Kostas Kazazis, 1934.2002

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obituary

Kostas Kazazis, 1934–2002

Costas Canakis University of the Aegean

For life goes on among the loyal… Paul Monette

Writing in memory of Kostas Kazazis is a tough deal for me for two reasons, other than sheer sadness and grief. To begin with, I never imagined I would be writing in his memory — as it is hard to imagine writing an obituary for someone I perceive as larger than life; a man whose voice and laughter still reverberate in my ears. On the other hand, Kostas’s peculiar sense of balance and fairness would, admittedly, require that I be ‘objective’ — and I am afraid it would take a better person than me to do that, for this is a personal loss. Kostas Kazazis, who died suddenly at the age of 68 on December 23, 2002 in his home in Hyde Park, was born in Athens on July 15, 1934. After high school he left Greece to study political science at the University of Lausanne, in francophone Switzerland. He came to the United States in 1959 and pursued graduate studies in political science at the University of Kansas, where he earned an M.A. with a thesis entitled An inquiry into the problem of American recognition of the Soviet government. It was at this juncture that he switched to linguistics: he studied at Indiana University with F.W. Householder, Jr. and received a Ph.D. in 1965 with a dissertation entitled Some Balkan constructions corresponding to the Western European infinitive. He taught at Indiana University and the University of Illinois before joining the faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, which remained his professional home for 35 years, until his retirement in 2000. Although he started out his higher education as a political scientist, Kostas was a linguist at heart as both the man and the work testify. However, his thinking in linguistics manifested a political being. He was a leading figure in Greek and Balkan linguistics with special emphasis on the socio-political dimension of language (though note as well his much-cited 1976 article with Joseph Pentheroudakis). Sociolinguistic issues, as exemplified by Modern Greek

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diglossia and contact phenomena in the Balkan languages, were his lifelong concern and at the core of his work. On the other hand, he was a regular polyglot: having started out life with Greek and French from a very early age and then English as an adolescent, he mastered many (if not most) European languages and spoke them with astonishing fluency and an ear for sociolectal detail which was so much like him, the pignolo (Italian for “pedant” or “pedan- tic”) he admitted to be. His latest linguistic escapades included Japanese, which came after Estonian as an addition to his non-Indo-European repertoire, a repertoire already featuring some Finnish. The more I got to know Kostas the more I realized that learning languages was unavoidable for him: more than an occupational hazard, a professional quirk, or an edifying pastime, it was the natural consequence of his boyish curiosity and the avid interest he took in people — in peoples and cultures — indeed, of the urgent need he felt to communicate and crack jokes. In a way, this side of him indirectly dictated the brand of linguistics he engaged in as well. I met Kostas in 1990 as a first-year graduate student in linguistics at the University of Chicago. His affability and his notorious, irreverent sense of humor were the first things I noticed. During my five-year stint at Chicago I had the opportunity to work closely with him and to appreciate him as an inspired teacher and as a loyal friend; a friend I cherished and valued deeply over the years. I took several courses with him: Modern Greek Diglossia in Literary Prose, the Diglossia Seminar, and Albanian I–III, and they were some of the liveliest classes I ever attended. He not only loved to teach but also knew how to have an audience in stitches with his jokes. After I graduated, I used to tell him that I have seldom met anyone so demanding, especially regarding the Albanian language class. My one other fellow student and I stood in total disbelief at the sheer expectation of fluency — down to the phonetics of the language, which we practiced through his home-made tapes (his undisputed trademark). Yet there was a peculiar balance there: he took a lot of mileage out of his students but, I daresay, it worked the other way around too; for one hardly had to lift a finger to get a lot of mileage out of Kostas. I was blessed with memorable teachers as far back as I can remember, yet I feel especially privileged to have had Kostas as one of the supervisors in my doctoral committee. To begin with, at a turning point in my course of studies, he (unwittingly?) provided me with a dissertation topic and persuaded me that I could ‘deliver’. As a supervisor, he was no less demanding and (alas!) pro- duced recalcitrant data, posing a new tough question, about every other day. Yet he was also encouraging, appreciative of hard work, unfailingly prompt with

