zompist bboard

How was medieval Greek romanized by their contemporaries? Specifically, in the Latin Empire and its fiefdoms? Did they continue to impose the Roman system, transcribe in an ad hoc manner, or had another standard based on contemporary Greek pronunciation?

Greek was not used in an official capacity. The rulers used Latin and Old French..

mèþru wrote:Greek was not used in an official capacity. The rulers used Latin and Old French..

Of course, so they would have to romanize the names of the towns and people they rule, right?

Romanizations of Greek cities already existed from when Romans ruled, as well as probably some versions of those romanizations that went through sound changes/borrowings from languages of various traders. These were the ones probably used. (Like how English speakers use Moscow rather than Moskva)

M Mira wrote:How was medieval Greek romanized by their contemporaries? Specifically, in the Latin Empire and its fiefdoms? Did they continue to impose the Roman system, transcribe in an ad hoc manner, or had another standard based on contemporary Greek pronunciation?

A quick perusal of some three online catalogues returned no relevant results... I haven't looked at medieval manuscripts this extensively myself to be able to answer your question, but if you want to carry the research yourself, if I were you I'd probably look at manuscripts of Isidore's Etymologiae, since they contain a good number of Greek words if you know where to look, and they're common throughout the latter part of the Early Middle Ages and throughout the High and Late Middle Ages.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the first manuscript of the Etymologiae that came up on Google, some German volume from 1136, and looking at the Greek words of the first liber I found: ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρετῆς apo tês aretês transcribed as one word "apotesaretes" (not bad!), but what was ἱερὰς πανδήμους hieras pandêmous appears as yepac iaNemoc, which is an attempt of rendering the Greek in Greek letters but failing in the transmission... Then ἀπὸ τοῦ θανάτου apo tou thanatou appears as apotuthanaton, with an u based on pronunciation in τοῦ tu, but the final u was miscopied as n. I suppose this gives you an idea of what you'd be dealing with (i.e. different results from different fortunes in the transmission of Greek romanizations; the vast majority of these people did not know Greek after all, so you can't quite expect any consistent system...).