositions are vague, this is sometimes done on purpose because we want to imply certain things, which again we believe that our interlocutor will “get.” (I have already discussed that in another post.) So for example, in the first article, I read that the Chinese can understand the concept of time but “they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.” How true is this? Let’s pretend for a moment that there are no tenses in English and the same form of the verb “talk” is used for “I’m talking,” “I talk,” “I will talk,” and so on. If I want to express the concept that “Tomorrow I will talk to my boss”; instead I will say, “I talk to my boss” since there is only this one form.  However, because I want you to understand what I mean, I do not want you to be confused and wonder, “Will she talk to her boss? Or Has she talked to her boss? Or what?” I need to make sure that you understand that “I will talk to my boss.” I do not want to spend all my time trying to convey the meaning of futurity, as this is not what happens in real life.

Even though the  Chinese do not have different tense forms for verbs, they understand each other immediately and do not ask for clarifications every time the other person says something. How is this done? If I do not use verbal tense, I use some other means, like adverbs (e.g. “tomorrow”), aspectual particles, and so on, and I say, “I talk to my boss tomorrow.”  This is what the Chinese do.  They think about it and make sure that the time reference is clearly conveyed via a linguistic device other than verb tense.  So, they are still obliged to think about timing, perhaps not in the sense of verbal tense but of an adverb; they are obliged to think of the means they will use to make timing clear. Of course, this “thinking” is done in no time, but that is another story!

Let me now tackle gender. When I first read the article, I was intrigued and decided to do an experiment myself. I asked my guinea pigs, my husband, and my daughter, to complete a questionnaire. I wrote down a list of randomly selected nouns that referred to objects that were masculine, feminine, and neuter.  (As a side note, in Greek, grammatical gender is arbitrary–for example the fork is neuter and the chair is feminine, and there is no reason why this is so).  Then I asked them to assign human voices to them, just like the experiment in the article. Some results were the same, e.g. the “bulb” (we have two words for it, one masculine and one feminine) was assigned a child’s voice by both; the “car” (neuter gender) was assigned a man’s voice; “Harley” (feminine gender) was assigned a man’s voice; and “camera” (feminine gender) was assigned a man’s voice.

There were some differences, like the “table” (neuter gender) was assigned a man’s voice by my daughter and a woman’s voice by my husband; the sofa (masculine gender) was assigned a man’s voice by my daughter and a woman’s voice by my husband. More relevant to the experiment, few were the cases in which the gender coincided with the assigned voice (masculine gender – male voice).  My conclusion was that in general other things interfered with the decision of voice assignment: machines (Harley and camera) were assigned a man’s voice because machines are considered by our society to be a masculine hobbies; the bulb is small so it was assigned a child’s voice, and so forth.  Our general perceptions of the world play an important role here.

In Linguistics we distinguish between competence (what we subconsciously know about language) and performance (what we actually utter) and we work on competence in order to understand how language works. Most of what the article described was about performance.

All this is not to deny that language and culture are intertwined; people need to express their everyday needs, desires and what have you, in a precise way so as to avoid misunderstandings as much as possible.

What are your thoughts about this topic? About verb tense? Gender? Culture?

Noam Chomsky- His Contribution to Linguistics

What Do You Mean?

In this post I would like to explore two subcategories of Linguistics: Semantics and Pragmatics. Semantics studies the meaning of words and sentences. The notion of meaning, however, has many facets. For example,  the words “unmarried man” and “bachelor” have the same meaning; the sentence, “The toothbrush has five legs” is meaningful only in a Lewis Carroll-like story; the sentence, “I saw her work” is ambiguous (“I saw her while she was working” or “I saw something she made”). The meaning of the two phrases in the sentence, “John killed Mary and Mary didn’t die” contradict each other.

A sentence can be well-structured but nevertheless meaningless. Let’s illustrate with the last example: “John killed Mary” is a well-structured sentence with a verb (killed), the subject  (John), and an object, the receiver of John’s action (Mary).  This is  meaningful: a male named John took the life of a female named Mary.  The same goes for the sentence, “Mary didn’t die.”  Their combination is a well-structured sentence with verbs, subjects, and objects in the correct order, but it is meaningless; this is due to the inherent meaning of the verb “kill,” which entails that the killed person has died for good and is 100% dead.  Semantics then is about the conditions a sentence has to meet in order to be meaningful.

