Language and Identity in Greece(1900-1976)Dr. Notis Toufexisnt262@cam.ac.ukwww.toufexis.info

Paper Gr.3Introduction to Modern Greek Language and Culture

•What is (national) identity?

•What or who people think they are

•What or who people say they are

•What or who people aspire to be

National identity

Manipulation of national identity

• When national border are not fixed, people are not born Greek but may become Greek

• National identity and language can not differ

• Can a ʻHelleneʼ (Έλλην) speak Bulgarian or Slav?

Expansion of the Modern Greek state Source: Wikipedia Commons

(National) Identity: From an idealized and mythicized past to the present (and the imagined future)

Source: Wikimedia CommonsDetail of the Akropolis by painter Leo von Klenze (1784 - 1864)(Reconstruction of the Acropolis and Areus Pagus in Athens, 1846)

View of Athens from the river Ilissos, watercolor, Johann Michael Wittmer (1833)

Acropolis from the top of Polis Grand Hotel

Ancient Greece

Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium)

Ottoman Empire (Tourkokratia)

Modern Greek State (Kingdom of the Hellenes)

“Hellenism, as a cultural topos […] was an intellectual product of the Renaissance, which was subsequently renovated through intellectual trends ranging from the Enlightenment to the Romanticism …

… the incorporation of antiquity constitutes not simply the beginning of the national narrative, but actually the construction of the object of this narrative. For Greeks, to feel as national subjects means to internalize their relationship with Ancient Greece.”

A. Liakos, “Hellenism and the Making of Modern Greece: Time, Language, Space”, in K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms. Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity, London 2008, p. 205

The myth of Ancient Greece incorporated into modern Greek ideology

Ancient Greece

Modern Greek State (Kingdom of the Hellenes)

Greek language and language controversy

• The debate about Modern Greek history and identity is very much a language controversy

• The ʻLanguage Questionʼ is about developing a written language that would reflect an ideal national image

• This image has to embody and express the relationship of the modern Greeks to the ancients

“Another important factor, somewhat paradoxical in its impact, is the tradition of neoclassicism in most European countries. The great prestige of Greek antiquity and its culture, whose products are considered by the intellectuals of all European countries as being of universal value, reproduces a discourse that in its positive mentions of Greece pays tribute solely to classical antiquity and its civilization. Reference to this great prestige, in almost every positive mention of modern Greece, functions in fact as a pejorative euphemism through the implied contrast between the glorious past and the insignificant present.”

A. Frangoudaki, ʻDiglossia and the language situation in Greece: a sociological approach to the interpretation of Diglossia and some hypotheses on todayʼs realityʼ, Language in Society 21: 365–81 (this quote on page 376)

Latin

Vernacular 1 Vernacular 2 Vernacular 3

Latin Old French French

Greek (Ancient)

Greek (Modern)

Old Greek

Language

change

Language:Modern and Ancient (not Old) Greek

• “Greek” as a linguistic label is multifaceted

• A schism between the spoken and written language is nothing new for the Greek speaking world

• The use of different registers with variable (old and new) morphosyntactic features is common in the Medieval and Early Modern period

Is there one Greek language?

Linguistic choices and ideology

• After the creation of the Greek state in the 1830ʼs the “Quest” for a written standard intensifies

• How this standard would look like is heavily influenced by ideology

Textbook of Papamarkos for second class pupils

From a 1906 reading book

αλεπού

ἀλώπηξ

A choice is made based on entrenched beliefs about language: only with the “right” language the speaker can be moral, civilized, rational, and capable of abstract thought

A sociolinguistic perspective: Diglossia

• An elevated code with no native speakers is used as a written standard and not as a vernacular (at least not in a casual way)

• This code is superposed upon the everyday vernacular

• These two codes are conventionally labeled as HIGH and LOW respectively

HIGH

Dichotomy: Acquisition, Function, Typology

LOW

HIGH and LOW represent the two poles of a continuum

HIGH LOW

A large amount of variation exists between these two poles.