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:13:37AM via free access Kostas Kazazis, 1934–2002 133 perusing students’ written work, and just about the keenest editor on campus. Thus, among the many things I owe him is also an understanding of the importance of punctuation. For Kostas, contemporary linguistic theory was a perspective through which to see language rather than the only perspective. Thus, he took an interest in the history and the culture of the linguistic community whose language he happened to be studying as well as in relevant anthropological and philological work. This made him a rare specimen of a linguist in a time of strict compart- mentalization of areas of knowledge, while at the same time enhancing his understanding of linguistic variation, a prominent interest throughout his career. Kostas’s earliest work known to me is the co-authored Reference Grammar of Literary Dhimotiki (Householder, Koutsoudas & Kazazis 1964), an oft-cited reference work and, in one sense, a landmark in Greek linguistics in that it appeared thirteen years before the abolition of katharevousa and the adoption of demotic Greek as the official language. In it, the interested reader will find a grammatical description of educated Modern Greek. Kostas’s dissertation on Balkan infinitival constructions (1965) was a study in the generative tradition which aimed at showing how some Balkan constructions correspond to the infinitive in West European languages. At the same time, it was also a study in language contact phenomena, as it showed that some languages possess more than one way of forming such constructions under influence from neighboring, although genetically unrelated, languages. To this effect, Kostas deals with languages belonging to several distinct language families. His interest in Balkan linguistics and the Balkans as a socio-political and economic area also informed later work, such as Kazazis (1972, 1994, and 1999) in which issues of power and symbolic linguistic capital play a central role. In Kazazis (1972) he focuses on Turkish loans in the Balkans and examines the reasons that have led to the association of Turkish, the language of the erstwhile powerful neighbor and conqueror, with pejorative meanings in this area of the world. He thus offers insights into the relation of language attitudes and aspects of semantic shift such as pejoration. Kostas is perhaps better known among his colleagues, certainly to his fellow linguists in Greece, for his lasting contribution to the study of the so-called Greek language question, i.e. Modern Greek diglossia. In a series of articles over a period of twenty-five years (as Kazazis 1968, 1976a, 1982, 1992, and 1993) he traced the interplay of katharevousa (the High diglossic mode) and dhimotiki (the Low mode) focusing on several of its many aspects. His Sunday Greek (1968), anthologized in The Best of CLS volume published in 1988, deals with

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stylistic infelicities and outright mistakes in the speech of a young male caused by normative pressure from above: deliberate linguistic decisions and slips of the tongue related to an attempt to impress the interlocutor that can be traced back to linguistic insecurity, itself an aspect of social insecurity. Some twenty- five years later, he re-visited Sunday Greek (Kazazis 1992) realizing that not only is there normative pressure from above in the Greek speech community, but there is also normative pressure from below, “i.e. from an ideal, ‘pure’ version of the Low diglossic mode (demotic)” (ibid., 57). He concedes that, although this is not an altogether new development, it is on the increase and has been encouraged in schools and by the mass media after the official death of katharevousa. I take these two works to be the opening and closing points, respectively, in the cycle of Kostas’s preoccupation with Greek diglossia, a preoccupation which was certainly not co-extensive with the state-proclaimed ‘abolition’ of diglossia in 1976. However, in between these points there are two other works I would like to mention. Kazazis (1976a), taking as a point of departure Ferguson’s observation that in diglossic speech communities literature is typically written in the High mode, presents Greek as an unusual case, noting that most prose and virtually all poetry is written in the Low mode instead. However, Kostas argues that the very writers whose work he refers to would be liable to use High- er forms in their everyday conversations than those prominently figuring in their literary production. Last, Kostas’s personal involvement in the diglossic predicament as a speaker of Greek found its expression in Kazazis (1982). Hilarious as it is bittersweet, the Partial Autobiography of a Schizoglossic Linguist is pretty much what its title says: a brief reflective account of the constant insecurity a ‘diglossic’ speaker is subject to, often even before uttering a word, and of the constant weighing of parameters that goes on before putting two words together, especially for educated or ‘sophisticated’ speakers. I saw Kostas for what was meant to be the last time in October 2002. We had a good laugh, as usual, and talked, inter alia, about some of his favorite things: he loved to read, had a passion for swimming, and, yes, a craving for sweets and the occasional cup of well-prepared Turkish coffee. Kostas Kazazis is survived by his wife Christina von Nolcken, his daughters Marina and Silvia, his first wife Maria Jarlsdottir Enckell, five grandchildren, and a world-wide following of friends who loved him dearly and already miss him sorely. [Costas Canakis, University of the Aegean.]

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References (selected works of Kostas Kazazis)

1964. (with F.W. Householder, Jr. & Andreas Koutsoudas) Reference Gram- mar of Literary Dhimotiki. The Hague: Mouton. 1965. Some Balkan constructions corresponding to the Western European infinitive. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University. 1968. “Sunday Greek”. Papers from the Fourth Regional Meeting: Chicago Linguistic Society, 130–140. Chicago: University of Chicago. [Reprinted in The Best of CLS, 1988.] 1972. “The Status of Turkisms in the Present-day Balkan Languages”. Aspects of the Balkans: Continuity and Change ed. by Henrik Birnbaum & Speros Vryonis, Jr., 87–116. The Hague & Paris: Mouton. 1976a. “A Superficially Unusual Feature of Greek Diglossia”. Papers from the Twelfth Regional Meeting: Chicago Linguistic Society, 369–375. Chicago: University of Chicago. 1976b. (with Joseph Pentheroudakis) “Reduplication of Indefinite Direct Objects in Albanian and Modern Greek”. Language 52:2.398–403. 1982. “Partial Linguistic Autobiography of a Schizoglossic Linguist”. Glosso- logia 1.109–117. 1992. “Sunday Greek Revisited”. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 10:1.57–69. 1993. “Dismantling Greek Diglossia”. Language Contact – Language Conflict (Balkan Studies, vol. 1) ed. by Eran Fraenkel & Christina Kramer, 7–26. New York: Peter Lang. 1994. “How Some Arvanites View Greece’s New Albanians”. Indiana Slavic Studies 7.121–126. 1999. “Some Discordant Greek Voices on the ‘Macedonian Question’”. Indiana Slavic Studies 10.

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