Pragmatics on the other hand has to do with how we use meaningful, or sometimes even meaningless, sentences in order to communicate. And to communicate successfully, to understand and be understood, another factor plays the most important role: context, or everything that has to do with the circumstances in which a sentence is uttered.  For example, the sentence, “Can you open the window?”, a well-structured and meaningful sentence, can be interpreted as a question in which we ask the listener if he has the ability to open the window, or as a request for the listener to open the window.  How does the listener reach the correct interpretation? In our example, how does he understand if it is meant to be a question or a request?

According to Pragmatic theories which are based on Paul Grice (e.g. Relevance), we need to guess the speaker’s intentions, i.e., the reason why he is saying something. We put the speaker’s intentions in the right context, and we interpret the utterance. Let’s imagine we are in a stuffy room.  The listener interprets the sentence as a request, given the stuffiness of the air and guessing that the intention of the speaker is to ask him to do something.  Now imagine two burglars outside the house they want to break into. The listener interprets it as an ability question given the fact that they are outside and want to get into the house one way or another. Many times we do not make the right guess and we misinterpret the speaker’s intention, which leads to lack of communication.

We say one thing, but is that what we REALLY mean?

Bring Your Appetite. We're Going to Greece!

The Greek Flag made out of Olives and Feta Cheese

All over Greece you will see and smell fruit-bearing trees: olive trees, dating from ancient times, sweet-smelling orange and lemon trees, juicy peaches, apricot, apple, pear and fig trees, and vines loaded with bunches of grapes. The fields are full of all sorts of vegetables: red, sweet tomatoes; fresh beans and peas; cucumbers; artichokes; aubergines; onions; and fruits like melon and red, delicious watermelon, both a real treat in the heat of the summer.

In the sea hundreds of fish send out silver reflections. Swarms of bees in beehives produce the famous Greek honey. There are forests of walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, oaks, and pines. The pines give us a special ingredient for Greek wine, called retsina, and the pine kernels are also used in several dishes.

Most of the Greek foods are prepared with olive oil. It is the so-called Mediterranean ingredient, famous for being so good for the health. In Greece a main dish can consist of vegetables only cooked so as to offer a wholesome meal. But generally we are fond of meat, and this comes to its apogee during Easter, the great outdoor feast, where whole lambs are specially prepared on the spit, and all the neighbors celebrate together dancing, eating and drinking – a feast strictly not for vegetarians. Even the entrails of the animals are cooked, making the famous kokoretsi. Lambs, goats, and mainly cows give us milk from which we make the famous Greek cheese called feta, a white kind of cheese. Also yogurt, which mixed with crushed garlic, makes a famous dip called tzatziki. Feta cheese, tzatziki dip, aubergine dip, and a dip from fish roe, called taramas, olives and small cheese pies are the dishes served with ouzo, a transparent aperitif, which one could drink as is–but that is not recommended, remember what happened in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

In the northwest part of Greece they make delicious, crunchy pies with filo pastry or dough, with every imaginable ingredient, savory or sweet: pies with spinach, or other herbs, or a mixture of them, with cheese, tomatoes, aubergines, leak, meat, chicken, and also sweet pies, with rice and currants, or pumpkins and custard-filled pies. The list goes on and on…

Greek sweets are very… sweet.  Honey and walnuts are mostly used to make the traditional Greek sweets. These together with filo pastry make baklava, and with dough they make the traditional Christmas sweets, melomakarona.  Another kind of Greek confectionery is the preserves with fruits such as figs, grapes, apricots, sour cherries, plums, quinces, and even roses (the flower!), tomato, the skin of watermelon, the skin of orange and citrus, and whole walnut with its skin, which are cooked in water and sugar and then preserved in jars for the winter. The mild winter cold is fought against with soups made from beans and lentils. Several spices are added to improve the taste of dishes, all used moderately so as not to cover the taste of the meat or any other main ingredient: oregano, mint, garlic, dill, parsley, bay leaves, basil, thyme, cinnamon, clove, rosemary, saffron.  All the dishes are accompanied with wines, sometimes home-made, as well as with retsina.  At the end of the meal you can have coffee, Greek coffee, or frappe. Greek coffee is prepared on low heat until it froths – be careful, you do not have to drink the dregs. Frappe is instant coffee, served especially in the summer, for which you put coffee, sugar, and cold water in a shaker and then add milk and ice cubes. Enjoy it with a straw while watching people passing by.