“K[atharevousa] ... is mostly a written code, which emulates in vocabulary and in grammatical elements Ancient Greek. As the official language of the state, it has been the language of public administration, the church, politics, and part of science. D[emotiki], on the other hand, is the codified and normalized form of the “natural” language; in linguistic terms, it is the standardized variety that corresponds to the fundamental features of Modern Greek, that is, to the productive linguistic mechanisms, morpho-phonological and syntactic ...”

Frangoudaki 1992: 366

“Although a large segment of the literature on the Greek sociolinguistic situation maintains the contrary, Demotiki is not a vernacular, or a dialect, or a variety. It is in fact a standard. It is the product of a process of codification and normalization of the spoken language, out of the varieties used by the educated in the urban centers. This process occurred approximately between the 1880s and 1930s.”

A. Frangoudaki, “Comment. Greek societal bilingualism of more than a century”, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 157 (2002) 102.

Katharevousa is artificial“... a striking comparison between the demotic and katharévousa versions of the phrase ʻMy father diedʼ: while the demotic version (Πέθανε ο πατέρας μου) takes root in oneʼs heart, in oneʼs very being, ..., the katharévousa version (ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἐμὸς πατήρ) is like a piece of clothing that can be discarded. The demotic version ʻhas grown organically as the green branch of our national linguistic treeʼ, while the katharévousa version is ʻthe dead branch . . . , which has been nailed to the linguistic trunk by willpower aloneʼ.”

Mackridge 2009: 256

Language and Greek nationalism (1888)

Οι ξένες λέξεις κανένα κακό δε μʼ έκαμαν· τις έχω μαλιστα ανάγκη για να πω πολλά πράγματα που δε μʼ έρχεται και δε γίνεται να τα πω αλλιώς· έτσι τις έκαμα δικές μου ... Είναι περιττό να καθαρίσουμε τη γλώσσα που δεν τόχει ανάγκη και δε βρωμά· κάλλια να καθαρίσουμε την Ανατολή.

Ψυχάρης, Το ταξίδι μου, ed. A. Angelou, Athens: Ermis (first publication 1888) (p. 181)

Language and Greek nationalism (1908)

“the aim of the dictionary was to demonstrate that Greek had been spoken constantly through the ages, that there had always been a Greek nation that spoke it, and that the changes that had taken place in the language did not constitute corruption and barbarization but ʻa natural and necessary developmentʼ that conformed to laws that are essential to every living spoken language. It also aimed to show that the Greeks are a single nation from Agamemnon to George I and from the Caucasus to Italy, and that they worship one God and possess one fatherland and one language.”

# P. Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976, Oxford 2009: 273

Expansion of the Modern Greek state

• Source: Wikipedia Commons

Language and religion: the translation(s) of the Gospels

• Queen Olga of Greece (1851-1926, Wife of King George I of Greece) commissioned a translation of the Gospels in the simple language (“for popular use”) (1898), published 1901

• Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἡ γέννησις ἔγεινε κατ᾽αὐτὸν τὸν τρόπον. ἀφοῦ δηλαδὴ ἠρραβωνίσθη ἡ μήτηρ Αὐτοῦ Μαρία μὲ τὸν Ἰωσὴφ, πρὶν συνέλθουν, εὑρέθη ἔγκυος μὲ τὴν δύναμιν τοῦ Ἁγίου Πνεύματος.

• Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἡ γέννησις οὕτως ἦν. μνηστευθείσης γὰρ τῆς μητρὸς Αὐτοῦ Μαρίας τῷ Ἰωσὴφ, πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτοὺς, εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ Πνεύματος Ἁγίου.

Olgaʼs translation Original

Why the translation?

• Benevolent intentions, based on the experience of the post 1897 war period

• The publication was a success, controversy about the publication was short-lived

One more translation as a political statement

• The front page of the Akropolis newspaper, Sunday 9, September 1901.

•“The Gospel in the language of the people”

•Translation presented falsely as the continuation of the Queenʼs translation

A deliberate act against the linguistic establishment

• Author or the translation was Alexandros Pallis (1851-1935)

• The object of the serialization, as the proprietor of the Akropolis put it, was to propagate to its countless readers the preaching of Christ, which until today was sealed with a multiple of seals

• The register used for the translation made no concessions to tradition

Who amongst the peasants and the workers, who even among the merchants and the clerks and all those who have not completed secondary education can understand the language of the Gospels? No one. [...]

