Can Parent and Daughter co-exist?

Nikos Sarantakos sarant at village.uunet.lu
Wed Sep 22 06:31:34 UTC 1999


At 03:38 20/09/99 EDT, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>>petegray at btinternet.com writes:

>>Katherevousa and the Demotike forms of modern Greek.   No one learnt
>>Katherevousa as a mother tongue, but in the 60's we could hardly claim that
>>it was not "Greek", just because it had no mother speakers. >>

>-- Katherervousa was an artificial creation; an archaized form of modern
>Greek.  As soon as the government stopped insisting on its use in the state
>apparatus, it vanished without trace.

>This is an illustration of how helpless governments, National Academies and
>other 'formalists' are in the face of actual linguistic evolution, as
>embodied in the real popular speech-forms.

I beg to differ. As you perhaps know, in Greece (I am a Greek) the
katharevousa vs demotiki battle was an embittered one, and I
certainly was for demotiki, but "vanished without trace" is the
understatement of the century.

It is not that many people are still using it. It is, rather, that Kath.
has passed to Dem. a lot of structures that Dem. lacked,
a lot of grammatical types, a lot of phonetics (well, my terminology
is vague).

Modern Greek has taken a lot of words from Ancient, many of which
are following the ancient grammar. Demotiki had been normalizing
this, but the Katharevousa domination via school and state
apparatus has now entrenched the ancient types, so we have
parallel types for, say, the conjugation of similar verbs, or of nouns,
depending on whether the word is ancient or modern.
Even some consonant clusters that were current in ancient and
katharevousa but not in demotiki have now been reinstated in
popular speech. For instance initial [pt] of ancient words was
commonly being transformed into [ft] in popular speech. No longer.

The process may begin anew now that Kath. is not being taught,
but it has at least taken many decades of delay.

Nikos Sarantakos



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