There are many kinds of eating places in Greece, like restaurants; taverns – for a more informal meal – grill houses; fish taverns; small places where you can have ouzo and starters only; small, usually underground taverns where you can hear live music; but also kebab places, and cafes. There are also places where you can have light meals, usually to go, like pies or sandwiches (two pieces of bread filled with whatever you like), and also fast-food.  The popular Greek fast food chain is called Goodies.

In conclusion, when dealing with Greece and the Greek culture, one should savor the flavor.

Language or Dialect: The War of Similarities

According to ethnologue.org, there are 6,909 languages in the world, from Mandarin Chinese, with 870 million speakers, to moribund languages with one or two aged speakers.  What counts as a language though?  Let’s see some examples:

Let’s say that “language” is the standard language of a country.  This would mean that Romani, the language of the gypsies, that has more or less 1.5 million speakers, is not a language.  Neither is Kurdish, with 16 to 35 million speakers.  Let’s also take a look at the Balkan languages: in the former Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian was one of the standard languages, as Serbian and Croatian differ from each other as much as American English differs from British English.  In the same area today we find Serbian and Croatian–two languages.  What happened?  We realize that once new countries were established, former dialects became standard languages.  Hence, “language” cannot mean “standard language,” since what qualifies as a dialect or as standard language depends on geographical and political changes and factors, and not just on the grammar or the vocabulary of the dialect.

Another example like the one of Yugoslavia is Danish and Norwegian.  Both languages are standard languages but they are almost identical regarding grammar and vocabulary.  And so a Dane and a Norwegian can talk to each other, each speaking their own language, and be mutually understood.  The reason is that Norway was under Danish occupation for centuries and at that time Norwegian was just a dialect of Danish.

The opposite situation is happening in China: there are many dialects in China and those with the most speakers are Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese.  However, these two dialects have deep differences in grammar and in vocabulary.  The differences are like those we have between Romance languages, like Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, etc., which are called “languages.”  So again, grammatical and lexical differences do not constitute the characteristics that would differentiate a dialect from a language.  Talking about the Romance languages, it is obvious that there are many common elements in grammar and vocabulary, but based on these attributes, couldn’t one say that they are dialects of Latin?

There are many, many examples like these: think about the Arabic dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible, or Venetian, spoken in Venice, which is cognate with Italian but quite distinct from the standard language.  Or Sicilian…

We see then that there are languages that could be dialects of other languages and dialects that could be languages.  So, what is the difference between a dialect and a language after all?

The answer can be what the Yiddish linguist Max Weireich said, “Language is a dialect with an army and navy” or simply “… a dialect supported by influential people.”  When a community wants to become independent from another community, as it happened in Denmark and Norway, they make their dialect a language.  When they do not want to become independent and their dialect has some sort of similarity with the standard language, then they say that they speak a dialect of the standard.

Can you think of a good example of what is a language or dialect?  Please share by writing a comment.

The Sounds of Silence

One of the most famous and moving stories is that of Helen Keller, a deaf-blind woman who managed to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree despite her adversities. The oft-quoted part of her story is when she managed to make the connection between the words her teacher, Ann Sullivan, was making in Helen’s palm and the objects they represented; Helen came to understand one day that every object has a name, and this was the beginning of everything.

Ann Sullivan used fingerspelling –spelling words with the fingers– and “spelled” the letters of each word in Helen’s palm in the hope that Helen would make this connection. Fingerspelling though is only a tool in the languages of the deaf, the so-called sign languages. There is a misconception that sign languages are just an imitation of oral languages, just a compilation of gestures, and that the deaf represent the letters of the alphabet with the fingers and “speak.”  However, this is far from the truth. Sign languages are not another way to represent oral languages, and what’s more, they have nothing to do with the corresponding oral languages that are spoken in a place.