Rarely, perhaps for the first time, has the vernacular language taken on such a godlike gentleness and sweetness and harmoniousness as in the language of Mr Pallis. It is as though one is listening to the tinkling of the bells of a distant flock, such as those that first greeted the Birth of Christ.

From the editorial of K. Gavriilidis, the editor of Akropolis (Mackridge 2009: 249)

The establishment reacted violently• Three days of violent riots

followed between large crowds, and armed troops

• 8 people died as a consequence

• The bishop of Athens had to resign and eventually the government of Prime Minister Theotokis fell too.

The significance of the incident

• The Language Question irrevocably entered the political arena

• Dimotiki could now be associated with attacks on Orthodox Christianity

• Translating the Gospels equals admitting that the language of the Gospels is no longer comprehensible

• The narrative of continuity is broken

Ancient Greece

Modern Greek State (Kingdom of the Hellenes)

National ideology with immense time gaps?

• The myth of reborn Phoenix (resurrected Hellas) was to weak to sustain a national ideology

• It excluded the religious part of present experience

Hellenism and identity: a genealogy

Ancient Hellenism father great-great grandfather

Macedonian Hellenism son great grandfather

Christian Hellenism grandson grandfather

Medieval Hellenism great-grandson father

Modern Hellenism great-great-grandson son

Language as a uniting factor

• The idea of “One” Greek language plays an integral role in this narrative

According to this ideology, what is labeled with the timeless and semantically vague abstract term Hellenism together with its language is a healthy organism that for 4.000 years has either resisted or assimilated foreign influences; alteration is viewed as adulteration, while outside influences are generally viewed as threats.

P. Mackridge, “Cultural Difference as National Identity in Modern Greece”, in Zacharia 2008: 303

Thou shalt not translate

• Translation of the Gospels and other “holy texts” is seen as an unpatriotic act

• The translation is associated with foreign influences

• The fear of a pan-Slavist conspiracy with the aim of splitting the Greek nation into dialects and cutting the Greek off from their ancestral culture

Language and the Macedonian Question

• The intense phase of the “Macedonian Struggle” lasted from 1904-1908

• The Greek authorities tended to count as “Greeks” all those who adhered to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and sent their children to Greek schools

• The Bulgarians tended to classify as “Bulgarian” all those who spoke a Slav language as their mother tongue

Source: Wikimedia commons

Both sides believed, however, that if the inhabitants of Macedonia were taught to read and write Greek (or Bulgarian), they would automatically gain access to Greek (or Bulgarian) national culture and history, would share the same feelings and thoughts as the rest of the Greeks (or Bulgarians), would consequently adopt a Greek (or Bulgarian) consciousness, and would feel an adherence to the Greek (or Bulgarian) national cause. The question for the Greek authorities was which kind of Greek to teach them. Only Ancient Greek and katharevousa were being taught in Greek schools in Macedonia at the time, as they were in Greece itself. Demoticists observed that in Greek schools Slav-speaking and Vlach-speaking children were attempting to learn to read Ancient Greek and katharvousa without being able to communicate in spoken Modern Greek; they also observed that many children preferred to attend Bulgarian schools because they found written Bulgarian easier to learn, since the vocabulary and grammar of the written language corresponded closely to the spoken, and it employed a more or less phonetic orthography.

