Dear Editor
Dear Editor It's All Greek What an utter jumble of misinformation your Athens correspondent, Cokie Roberts, transmitted concerning the new language policy of Prime Minister Constantine Karaman-lis...
...Ithaca, N.Y...
...All of this is simply an extremely esoteric (to use a good Greek word) way of saying the politics plays a part in the language and that part is ongoing and emotional...
...But they have long learned to take these variations in their stride...
...The Communist party of the Interior spells levteria with an upsilon and the Communist party of the Exterior with a phi...
...Here I can deal only with the grosser errors...
...I urge Roberts to rush down to Eleftherudakis and purchase J. T. Pring, The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Greek, Oxford, 1965...
...My article simply reported on language as it functions in Greece at present and was not intended as a linguistic dissertation...
...But in the case of the Demotic forms Messing missed the point...
...urban middle-class society favors Kathomilumeni...
...As to the pronunciation of ancient Greek, that too can become a hotly disputed issue in some circles here, W. Sidney Allen notwithstanding...
...By noting some of the several language forms existing between Katharevusa and Demotic he stresses the confusion in the language today, and by delineating additional historical examples of curriculum changes he demonstrates the political nature of the "language problem...
...However, in terms of specifics, Professor Messing's objections indicate his absence from the current turmoil surrounding the language reforms...
...In Demotic it may be lefterla (same accent but loss of unstressed initial vowel and shift of fth to ft) or lefteria (accent on final...
...What the last military dictatorship did was to abolish the teaching of Demotic in the first few grades of elementary school...
...It is Karamanlis' removal of ancient Greek from the regular secondary curriculum that is upsetting some upper-class Athenians...
...It would take an article several times as long as the original one to correct everything she got wrong and put the rest into proper perspective...
...At one extreme is the Katharevusa (sc...
...Finally, who says there are no Demotic dictionaries...
...Dear Editor It's All Greek What an utter jumble of misinformation your Athens correspondent, Cokie Roberts, transmitted concerning the new language policy of Prime Minister Constantine Karaman-lis ("It's All Greek," NL May 10...
...Demotic is now to be reintroduced in the school and its use extended there...
...I sympathize with Cokie Roberts, who is no doubt innocently passing along what Greek acquaintances volunteered...
...Modern Greek dialects differ in varying degrees from the standard language, but Pontic, despite its fascinating archaisms, is by no means "closely allied to ancient Greek...
...Usage wavers: E.g., the strict Katharevusa survives mainly in official publications of the Greek government or of the Greek Orthodox Church...
...At this late date, it is not a spoken or written language, and no one now seriously proposes to make it such...
...That was the point in the first place...
...Gordon M. Messing Professor of Classics and Linguistics Cornell University Cokie Roberts replies: Gordon Messing's letter has admirably underlined my point—that many forms of modern Greek currently coexist and create a continuing political issue...
...In Greek schools, for good pedagogical reasons, ancient Greek is pronounced exactly like modern...
...Somewhere in between, as Andre Mirambel pointed out some 15 years ago, is a modified Katharevusa (so-called Mikti "mixed"), as well as a modified Demotic called Kathomi-lumeni...
...By the bye, still another variant, eleftheria (as in Katharevusa but accent on final) is known to all Greeks since it occurs in their national anthem...
...Contrary to Roberts the ancient pronunciation can be reconstructed with reasonable certainty (see W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca, A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek, Cambridge, 1968...
...At the other extreme is Demotic...
...glossa), meaning not the "clean" but the "purifying" language, now considerably changed from its 19th-century prototype...
...Freedom" is eleftheria (accent on next-to-last syllabic) in Katharevusa...
...The historical background for what Greeks call simply the "language problem" and what modern linguists call diglossia is infinitely more complex than Roberts suggests (for a lucid summary, see Peter Bien, Kazantzakis and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature, Princeton, 1972...
...The printer can be blamed for the placement of the accent on the Katharevusa form of eleftheria...
...this concession to Demotic had been authorized since 1917, although earlier Right-wing governments had abolished it in 1921-23 and again in 1935-6...
...The teaching of ancient Greek has always been stressed in Greek education, especially in secondary schools, since the Greeks are justly proud of their splendid literary heritage...
...scientific and technical works mostly still use the Mikti idiom...
...I never implied that ancient Greek had not always been taught in the schools, quite the contrary...
...Perhaps it was the printer who made a hash of Roberts' examples of rival word forms...
...novels, poetry, plays, and literary criticism are in Demotic...
...Alas, even in Greece, as elsewhere, presumably educated people know very little about the history or structure of their own language...
Vol. 59 • June 1976 • No. 13