For example, although American and British English speakers share the same language, American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) are different and mutually unintelligible. Sign languages are natural languages, like English and Spanish, for example, with the only difference that whereas oral languages use the sound-hearing mode, that is we pronounce them through the vocal tract and we hear them, sign languages use visual-place mode, that is we “pronounce” them by using the fingers, face and body, and we see them. One very interesting event is the birth of the Nicaraguan Sign Language: when schools for the deaf were created in the country, the deaf children, who were isolated from each other up to then, were taught lip reading. However, when they met in the playground, the children invented their own sign system (LSN).

This brings us to a characteristic of all sign languages, which makes them similar to their oral counterparts:  they follow the same phases of first language acquisition, i.e.,  the various structures of language are acquired at the same age in both hearing and deaf children, and there is a critical age between 0 and 4/5 years for both. For example, at the same age when hearing children mistakenly use “you” to refer to themselves, the deaf children point to the other person (the sign for “you”) to refer to themselves.  Nicaraguan deaf children were past the critical age and so they developed some sort of a pidgin which slowly evolved into a language (ISN).

Sign languages have their own grammars, which are far from simple.  ASL’s grammar, for example, is reminiscent of Navajo. The various grammar structures are shown with a combination of hand shapes, movements of the palm, hands and body, facial expressions, and body postures. To give an example, in ASL, to show the part of a sentence that is the subject, as in “John I really like” where we want to stress that it is John, and not Mary, that I really like, one raises the eyebrows and lifts the chin together with the sign for John. To understand what a signer signs, one has to literally have in view everything and not only the sign.

I will end this post on a personal note. Sign languages have been persecuted and forbidden as usually happens with languages of minorities. In the book by N. E. Groce, “Everybody here spoke sign language” we read that in a small town in Martha’s Vineyard, an island outside Cape Cod, for about three centuries the hearing inhabitants also knew the local sign language because the deaf population of the island was numerous and rich. In 1960, William Stokoe argued that sign languages are natural languages. From then onward much research has been done in Linguistics which has revealed many interesting things about the structure of sign languages and how similar in structure they are to oral languages. Moreover, many discoveries have been made regarding the nature of human language which would never have been made if we just studied oral languages. All this as well as the work of many psychologists and educators has helped give sign languages and signers the place they deserve in society.

Do you have a story that relates oral languages to sign language? Please share!

Greek Dancing

Dancing is a favorite form of entertainment in Greece.  Apart from the western dances, there are two traditional kinds of dance in Greece: the folk and the popular. The first group comprises the old traditional dances.  They are numerous, around 1000, and many people want to learn how to dance them in Greece as well as abroad.  Every part of Greece, every village, has its own dances and also its traditional costume.  There are many differences in the rhythm of the dances: those of the islands are more “happy” whereas those of the northwestern part are very slow and heavy.  They are usually performed during celebrations, such as Easter and in weddings.

The second kind of traditional dances are the popular called the zeimbekiko, the syrtaki, the hassapiko and the hassaposerviko.  Now, syrtaki is the dance of the movie Zorba the Greek, specially made for it and danced by Antony Queen.  Hence, it is also known as the Zorba dance.  The basis of syrtaki were hassapiko and hassaposerviko, which is the fast part of syrtaki.  Hassapiko is a group dance: dancers line up the one next to the other, each holding the other’s shoulder, and they have to do set steps.  Finally, zeimbekiko belongs to the group of songs and dances called Rembetika.  It is a solo dance performed by men, but recently  women have also started dancing it.  The songs are about love and heartbreak, so the dancer acts out someone who has tried to drown his sorrows in drink and then gets up to express his feelings in dance.  It is a slow dance requiring grace, balance, rhythm and creativity.  Spectators usually form a circle around the dancer in a kneeling position, they clap their hands and encourage him by shouting “opa!”  They may also throw petals or money at his feet and, most commonly, they may break plates.

To end this short account of Greek dances, a few words about Rembetika.  The rembetiko song (plural rembetika) belongs to a genre of music that was created in Greece after the destruction of Smyrna, Turkey, and the killings and expulsion of the Greek population there.  These people came to Greece which could not support them and they were forced to do all kinds of jobs, legal and illegal, in order to survive.  Their consolation was their music, which could be compared to the Blues.  The main instrument was bouzouki, the famous Greek instrument, and the main themes were taken from their life: misery, unemployment, hardship, and of course love.  This music has obviously influenced modern Greek music.