Greek, in Exhausting Detail

Please beware of and forgive all and any factual errors in the following:

This evening I have Latin again, but in the meantime I have returned from the morning's Greek lessons and am sitting comfortably in the bookshop. In the lessons we reviewed the phonetics of the past two days, which is highly useful, and read aloud example words for consonant pairs like κλ and γδ, which looks complicated but in fact isn't.

This time our professor took the time to tell us the meanings of words, which with πνευμα (air, breath, spirit) and ενεργειεα was simple enough; there were quite interesting ones in between. Ανθοσ (flower) and αμυγδαλια (almond tree) were familiar but I hadn't known the Greek stem-words.

Though I have left out the stress accents (in Greek, the accent is called the οξεια) on these Greek words until I figure out the html encoding, there should be an acute on each one. Since 1982, Greek has adopted the "monotοnikó" (μονοτονικο) system whereby every accent is stricken from the written language except for the οξεια. In the absence of the rough and smooth breathing (the little curling apostrophe which sits on the first vowel of a word and separates the "ho"s from the "o"s), and circumflexes and grave accents indicating changes in the pitch of the voice, written Greek has become much less fussy. I wonder where the changes in pitch went — whether they were artificially imposed on Ancient Greek when it became the scholar's preserve or whether they did exist but have fallen into complete disuse over the centuries.

Earlier the professor gave a leisurely introduction into modern Greek history.

She reiterated that the Erasmus system of pronunciation (e.g. οι = ahoy!, αι = might) is artificial and demonstrably historically inaccurate, Erasmus having designed it purely so help his students learn to spell the words. I was a little miffed, since I like Erasmus's system and moreover have used it consistently for Ancient Greek — though it is admittedly best suited for communication within the ivory tower. But Russian or French and certainly Greek universities — for example — seem to teach a different Ancient Greek system.

She went into detail besides about the Katharevousa — which is a formal language created after Greece shed Ottoman rule, spelled καθαρευουσα, and which like modern Italian hopped back in time not in this case to the Middle Ages but a little further for inspiration. But if I've understood correctly, it created an unsettling gap, by separating Greeks into the hoity-toity world of the official constructed language, and the hoi polloi world of the demotic tongue, Dimotiki — δημοτικη. The popular language had in fact acted as a reservoir to preserve Greek over the centuries and folk poetry had kept what the written word had discarded, but in a different form from the tongue of Aristophanes or Pericles, whose preservation fell to scholars who left Constantinople as it fell in 1453 and to their Arabic colleagues and later of course to scholars across Europe who would no longer have been privy to the spoken traditions (for instance pronunciation) which would hint at the ancient forms. Katharevousa took over some of the popular language, but otherwise was a little estranged. Besides the Katharevousa is apparently not held in good odour since it is associated with the military dictatorship and its organs.

What I had not heard before is that the administration of Greece in the early 19th century had been pedantic and quite foreign in character. It was guided by Philhellenes from the remainder of Europe, many of whom were shocked to arrive in Greece and find that it was not a nation of (as the professor put it) lofty-souled, tunic-wearing philosophers. Instead there were guerrilla fighters. She also pointed out that due to the four preceding centuries of foreign rule, and a brutal extirpation of the regional aristocracy at the time of the conquest in 1453, Greece does not have any aristocracy; its handful of modern kings were invariably imports or descendants of imports.

Apart from that she explained the construction of Greek last names, which were introduced as such under the Ottoman government to simplify taxation and the military. Papandreou would mean, I think, the child of Andreas; physical attributes like black hair also lent themselves to names.