[lg policy] THE LANGUAGE(S) OF SOVIET GREEKS.

[Harold Schiffman]

THE LANGUAGE(S) OF SOVIET GREEKS.

Helen's Steakhouse—sorry, I mean Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος—is one of those
blogs whose irregular schedule of publication always throws me for a
loop. It'll go for days and days without change, and I'll get tired of
clicking on it and ignore it for a week or so, and then I'll go back
and discover a spate of (invariably fascinating) posts, and I'll have
to drop everything and catch up. This is one of those times, and I
really didn't have the time to read all that, because I'm working
against a tight deadline on a massive editing job, but it was such
irresistible material that, well, I couldn't resist. It's actually a
good thing that I let them pile up, because if I'd read them one at a
time I'd have wanted to blog each one, and LH would have turned into a
reprint service. As it is, all I can do is point you to them and tell
you to go read the posts and the conversations that develop in the
comment threads. So, in chronological order, here they are:

Soviet Orthography of Greek, about the spelling reform that took place
in the USSR in 1925.

Demotic in the Soviet Union, about the two major groups of ethnic
Greeks in the USSR—the Pontians who migrated to Russia and the
Caucasus in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Mariupolitans, who
originally lived in the Crimea—and the debate over what form of Greek
to use as the official language of the Soviet Greek nationality.
Shevchenko in Mariupolitan and Urum, which presents translations of a
famous Ukrainian poem into Mariupolitan Greek and Urum Greco-Tatar.
The status of Urum: "How it came to pass that a group of Christians
spoke Tatar and followed Greek-speakers to the Ukraine is a question
we're not equipped to answer." The question is, why didn't they become
a separate nationality during the Springtime of the Nationalities,
which "was all about splittism, raising new national consciousness
where there was none before"?
Mariupolitan transcribed through Russian ears, a rather technical post
about the phonemes of that variety of Greek.

I won't try to quote enticing bits from each, because I'd wind up
reproducing reams of Nick's prose; instead I'll just tell you that if
you're at all interested in this stuff, you need to go over there and
stay a while. The one bit I will quote is a question for which I too
would like an answer:

Agtzidis' article ends with a question: Soviet language policy was
eager to split ethnicities within the USSR from their kin outside:
Moldavian differentiated from Rumanian, Buryat from Mongolian. Why
then did Moscow affirm Demotic in 1934, instead of encouraging local
norms of Pontic and Mariupolitan—which would inevitably have separated
the local Greeks from the Downlanders? I don't know, and I'm curious
if readers that know about the politics of the time have any opinion.
And I'll pass along a passage from a powerfully written post, Greeks
speaking the wrong language, from his other blog, opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr:

The Christians of the Ottoman Empire had to be taught they were
Bulgarians, or Greeks, or Macedonians, or Albanians. What the people
of village X thought they were 500 years ago is different to what they
thought they were 100 years ago, and often what they think they are
now. And the change was often enough initiated, because someone from
Athens or Sofia came to town, and told them so; or because the local
landlord made a choice, and his villagers followed suit.
But the question of what people "really" are, of how their language or
quirks or DNA contradict their current self-identification, is
pointless. If for whatever reason the villagers of X or Y now consider
themselves Greek, well, they're Greek; telling them a hundred years on
they've been brainwashed means nothing. (The same goes for the search
for Greeks in FYROM, it should be said: the Vlachs there in particular
have changed their minds too.) Telling the Karamanlides they should
have held on to a Turkish-speaking identity in Greece means even less.
They suffered for being Christian in Turkey, they suffered for being
aliens and speaking the wrong language when they fled to Greece: if
they've come to hate their mother tongue, they aren't obligated to
hold on to it for my linguistic edification.

Finally, I'll put in a plug for the one novel I know about the Soviet
Greeks, The Proofreader, by Alexis Parnis.

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003834.php


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