Mackridge 2009: 255

Educational demoticism and the dilemma of purity

• Once “liberated” those living in the Ottoman empire and elsewhere can be educated and integrated in the Modern Greek nation with the help of demotic

• Winning the hearts and minds of speakers of other languages is more important than trying to sustain a link to the past

• However, regional dialects have to abolished and a supra-regional, standardized variety has to be created

Unfortunately the idea that it would be possible for the demotic language, as it has been handed down to us through oral tradition, to enrich itself from its own resources and to develop into a modernized language of a civilized people, at the same time preserving all its virginal demotic chastity, has proved to be romantic and impracticable. N. Andriotis, 1932 (Mackridge 2009: 248)

The trial of the accents

• In November 1941 the vice chancellor accused a young professor of the University of Athens of “criminal activity against the nation, which threatens to bring about a rift in national opinion and dangerous commotion”

• The professor, Yannis Kakridis, had published two small books on ancient Greek culture, written in demotic and printed in the monotonic (single-accent) system

• Kakridis was punished with two monthʼs temporary suspension

Foreign occupation as chance for the resurrection of the Ancients

• The modern convention of moving the Olympic Flame via a relay system from Olympia to the Olympic venue began with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany.

Source: Wikipedia

During the proceedings, Koukoules read out the transcript of a programme recently broadcast by Berlin radio about the way that professors, writers, journalists, and other intellectuals in Germany were working to adjust German cultural life according to ancient Greek models; he was clearly implying that this was what should have been happening in Greece too.

Mackridge 2009: 308

A more modern concept of identity

Language and identity in Modern Greek literature

The concept of Eλληνικότητα

•Ελληνικότητα unifies the differences between the exceptionality of the past and the normality of the present

• Greece or Hellas becomes a metaphor or even a quest, almost a vision

• Specifics of the present and the past are combined to evoke an organic, synthetic and metaphoric value of infinite importance

Dear friends, it has been granted to me to write in a language that is spoken only by a few million people. But a language spoken without interruption, with very few differences, throughout more than two thousand five hundred years. This apparently surprising spatial-temporal distance is found in the cultural dimensions of my country. Its spatial area is one of the smallest; but its temporal extension is infinite. If I remind you of this, it is certainly not to derive some kind of pride from it, but to show the difficulties a poet faces when he must make use, to name the things dearest to him, of the same words as did Sappho, for example, or Pindar, while being deprived of the audience they had and which then extended to all of human civilization.

O.Elytis, The Nobel Lecture (1979) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1979/elytis-lecture-e.html

Binary distinctions or hybridity?

• Greek culture can indeed be seen as a hybrid construct that did not emerge from the synthesis of opposites but from the tensions between East and West, Enlightenment and Orthodoxy, Antiquity and Tourkokratia.

• Modern Greek literature is not so much a literature of time as of place; it developed out of the dialogue between places, languages and cultures.

D. Tziovas, Beyond the Acropolis: Rethinking Neohellenism, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19 (2001): 205 & 211

A synchronic perspective

• The language question has been solved and demotic has been established as a standard

• In recent years, a metalinguistic prophecy of language decline has received widespread acceptance

• The answer against language decline: more teaching of Ancient Greek

Identity crisis in a globalized world?

• European integration is perceived as a vague and confused threat

• Greek intellectual groups perceive the national identity as needing to be defended

• The “myth” or the uniqueness of the Greek language is extremely popular among politicians and amateur linguists

Urban legend: Hellenic QuestHellenic Quest refers to an urban legend mostly praising the Greek Language for its superiority amongst all languages. The hoax circulated around Greek websites and was widely reproduced without verification by many reputable sources from newspapers to the then Minister for National Education and Religious Affairs ... According to the "Hellenic Quest" story, CNN has reported that Apple Computer is supposedly developing a software product for teaching the Ancient Greek language to foreigners and scientists, in the light of the upcoming development of supercomputers that will use Ancient Greek as their programming interface, due to this language's superior logical structure. (This prediction often attributed by the hoax writer to Bill Gates) A prototype computer that is allegedly under development as part of this project is called "Ibycus".Source: Wikipedia

Ideology as metalanguageHowever, we should highlight the importance of the impact on Greek society of the historical language question. Besides its effects on language itself, particularly on the lack of any in-depth study of actual language usage, it is responsible for the absence in the society (even among scholars and especially among educators) of the elementary knowledge concerning what is a language and how it functions. This lack, which leads to the treatment of traditional (prescientific) opinions on language as self-evidently valid, validates at the same time the confusion among traditional and modern ideas and notions. That is to say, the few remaining supporters of K language have modernized their arguments by using notions from linguistic theory. Frangoudaki 1992: 375-376